"What?"
Her heart dropped at his tone, but she held her own. She knew what it was like to keep things buried in till they ate you up. She knew he had to let out whatever storm destroyed him on the inside, even if it hurt her in the process.
She placed her hand on his and rubbed in soothing motions. "I'm here for you."
He looked away. "Okay."
"Do you wanna talk about it?" she asked tentatively.
He let out an exasperated sigh and looked at her. "Please stop forcing me, Giselle. If I wanted to talk about it, I wouldn't need pestering."
Heat rose to her cheeks, her lower lip quivered, and she looked around the park to see if anyone had noticed his behavior.
She removed her hand from his. "Fine."
"Shit." He turned his body toward her. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to snap at you. Of course, you can ask me anything you want. You can annoy me. I'm yours to—"
"It's okay." She forced a smile at him.
"No, it's not. I don't know what came over me. My family is not something I like to talk about—"
"Among other things."
He blinked. "I'm sorry. I'm just not comfortable with it."
She wondered if he knew that she respected his need for privacy and that it wasn't something she'd gotten offended by. It was the tone of his voice. It was the words he'd chosen to snap at her with.
"Then I won't pester you about it. Don't worry."
He sighed. "I'm saying sorry, Giselle."
She closed her eyes for a moment. "Thank you."
Sorry—what a sorry word.People, sure, used it without realizing what it referred to. It didn't just mean that they regretted what they did. It was also a promise to refrain from making the same mistakes again. But unfortunately, 'sorry' had become just a weightless word that people liked to throw around as a band-aid to cover the wounds that their toxic behavior inflicted.
"Are you mad at me?" he asked.
"No," she said, unable to muster the energy to be upset. "I just wanna go home."
He understood.
Back at home, Giselle lay on her bed, stifling her cries. Everything was falling apart that day.
Xavier's behavior made her heart hurt. Although she excused his harshness with the reason that he had his own problems, at the back of her head she knew that love had made her weak.
Her mother's face kept surfacing in her mind, reminding her of the warmth she'd never be able to experience again.
Her father's grief was starting to eat him up again, and she felt scared of losing him the way she had in the first few months after her mother's death.
Her eyes burned and the tears fell endlessly. And that particular night, she missed Chris a lot.
Chapter 5
Sunday meant catching up on work he'd missed on the weekdays and having extra time on hand to overthink about what Giselle and Xavier were up to, though the latter occupied Chris more than he liked.
An alarm beeped on his phone, and he shut the laptop with a sigh. It was almost noon, which meant it was time to get ready for the date he'd promised a certain Abigail. He gathered his files and folders from around his bed, putting them together in a pile, and placed them in the drawer of his side table.
Jogging into his bathroom, he looked at himself in the mirror and instantly noticed that thirty minutes were not enough for him to look his best. It was a date, after all. A date he wished was with someone else, but a date, nonetheless.