Chapter 12: Trust

In the end, and realistically, I had expected for someone to eventually find me. Despite the fact that the idea of running away had journeyed across my mind, I had stayed rooted to my spot in the sand, pursing my lips into a thin and almost imaginary line as the ocean continued to rise and fall, leaving its trail, and darkening the grains of sand behind it.

I had expected it to be her. But, then again, I didn’t.

A policeman, maybe? Sooyoung, possibly. And Hwang Tiffany…I couldn’t tell, but I felt as though she was the most likely to find me and I had been right. She did find me first. Why? I wasn’t sure, but I now knew for a fact that she was very different to those other people that called themselves Therapists. She was, really, quite different from anyone I had ever met. She wasn’t typical, but she was normal in a non-typical kind of way.

Intricately, she was similar to Jessica, but then again, she was nothing like Jessica. She was almost like Jessica’s opposite, but they were so reversed that they were similar to one another at the same time.

In a strange kind of way, I liked how she had sat down beside me in the sand wordlessly and said nothing. I liked how she was willing to use her patience on me and wait for me to talk and explain. And, really, I liked the way the moonlight gently brushed and cascaded over her flawless complexion…the same way it did with Jessica. And as I looked over at her, I suddenly felt as though I could trust her…I felt as if it were Jessica sitting with me right now.

The same kind of comfortable yet tense silence was lurking around us, and the way she didn’t force me to say anything was like the way I was with Jessica at one point. And Tiffany brought the same sort of clarity and confusion to me, the same way Jessica did. It was a scary sort of familiarity, I felt as though she was a stranger to me, but yet I felt somewhat comfortable but uncomfortable around her.

In a sense, Tiffany and I were in a kind of limbo, like I had been with Jessica. But obviously, things were different this time, and I wasn’t certain of what I felt for Tiffany. I liked her…or maybe I looked up to her in a way, or I admired her…or maybe there was the slightest of chances that I was beginning to fall in love with her…

Whatever it was, it felt as though the more thought I put into it, the more tangled the emotions within me would become, and it would eventually get so tangled and knotted that I wouldn’t be able to tell which emotion was which, and it would take me an extremely long time to sort out and untie it all.

For some reason the aspect of telling Tiffany everything, crossed my mind. But then I remembered that I was supposed to be pushing her away. I was supposed to be acting as coldly as possible towards her, and yet I couldn’t help but want to pull her close to me and tell her my upmost greatest and darkest secrets. I wanted to tell her about Jessica, I wanted to tell her about the murdering of my parents and I wanted to shed light on every single nook and cranny of my life, just to show her who I really was.

But then again, why would she care in the first place? Because Tiffany came off as so genuine and so honest, but was that really the true her?

I looked at her and she looked at me. Her gaze held onto mine and my gaze held onto hers. And the only thing that I could comprehend was how pretty she looked under the moon and its light, but Tiffany always looked pretty, no matter how I looked at her.

“Her name was Jessica.”

The words had tasted rather strange on my tongue and I had said it so softly, that I was really unsure if I had said it at all. The gentle sea breezes that were rolling off of my skin were so light, so feathery, that it felt like they weren’t even there in the first place, much like the sentence that had just slipped out from my unthinking lips. But the scrunching of her eyebrows and the confused look contorting her face told me otherwise.

I swallowed down, I wasn’t thinking. My body and its vocal chords were doing as they pleased, and really, I should have just shut my mouth and said no more, but I went on anyways because, just like before, I couldn’t keep my mouth shut and the words just seemed to spill out over me.

“She’s the girl in the pictures on my wall. I see you looking at them a lot.” I looked away from her, looking up at the sky and wishing so badly that it really was Jessica by my side right now, but maybe it’s better that Tiffany is here instead. Maybe, Tiffany is better for me than Jessica ever was.

I could feel the somewhat flicker of recognition in her eyes as she waited for me to go on. I clenched my jaw. I was never good with words. I exhaled through my nose and dug my feet deeper into the sand, trying to keep my calm.

“She used to live at the orphanage.” I stated, looking at the water as it heaved its equivalent to a chest, breathing in a continuous rhythm that only got stronger.

“We used to be friends.” I met her gaze and I looked into her eyes, her expression softened and I suddenly felt as though I wanted to cry and let the sand soak up my tears.

“Things were complicated…” I continued, wetting my lips a little, trying to keep my voice as level as possible. “And eventually…” I paused for a moment, registering the fact that I had never ever told anyone else this and this would be my first time saying it aloud, “…we fell in love.”

A streak of surprise rocketed through her eyes as she continued to look at me. Her opinion of me had probably flipped, now that she knew that I had once been in love with another girl.

I looked away from her, the look on her face making me feel sick. “But that doesn’t matter anymore.” I heaved a breath, “She’s just a girl from the past…a girl that I’m desperately trying to hold onto…but she’s slipping through my fingers and I can’t hold onto her for much longer.”

The feeling of helplessness settled underneath my skin, and I suddenly realized how lost, how confused, how blind I really was. The thought made me want to run until my lungs burned, until I was just a speck in the distance and the silence that Tiffany was emitting made me want to puke because she pitied me now. Sooyoung pitied me, the other kids in the orphanage pitied me, my past therapists pitied me, the teachers and students at school pitied me and now… Hwang Tiffany pitied me.

I was so tempted to just stand up and leave her sitting there, jump on a bus and let it take me anywhere it wanted, but the feeling of her cool hand placing itself atop of mine made me stop. I inhaled a sharp breath as her skin pressed against mine, my eyes quickly shifting as I watched her lace her fingers between mine. I stared, not really knowing what to do, or how to react.

I blinked, lookin