Breakfast in the woods? I'll bring food and the flute and we can watch the sun rise!
A significant portion of me wants to ignore the message and go right back to sleep, but I haven't seen her alone in several weeks. The thought of spending time with her without Bastian constantly waiting to leap on every little thing I say is a pleasant one. I give her a reply and toss myself into the shower, letting the water drag me into consciousness.
How many months has it been since she arrived? Why is she still so intriguing? Watching her change and become her own person has been amazing, sure, but she sends me into rages. The sane thing to do would be to stop interacting with her at all so I could regain my equilibrium. I should pick up my wristband again, tell her I am busy, and avoid her from now on. Instead, I towel my hair off and get dressed, kicking my nightclothes into a nearby pile of dirty and clean laundry. I open the door and feel the chill of the hall. It's still winter. Why am I willingly spending time outdoors in the wintertime? Asha has clearly driven me insane.
The walk to the Arboretum is eerie. I am rarely out this early, and the lack of any other student on campus, or any lights in the windows, is disconcerting. I feel alone, and I like the sensation rather less than I expected I would.
The sound of my old flute guides me through the trees to find her, much like her singing did the last time I found her here. She smiles when she sees me, and my pulse becomes awkwardly fast.
“You're lucky,” I say, sitting down beside her on her ever-present catskin. “I don't wake up this early for just anyone.”
“Is it early?” she asks me, completely serious. “This is late for me. I thought I gave you enough time.”
“Feed me, and I'll stop complaining. What have you brought?”
“Pancakes!” She says the word with a smile, digging a thermal container out of the pack she has dragged along. “Tea, and peaches. The syrup is warm, too.”
I have to admit, this is worth getting out of bed for. “I haven't had pancakes since, well...” I realize where that thought is going and cut myself off.
“Since your mother died,” she finishes quietly, and I stiffen.
“What did you just say? How do you know that?”
“I have been getting bits and pieces recently. Of your thoughts. The other day, when the lawyer got you thinking about Newearth, you remembered your mother cooking breakfast.”
“If I wanted you in my head, I'd let you in, Asha!” I snap, and feel a combination of pleasure and guilt as her expression turns sad.
“I am sorry. I thought I was doing a good thing.” She sets the container down and looks up at the skeletal canopy, trying to hide her hurt. I find this interesting—she never hides her emotions. This is a new development, but not one I find particularly enjoyable. Steam rises from the exposed pancakes and draws a wall between us in the silence. Soon, my guilt overtakes my glee, and I decide to make amends.
“If these pancakes are as good as my mother's were, all is forgiven,” I say at last, pulling a plate out of her pack and giving myself a stack. They were pre-buttered. Did Elene help her with this, or was that a bit of foresight of her own? She has grown a great deal in the past few weeks. It is likely she has developed the ability to plan ahead.
Asha watches me out of the corner of her eye as I take a bite, curious despite herself. My reaction is genuine. The cakes are amazing. “These are excellent, Asha! Who taught you how to make these?”
“No one,” she says with a smile. “I did a lot of cooking growing up, so once I got used to the machines it was easy. I got the recipe out of a reading on Newearth,” she adds.
“What do you think about my homeland?” I ask between bites.
“It explains a lot about you and Bastian,” she says slowly. I raise my eyebrow at her and she giggles in response. “That is not bad! Things on Kiran are so different from everywhere else. Newearth is....a bad place for empaths, I think.”
I nod. “It certainly felt that way. My sister and I were forced to go to an empath-only school, which was good for her. But me...well.” I trail off again.
She looks up at me. “That does not seem fair to you. Please do not take this the wrong way, but I do not think you are powerful enough to be treated like an empath. You miss out on so much since you only read one way.”
I laugh. “That's what I keep telling Caroline. Don't let her or Desmond hear you say that—they'll think I'm conditioning you.” The only thing that kept me going in school on Newearth was taking care of my sister, but I don't tell her that. It seems sad in retrospect that my entire life revolved around a sibling three years younger than I was. But mother was busy with father, and father didn't know how to take care of his empathic children.
“Is Newearth really as dirty as the Kiranese authors say?” She asks after a moment.
I chew and think. “Yes, it is. Most of it is. My father owned a farm out of the way of the cities, but he was rich. It was his inheritance. Cost a fortune to protect the grass from the rain.”
“Did you like the farm?” Her voice is barely audible now. She is worried about asking me personal questions.
“I hated it.”
“Why?”
“The horses scared me.”
Asha gives me a sober nod. “Horses scare me, as well.”
I laugh and toss a peach at her. She catches it deftly. “Asha, the horses on your planet are easily half again the size of horses anywhere else. Of course you'd be afraid of them!”
She shakes her head. “No. I loved them, until they killed my brother Mani.”
Her honesty surprises me into silence. I eat more pancake to fill the space demanding I reply.
“My sister loved them. They never acted right around me, though,” I say at last.
She bites into her peach and looks toward the horizon, where light is beginning to bleed over and wipe out the colors in the sky. I dig the other peach out of her pack before pouring us both mugs of tea. When I hand one to her, she smiles, and I feel self-conscious.
“The day my brother died, my father forced me to stay home. I still believe that if I had gone with them, I would have been able to tell them the horses were scared. After Mani died, I didn't have anyone.” She sighs and eats the rest of her peach in silence.
I don't want to know more. I shouldn't ask. But there is something about her that seems so sad that I find myself caring anyway. “What about your mother?”
Asha takes a sip of tea. “Mama wasn't strong enough.” I wait, but in true Asha fashion, that is all she says. The sun is rising now, with clean, crisp light unlike what I am used to back home. It hits us at an angle, illuminating half her face as she gazes at me. She is sucking peach juice off her fingers, completely unaware that the action would normally be considered either provocative or impolite. I have the sudden urge to freeze her, to keep her from changing more than she already has. To steal her away from Desmond and keep them from making her just like everyone else. I highly doubt the Asha a year from now will wake up, make pancakes, and watch the sun rise. That Asha will eat breakfast at home and wipe her hands clean with a napkin.
“Why are you sad?” she says, and I look away guiltily.
“I'm not,” I lie.
She shakes her head. “Your face says you are. I think you are lying to me.”
I smile and tuck a loose strand of hair behind her ear. “You'd know all about that now, wouldn't you?” I realize what my hand is doing and jerk it away sharply, but she does not find the action at all strange.
“Now you are evading. Desmond does that.”
“I am worried about what they are turning you into, if you want me to be honest.”
She blinks at me. “What do you mean?”
“Asha, are you happy?”
She points at the sunrise and doesn't respond. It's amazing that something I found charming moments ago is so infuriating now.
“Are you?” she asks after another pause.
“If I am honest, will you be?”
She narrows her eyes at me. It was a stupid question.
“No, I am not happy. Do I seem happy to you?” I sound angry, and I desperately hope she can tell it's at me, not her.
Asha shakes her head and worries at her neck scar with her left hand. “I was hoping this would make you happy, but it does not seem to.”
I sigh. “I'm sorry. I'm a late riser, and I've never been appreciative of nature.”
She falls back onto the catskin and hurls the pit from her peach at a nearby tree branch. It hits with a resounding crack and careens into the leaves several feet away. Birds make disgruntled sounds and take wing at the noise, leaving us entirely alone. I look down at her and am horrified to find her face damp. She is crying. I've seen her cry plenty of times, but this is the first time I've been the cause. She sees me looking and stares up at me angrily.
“Asha...” I reach for her shoulder hesitantly, but she pulls away.
“I don't. I don't know how to be with people here. Nanda won't spend time with me anymore and I am lonely and I don't want to be but I don't, I don't! I don't know how.”
I wince as she finishes off her words with a strong punch to my chest. The pain is familiar—my sister used to act just like this when she lost control. “Asha, I'm sorry. I came, didn't I? I wanted to see you. I wanted to see you badly enough to wake up early and come sit outside with you in the dark.”
She gives a quiet sniff and looks up at me, wiping her left cheek clean.
“I'm not good at opening up and talking to people. That can't be a surprise to you.”
“How am I supposed to get to know you if you shut me out of your head and also refuse to tell me what is in there?”
“That's kind of the point. I don't let people get to know me.”
She hits me again, but this time I grab her by the wrist. “Stop that!”
“You only feel human when you are angry, Reid.”
“Stop hitting me.”
“Why? You hurt me. It is fair.”
“Fine. Fine!” I let her hand go and glower down at her. It is tempting to get up and walk away, but I admire her tenacity. Most people try to befriend me and give up when I don't let them in, but she has been relentlessly spending time with me for weeks. Granted, that is likely because she has only now learned that her lack of progress should be frustrating to her, but it is flattering all the same.
“Ask me one question and I will answer it honestly.” I lie back on the pelt beside her and shut my eyes.
“Anything?”
“Yes. Anything. I promise.”
Her breathing slows as she thinks, and the question comes to her much sooner than I expected. “How did your mother and sister die?”
Of course. “They were killed in a riot when I was fifteen.” My voice is carefully flat.
“A riot?” She is unfamiliar with the word. With a sigh, I lower my guard and let her into the memory. She gives a small gasp as she sees the angry throng of people in my head and feels the horror as I sit at home with my father in silence, watching the feed. Fearing the worst. Learning the worst.
“What, what caused your people to act like that?”
“Another anti-empath law was passed, banning us from more public offices. Several empaths got together to protest, and ended up getting seeded by passers-by. It got violent quickly, and spread to other empaths in the area before anyone knew what was going on. My mother and sister were in town shopping and got pulled in by all the emotion, I think. The police solved the problem by shooting at anything that moved. A couple of hundred people died.”
I open my eyes reluctantly and turn my head to find her crying again, but this time it is my emotion she is expressing, not her own. On her, it looks far less vile. She sees me looking at her and rolls over onto me, giving me an enormous hug. She's so small. Her skin against mine hurts, and I want to push her away, but instead I hug her back. She's lost a brother. She left her planet to get away from something, otherwise she wouldn't be here. Whether or not I want to admit it, we do have a lot in common.
“How did you know?” I ask, running my hand over her hair. She smells like some sort of flower.
She doesn't need me to elaborate. “You're hurt. Anyone who knows what it is like can see. Why do you think Seamus and Elene like you?”
“Actually, I have been wondering that for some time.”
“They understand. I understand.”
When Caroline says those words, I want to laugh in her face. When Asha says them, I want to cry. I hate them more when they come from Asha. At this thought my muscles grow tense and I shut her off again with ease. She wilts against me as we disconnect, but does not protest.
“We do not have riots where I come from,” she says after a moment, sliding off me and back onto the pelt beside me. “Everyone is empathic. I am not used to being feared. Only hated.”
“Hatred and fear are usually the same emotion, Asha.”
She frowns. “No, they are not.”
I shrug. She knows better than I do, I have no doubt of that. I look around us and try to regain some composure. The sun is fully up now, and there is a slight fog weaving in among the trees. My wristband says I have an hour until classes.
“We should probably head back, Asha. Let me help you pack.”
She helps me gather the remains of our breakfast together in silence. As she stands to give me room to pick up the catskin, she asks me another question.
“Are you angry with me yet?”
“Angry with you?” I brush the fur side off and fold it in half.
“For making you open up. For learning so much about you and being close.”
I shake my head. “Angry at you? No. I'm angry at me.”
“For what?”
“Letting you in.” This time my honesty is meant to hurt her. I hand her the pelt and turn away without another word. She doesn't follow, but picks up my flute and starts playing again. She seems to have simply accepted everything I just said to her. Anyone else would be hurt. The song she is playing is unfamiliar, but the notes make me guilty. The guilt, as usual, makes me angry.
By the time I get back to my dorm, I am in the throes of a full-on rage. I slam the door behind me with enough force to make my hand sore, and then proceed to kick my laundry about the room. Once I collapse on the bed I am out of breath, sweaty, and feel more than slightly silly. But the anger is still there. Agreeing to see her had been a mistake. Why was I so honest? Why was I so nice? Is it possible that I like her? My mind turns to Diane. It had never been like this with her. Diane was fun, but I'd never wanted to get to know her. I'd never told her anything about myself. And when she was out of sight, I hadn't missed her. She had been useful, but she had never really been important.
I slam my fist into the mattress. I don't want to like Asha. And for once it's not because I want to shut everyone out. Opening up to her had been scary, but it had also felt good, because she can relate. Diane wouldn't have been able to. Most anyone else at the University wouldn't have been able to. The problem isn't her at all, and that is what is making me so angry. Asha is making me be honest with myself, which is something I absolutely despise doing.
I don't want to like Asha for Asha's sake, not mine. She needs someone nice. Someone who knows how to be supportive. Someone who can help her become a decent person. Elene is teaching her how to care. Seamus is teaching her how to handle other people. Desmond is teaching her how to talk. And I? Bastian's words surface. I am teaching her how to lie. He's right—I am bad for Asha. My reasons for wanting to avoid her have been selfish up until now. I didn't want to bother to get to know her. But now, spending time with her is selfish. I need to stop. It will be better for her if I do. Bastian's a good guy with issues. He gets Elene. I'm a bad guy with issues. I get girls like Diane, or let my Teacher destroy her sense of self-worth by sleeping with me.
But her smell. Her eyes. The feel of her hair under my fingers. Her smile. I'll keep seeing her, even though I know I shouldn't. And that is why I am angry.
Liking Asha means I have to actively hate myself.
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