𝐀 𝐂𝐀𝐒𝐄 𝐎𝐅 𝐘𝐎𝐔 • Robin Buckley

Chapter 8

The quiet had never sounded so loud.

Robin laid on the side of Monica's bed facing a pair of windows showcasing her backyard, and she knew Monica was the same—laying on her side with her hands wedged underneath her cheek. She has a wide bed, so there's space gapped between them, but it was Monica's comforter that bridged their bodies together—bodies that were afraid of doing so much as grazing one another.

They had 'gone to sleep' at least half an hour ago, but the only one between them that had really given drowsing off much of a shot was the blonde with her hair braided onto her back. Robin hadn't remotely tried; she knew it'd only become a new form of torture. There was so much riddling the space of her mind and so much unfinished business lingering between them.

"Monica?" Robin's voice cut through the air.

"Robin," Monica says hoarsely with her eyes shut.

"What about me was so unapproachable?"

"The way you dress. The ties and the layers and the leather. But mostly just the way you are in general. You're always wearing headphones in a world of your own like you're in this untouchable bubble that everyone else has to move around."

Robin let out a breath from the very pit of her core. She heard shuffling behind her, followed by the feeling of eyes boring into her back.

"What?" Monica asks.

Robin turned around too, her eyebrows upturning hopelessly. "You saw me."

"You're not exactly invisible."

"Not to you. To everyone else, but not you."

Monica's eyebrows furrowed. She had a faint idea where Robin was going with this but she had none as to where the spur of the moment admission had come from.

"I spent so many years trying to perfect existing in the background and you completely ruined that. But it doesn't make me want to scream into my pillow like I thought it might. It actually feels quite freeing," Robin smiles tentatively as she comes to terms with this out loud. "It feels like coming up for air or something. Like I can finally breathe."

"Then why are you holding your breath?"

"Because I'll stop breathing all together otherwise which is not exactly ideal."

Monica laughed through her nose, the corner of her lips twitching.

"What?" Robin asks.

"I..." Monica stops herself, her lips still parted with the rest of her words frozen on the tip of her tongue.

"When I said you can tell me anything I meant it you know?"

"Yeah, I know."

"Then talk to me."

"I..." Monica's eyebrows pushed together as she held Robin's eyes. There was nowhere else to look and the intenseness of her gaze was destabilising. "I want to hold your hand," she says assuredly. "Is that stupid to say?"

Robin only side smiles and holds up one of the hands she held close to her chest.

And Monica took it, wincing the second their skin made contact. "It's so cold."

Monica pulled her other hand from where she kept it tucked beneath her head and used it to cocoon Robin's own. She pushed herself up onto her elbow blowing her warm breath on it and rubbing until the chill noticeably subsided.

"I kind of always have been. Especially in the night. My mom makes it her occupational duty to remind me. She jokes that I'm adopted and my dad jokes I'm reptilian. Somehow both makes more sense than the roaming possibility that I'm biologically my parents' child."