It's been an interesting couple of days, Dad.
Aura and I tend to butt heads over tiredness induced annoyance more than anything, but there is something different with her.
It doesn't feel like I'm losing hope.
Don't get me wrong, it scares me from time to time.
I worry that this time will be the last time that Aura can put up with me and my erratic schedule, and I dread her ever telling me that she can't do it anymore.
It hasn't happened. Not yet, anyway.
I don't know if it will, Dad.
I don't know if that's my hope speaking, because I don't want her to ever be gone from my life, but I have come to learn that with Aura, things really aren't impending doom.
It's happened a few times over the past three months and the more it happens, the more I learn that Aura understands what happens in our lives better than anyone else ever has.
When we have a particularly difficult day, we discuss the reasons we're upset, discuss the best way to ensure it doesn't happen again and we move on. Never have we ever had the exact same conversation about an issue.
One day, she was deathly tired, Dad. I could tell that she was sleepy and almost gone with the way she was slouching in her seat.
It happened almost a month ago, but I remember desperately feeling like I needed to give her more of my time even though I was deathly sleepy, too and I remember watching her annoyed face through the screen as I was on a call, wondering, fearing whether that was it.
Whether that was the day.
It wasn't.
She was logical and understanding.
After we discuss our problems and go to sleep, the next day is so much better. It's all anew and I have never felt so light in all my life, Dad.
Being with her is so freeing.
Being with her is like that moment after a hectic, chaotic day and you come home and you feel like you can finally breathe; like you can finally let go and be yourself and you don't have to have your guard up.
Once, a long time ago, I told you about my first girlfriend – just after I got into University, Reina – and at one point, you realized that I wasn't too happy. You never asked me to end things with her, you never tried to interfere or ask me the things that had happened.
We were in the den and you just asked me one question before you closed your book, got up and went to bed.
You asked, "Does she tense or relax your shoulders?"
It's the yardstick by which I've begun to measure my relationships – I ask myself whether the thought of her, or being with her relaxes or tenses my shoulders.
It could even be after a bitter argument, a moment where it seems like we won't get on the same page, Aura still relaxes my shoulders.
Sometimes I don't even realize my shoulders are tense until I see her face, or hear her voice and my shoulders begin to droop.
Even disagreeing with Aura doesn't cause me to tense up.
We sort out our differences, we talk about it and we move on, better.
Better together.
"No measure of arguments is ever going to overshadow the faith I have in you. The faith I have in this."
That's what she told me.
After we hung up, I may have cried a little from relief.
Every single day, I learn a little more about her and I am a little more convinced that she is my forever.
I haven't yet told her that I'm going to be seeing her in about two months' time when I go for the conference with the others.
Speaking of telling her things, I messed up.
I completely and utterly messed up.
I wasn't going to blurt it out like that – I was going to wait.
I was going to find the perfect time, preferably say it when I could actually look her in the face.
But, in my impassioned state of trying to explain myself – the weeping from relief of the previous night and the slight lack of sleep may have been contributing factors – I let it slip.
I told her.
Like the dumb idiot that I am – Jenna's words.
Not for this situation, but in general.
I told her that I am in love with her in probably one of the worst ways.
I am epically idiotic sometimes.
Don't tell Jenna I said that.
What could I do, though, Dad?
I would have never been able to stop myself from falling for her.
I would have never been able to stop myself from wanting her.
From wanting to be with her.
This fact is – apparently – very apparent.
A few days ago, after the whole Wrong-Time-Confession Fiasco, Marco and I played a game of tennis on a weekend and Aura and I had decided that we're going to tell Isa and Marco.
Marco invited me over for dinner at their new house – which is beautiful, by the way, complete with Bonnie and Clyde mail box – since Isa was away at a corporate retreat, which she had begrudgingly agreed to because if there's something that Isa hates more than Brad Windom, it's team-building exercises.
We had just walked in the door and we were standing in the living room, talking about the place and I decided that I wasn't going to beat around the bush, the way I had been doing at tennis, so I came right out and said it.
I told him, "Marco, I have been keeping something from you. You remember Aurora? Isa and Jenna's friend from college? She and I are together. We have been for a while now. I would have told you sooner, but we wanted to keep it to ourselves for a while."
After I said this, Marco did something I did not expect him to do at all: he pressed his lips together, put his hand on my shoulder, squeezed, turned and walked away in the direction of his bedroom, shaking his head.
I had to stand there, in the middle of his living room, quite lamely, while Lord Marshmallow Fluff – Marco's large, black, adorable Newfoundland – looked up at me, sympathetically, like he knew just how lame I was.
And I swear – I swear – when Marco emerged from his bedroom again, where he had left his tennis bag, he took a look at my face – which I'm assuming had a confused expression plastered on to it – and laughed.
Then, he walked into the kitchen like he hadn't had the most bizarre reaction to my news ever.
Obviously, I dumped my bag on the couch and followed him.
He was in there, coolly pouring a glass of water for me.
He just passed me the glass and looked straight at me, expectantly, while he drank from the bottle.
Holding the glass – so lamely – I asked him, "What?"
Because that's the only word that I could even think of forming.
Marco raised his eyebrows at me, finished the bottle of water and said, "Oh, I knew."
I'm really glad I hadn't taken any water into my mouth because I would have definitely spat it out at him.
Again, the extent of my eloquence was, "What?"
Marco had the audacity to laugh.
"I don't know why you're referring to one of my girlfriend's best friends as 'remember Aurora', as if I don't hear about her approximately fourteen times a week from my current roommate."
Then, he grinned very annoyingly and added, "I'm sure I'm going to start hearing about her even more from my ex-roommate."
I had never hated my best friend and ex-roommate more than in that very moment.
At that point, I drank the entire glass in one gulp and glared at him and asked, "What the hell do you mean 'oh I knew'?"
Marco shrugged like it was nothing and said, "Oh, I totally knew. I mean, I had no idea when it actually started, but I assumed you didn't let her go back to Andrusia without telling her how you feel."
That statement required me to sit down, which I did, at one of the stools at the kitchen counter.
"Marco, what the hell? How do you know about – about my feelings for her?"
Then, the bastard smirked.
"You're my best friend," he told me, scrolling through his phone, "And have been for the last eight years."
He put his phone down on the counter, slid it over to me and turned saying, "I have so many leftovers to finish before Isa gets back because I promised her I would."
I took the phone and looked at the picture that he had pulled up.
I was looking at a picture of me.
Well, me and Aura.
Which made me miss her so much.
It was taken at Jenna's wedding.
I asked her to dance at the end of the day, when so many people had gone home and everything was quietening down.
I'm holding her, one arm around her waist, one hand holding hers. She's laughing and I'm just staring at her. I look at her, eyes scrunched up, head thrown back, hand gripping my suit, and I can pretty much hear her laugh.
Marco's hand materializes out of nowhere and he swipes his finger across the screen.
There's another picture of me and Aura, still at Jenna's wedding, still dancing, but this time, she's looking up at me with those eyes of hers, lips parted, and I'm smiling down at her as the fairy lights that Juliet had picked out twinkle around us.
I'm sure I know exactly which moment that was. It was the moment that I told her, "I would like to buy you dinner. One of very many."
I don't think I'll ever live to regret those words.
I might live to regret not murdering Marco sooner – oh God, I think Aura is rubbing off on me with all the murder – because he coughed and it sounded a lot like the word 'whipped'.
When I narrowed my eyes at him.
"The only the other person in the world you look at like that is me," he had the gall to say while winking at me.
Then, Marco sat down next to me and told me a lot while he swiped through a whole album of pictures, he had taken of me and some of both Aura and I.
There were pictures of just me smiling into the distance and I just know I was looking at Aura.
There were pictures of us standing in the corner of the room at the rehearsal dinner, laughing over something.
"You look at her like she's heaven on earth. You did since the damn moment you walked into your dining room and saw her. You should have seen your face. God, do I look like that over Isa? Because if so, wow. I watched you that whole entire dinner, just to figure out if I was seeing things, but dude. You kept looking over at her. You're always looking at her. When you're in a room with her, it's like she's the ocean and you're a stream, flowing in and out of everything, finding any way just to get to her. I got to watch that for two months, and Eli, I have never seen you that way. You have always been the one to feel the deepest, but I have never seen that from you. I knew that you wouldn't let her go without a fight and I knew from Isa that she wasn't with anyone. That look on your face the moment you saw her at your house, though, that was the best. It's like after years inside a bunker, you were finally seeing the sun. Dude, you are so intensely whipped. But I'm happy for you, because she seems so great. Also, do the two of you have something with M&Ms, because you start smiling like a jackass whenever you seen a pack of M&Ms and if it's not her, you need to be lobotomized. Also, you talk about her – a lot. Way more than a brother would talk about his sister's friend. You think you're slick, my man, but I've known you long enough. You are so smitten, she only has to look at you and you would move mountains for her, I know."
I blew out a long breath and I confessed to Marco. "I am so devastatingly in love with her."
To which he said, "Good. Have you told her?"
I had to smile and tell him, "I told her, but not the way that I intended to."
He consoled me by saying, "I think the best things that happen to us happen in ways that we don't intend them to happen. I didn't intend on falling for the girl who had an agreement with me and you didn't intend on falling for one of your sister's best friends. How did she take it, by the way?"
"Lots of jokes at our expense," I told him and Marco told me that he expected nothing less from Jenna.
Then, he said something that absolutely killed me, which was, "Long distance, huh? Must be torture for you."
That's when I groaned, let my forehead hit the countertop and then, Marco and I drowned our respective sorrows in leftovers and stories about our respective lady loves.
Do we still love Marco and Elliot?
Sure, but do we ship it more that Elliot and Aurora or Marco and Isa?
Maybe.
Let me know what you think!
Much love!