youngblood | a.i.

sixty three || i resign

I could see the tears swelling in her eyes at my words. Learning your brother had been lying to you and purposely causing you pain had to have hurtful with her state.

"I love you, Auni, and I tried to call it off multiple times. It was like a shadow hanging over my shoulder at every moment, and I wanted to tell you so bad, but I couldn't dare break you when I saw you finally love and trust."

"Why'd you stop yourself that night we kissed? You could have just won the bet there and it would have all been over," she asked, sniffling through her words as she wiped her eyes.

I wanted nothing more than to hold her, comfort her, but I knew she couldn't even stand the sight of me, let alone my touch.

"Because I knew you didn't trust me," I told her honestly. "The bet meant nothing to me. I didn't want to hurt you so I didn't want you to do something when you didn't trust me. I've loved you for so long, Angel, I just didn't understand it fully. But I wanted to protect you from me, so I told you to wait till you trusted me because I knew how hard it was for you."

"I can't believe you can sit here and try to tell me about how much you care when you lied to my face for two months straight," she told me through tears. "You're sitting here telling me about how you wanted me to trust you when you knew damn well there was a good reason I shouldn't."

"Why do you think I asked you so many times if you were sure?" I whispered back before I could stop myself. "Why do you think I told you not to tell Luke or Calum? I could have won at any moment if I hadn't sworn you to secrecy. It was eating me alive... I loved you to death and I had no way to protect you from the devil lurking in the background and inside me."

"You remember that night when we were in the shower and you told me you would only tell me what princess had meant if your world was falling apart?" she whispered, looking up to me through her tear-filled eyes.

I nodded, biting my lip to stop the tears threatening to spill out of mine.

"You think it's falling apart enough I can know?"

"Yeah," I mumbled, looking away from her to collect myself long enough to speak. I took a deep breath, looking back at her. "'Princess' are always pointless in the plotline of a fairytale. Everything that happens to them is always so outlandish and dumb that I always thought they were pointless to the book, so I called you Princess in hopes maybe if I did it enough, I would convince myself you were pointless to me... You occupied every section of my brain, and I was hoping maybe one day, I could convince myself you were a princess in my storyline."

She wiped her eyes with the back of her sleeve, looking down at her lap as a spoke.

"I just wish I could erase it all, pretend the bet never even happened..." she mumbled to herself, still loud enough I could hear her.

"Me too, Angel. Me too," I replied quietly with her as I tried to choke down the tears. "I told you so many times about how I wish I could undo or erase it all. The bet was what I was talking about- not us. I would never erase what we built."

I watched as she picked at her fingers in a nervous habit, making me lean forward to push her hands away from each other. She slowly looked up to me through her tears, fighting a mental battle inside her head at my touch.

I pulled away from her before she'd even looked up to me, but I could still see her fighting with herself. She looked away again, shaking her head and laughing at herself before quickly falling back to her silent cries.

I sat silently, waiting for whatever question she'd have next so I could answer it. Eventually, my eyes fell to my hands too, finding myself picking at the skin of my fingers too- the exact same thing I yelled at Auni for.