Freckles Like Scars

Astrid is no stranger to compromises. She is, after all, in love with Talia for four years, but pretends for more than half of that to instead adore her best friend's brother.

It's... complicated.

She has to wonder what the box-dyed red-head thinks about it, when the normally stoic Astrid talks, waxes poetic of how she has feelings for the other sibling, taking the descriptions that fit both of them if one were to squint, how she brandishes the descriptions to support her love. Perhaps her friend sees through her bullshit, let's the pining girl stay friends so long as she stays in her lane of lying to the world about her true feelings. Perhaps Talia is unaware, takes everything at face value, gives true laughs and truer cringes as she whines about her feelings. Perhaps. There are so fucking many perhaps.

But Astrid is skilled and Astrid is good enough at repressing emotions that, eventually, falsifying them then going out to act on those lies isn't impossible.

"But, like, why?" Talia asks her one night when their sides are pressed together and Astrid has to refrain from sinking into the long line of heat across her side. They're both sixteen years old, and Astrid is spending the night to escape the constricting silence of her home, and they're on that cusp of adolescence where they think they can take on the world, spit in the face of nonbelievers and adults because they're old now too. They know more. More often than not these days, the black-haired girl thinks about how easy it would be; how easily she could ruin her life, her relationships, how she could make one action that would set this universe on a different path because she was never supposed to live past sixteen, not really, and now she's almost seventeen and high on the taste of every day’s stale air, and how she could just watch the flames burn, maybe warm her hands on them.

Perhaps she should, she can after all so why shouldn’t she? Maybe she should let those flames burn her like they burned her liar of a fucking father.

"I don't know," she replies, shifting to dig a hand covered in chip-seasoning deeper into the bag. "He's hot, I guess."

And that's not a lie, not entirely, because Talia's brother has the same sort of stunning eyes Talia does, where you forget the color unless you're looking at them, where they drag you in and you've just gotta swim and let go, hope the air in your chest keeps you afloat. Except that Talia, Talia has the attitude and smile to match; where her brother frowns, Talia is all sharp teeth and snark, a take-no-shit belief that Astrid wishes she could replicate. Replication would mean standing up to her bitch of a mother, it would mean telling her about her feelings, replication could mean so much. Instead, she sits there, and pines, because that facial expression really only works on Talia and her bad dye-job of a hair, and Astrid never likes the faux-expression on her face anyway, even though every time she's with her friend it's all she wears, naked to everyone else but her focus of attention.

"He's hot? You think my brother is hot?" the love of her life asks in an almost sardonic tone, gagging and whipping her head around to glare. Astrid stares at her hair as it turns, distracted. "God, Trid, I didn't think you thought of people as hot."

She throws a chip at the red-head.

"God, Tal," Astrid mocks in reply, taking a moment to stick a dust-covered finger in her mouth and loudly lick it off, to lighten the situation. "I'm asexual, not fucking blind."

That's a fact, honestly, she isn't blind. She's far from it, really.

It's just that she has to hide it, sometimes, because when she'd told Talia she was asexual the girl had thought it'd meant she wouldn't like, be in a relationship, ever, even if all Astrid wants is to curl around the other girl and maybe kiss her once or twice, with the promise of company hanging over their head. And then, despite the shittily dyed-hair which is really, really bad, but she's just so in love that it looks gorgeous, Talia has these freckles on her back that come out when it's summer and Astrid wants to take her time, map them out, count them. They look like scars from far away, and even though she wants to count them their appearance heralds summer, and summer heralds swimsuits, so Astrid worships them, she really does, she worships these little dots like some idol or great wonder of life.

I think of people as pretty, she wants to scream, to press her forehead against Talia's and stare into those unnameable eyes, I do, I swear, and you are the best sight I've ever seen.

You are the best sight I've ever seen, even if sometimes it's as if I am nothing but a dot on a grid and you are a line and the two of us will never intersect.

"Some days you seem blind," Talia hisses and she's cringing at the sight of Astrid with three fingers shoved into her mouth ungracefully, sloppily trying to free them of their dust coating of a prison. So, naturally, Astrid just starts to do it louder, ice-eyes glinting in glee.

"Blind and gross, apparently," her friend comments with a sniff that has the black-haired girl tossing her head back and cackling like a hyena, even as the other scrambles to avoid the contaminated fingers while also throwing an unused tissue directly at her nose.

There is no room for it to float down between them, so Astrid picks it up and wipes her fingers off, smirks at the orange residue with a triumphant look on her face.

"You're gross," she quips, eventually, stomach hurting from the way she can only laugh around her friend. "You're so fucking gross, the grossest person I have ever had the gross pleasure of grossly meeting."

You're so gross, and I am in love with you.

"Shut up! Shut up," Talia screams, even as more laughs topple out of her mouth, "At least I have good taste in crushes. God. My brother. You're gross."

It's not him, Astrid wants to yell, but she can't, because she's never been allowed what she desires, not really, it always ties back to green-beans and her mother and her dead dad and her brother who was out of the house the second he turned eighteen, but oh, oh does she want this. She wants it that it hurts so bad sometimes, it’s like an ache in her throat when she's sitting there and staring at her phone at one in the morning and watching the three dots appear in her best friend's texting window, the bland font somehow conveying the fond go to sleep, astrid, that her friend sends her.

Instead, she gleefully counters with, "Talia, shut up," and it hurts a bit, but this is all part of the compromise, and she's so fucking good with compromises, isn’t she? She’s no fucking stranger to compromises. "At least I didn't have a thing for Tyler."

The pillow to the face is deserved.