I gave the pot of couscous a good stir before returning to the kitchen bench to slice the orange for the salad. It was 6.45 pm and I’d almost finished preparing the Moroccan meal. The dining table was ready to go. I’d put out a jug of iced mint tea, and the green liquid shimmered in the light of the flickering tangerine and black ylang-ylang candles placed either side of it. I’d added the candles, even though Sara’s teasing words kept echoing through my mind. An ambient atmosphere would hopefully ease the difficult conversation I was about to have with Hayden.
My hands shook slightly as I tried to cut the orange into even segments. The doorbell rang and I dropped the knife, scattering orange pieces to the floor. I scooped the knife up and tossed it into the sink before dashing to the front door.
‘Hayden.’ My words sounded close to a sigh of relief. A part of me had been frightened that he wouldn’t show. It was only my faith in his overriding sense of courtesy that had given me enough assurance to start preparing the Moroccan meal. ‘How are you?’
I crossed my fingers behind my back and hoped that his answer wouldn’t be ‘Traumatised’. What kind of person was I?
‘Tired.’ Hayden gave me a small smile.
I suddenly got a crazy urge to do something, anything, to make that smile stretch to his eyes like it usually did.
We stood looking at each other on the doorstop. Hayden wasn’t making a move to step inside.
‘Aurora, I’m not sure …’
Was he cancelling now, on my doorstep?
Suddenly the smell of burning filled the air.
‘No! The couscous!’ I ran to the kitchen, Hayden behind me.
‘No, no!’ I pulled the smoking pot off the element. As I turned to put it on the marble board, my feet slipped on a segment of orange that I’d spilt earlier and I stumbled backwards. ‘Whoa!’
Hayden grabbed me around the waist with one arm and seized the smoking pot with his other hand. ‘Bit of an impromptu tango dip, Princess.’
He placed the pot down on the board next to us and carefully pulled me back up towards him. I couldn’t read his expression. His tone was serious, not teasing as I’d normally expect.
‘Is it ruined?’ I asked, trying to fill the silence.
‘Is what ruined?’
Our friendship, I wanted to say. The thing I’d always shunned but now couldn’t bear to lose.
‘The couscous. It’s supposed to provide a contrast to the deep-fried dates.’
‘You made deep-fried dates?’ Hayden suddenly seemed to take in the table and candles. ‘Princess, you’ve gone all out.’
His eyes were warmer, the golden flecks of his irises dancing. They reminded me of the fireflies the NAD and I used to watch out on the verandah.
‘Is it ruined?’ was all I could manage. The golden flecks were distracting.
Hayden slowly let me go and picked up the couscous pot. ‘Recoverable. It’s only the bottom that’s a bit burnt.’
‘Let’s take it to the table.’
I had to stay focused. Serve dishes, begin eating, start calm conversation about need to preserve virgin lips for a Prince.
I sat down before my shaky legs caused me to slip again.
‘This is fantastic,’ Hayden said.
He passed me the cumin potatoes and we began serving the different dishes onto our plates. He grinned at me. I grinned back. I was so relieved to have him sitting across from me.
‘It’s great being here with you,’ he said, reading my mind. ‘I haven’t been inside your place for years.’
‘It’s great to be your friend,’ I said. ‘I want us to stay this way, always.’
Okay, the plan was underway — step one: emphasise my positive feelings for Hayden.
‘Always?’ Hayden stopped eating.
‘Of course.’
Why did he look unhappy? How could my plan have gone awry already?
Hayden looked seriously at me. ‘I don’t feel like we’re friends.’
‘You don’t?’ I was horrified. This confirmed it — he’d overheard my Stop Kiss rant.
‘I mean, we were, but something’s changed — or I think it has —’
‘You’ve got the wrong idea!’ I blurted. ‘I’m your friend, always.’
Hayden, instead of smiling, sat very still, his gaze on the table. I felt sick. Could one statement, uttered out of stupid embarrassment, destroy things between us forever?
‘I can explain it. I can tell you the reasons why I couldn’t kiss you.’
The words came tumbling out. He had to understand my motivation.
‘I don’t want to hear it.’ Hayden lifted his eyes back up to mine and I was shocked to see the depth of hurt there. ‘I thought maybe I’d been wrong about this afternoon —’
‘It’s not you, Hayden, it’s me. I can’t —’
‘I know you can’t.’ Hayden shook his head. ‘I can’t do this either though. I’m sorry.’
‘Hayden, please let me explain why —’
I dashed after him as he strode down the hall and grabbed his jacket.
‘Here’s the DVD.’ He turned and handed me the disk. The cover was a handmade patchwork of printed savannah scenes.
I grasped his hand. ‘Let me apologise. I know we can fix this.’
‘I can’t be your friend right now,’ Hayden said. ‘You need to give me some time.’
He pulled his hand from mine. I felt like he’d pulled a part of me away with it.
He walked out the door, shutting it softly behind him.
In the dining room, Hayden’s and my plates sat abandoned, the candles continuing to flicker. Suddenly the house seemed filled with silence. All I could hear was my own breathing and the cats scuffling. I’d got used to that silence since it had descended four years ago when my mother left, but now it seemed too heavy to bear.
I began throwing items into the dishwasher, crashing the cutlery together, racing to get the machine started so that its dull roar could make me feel that someone, anyone, was here with me.
I stayed up till 3 am that night, my fingers creeping to my phone, creating and erasing texts that all said the same thing in a dozen different ways: I’m sorry, please let me explain. But every time my finger hovered over the ‘send’ button, I remembered Hayden’s request for time. My need to be forgiven had to come second to his wishes.
The next day at school, I waited to see whether Hayden would say something to me. If he just gave me a smile or made eye contact, I could take that as permission to go ahead with my apologies. I waited for my chance, but he never once turned around in any of the five classes we had together that day.
By Wednesday morning I’d decided that I couldn’t wait for permission to apologise. The longer he held false assumptions about Operation Stop Kiss, the worse the situation would get. I staked out his locker before class, hoping he’d need to pick up a book. He came down the hall, just as I’d hoped, saw me standing there, looked at me for a brief moment, then dropped his gaze and walked straight by.
He obviously didn’t want to have anything to do with me. I’d blown it.
I tried to focus on other things, like helping Cass shop for an outfit for her all-important date with Scott on Friday, but even when I succeeded in distracting myself, thoughts of Hayden slipped in eventually. I attempted to focus on my studies, but instead of looking at the board my eyes kept drifting onto Hayden.
After not registering a word of my Thursday morning English class, I had to ask myself, what if Hayden and I never resolved this misunderstanding? What if I finally got what I’d once wished for — for Hayden to disappear out of my life?
‘So, should I wear my hair up or down?’
‘Huh?’ I stared at Cassie.
‘For the date.’
‘What was the question again?’
‘Aurora, is something wrong?’ Cassie looked closely at me. ‘You seem very distracted. What do you keep looking at?’
‘Nothing!’ I ripped my gaze away from the group of pines where Hayden was sitting and back to Cassie. We were sitting by the school fountain during morning break. ‘Hair up, definitely.’
‘Are you sure it’s nothing?’ she probed. ‘It’s not just today. You’ve been a bit spacey all week. This morning you pulled your DVD remote out of your bag thinking it was your calculator. I’m slightly worried.’
So was I. I wasn’t sleeping properly, my appetite had faded, and I was obsessed with thoughts of Hayden. Was this guilt? Did guilt stop you functioning like a normal person?
‘I’m fine, Cass,’ I reassured her, giving my best I’m-nota-loony smile. ‘I guess I’m just finding it hard to get back to real life after the play.’
Cass smiled back, completely convinced. She moved on to shoe options for Friday night while I secretly despaired over my mental health.
‘So, last night’s homework — five hundred words on feudal farming,’ Mr Bannerman said, getting up from his desk to collect papers. ‘Jeffrey? Where’s your homework?’
‘I know this seems highly unlikely —’
‘Just tell me, Jeffrey.’
‘Aliens took it back to their planet as an example of fine earth literature?’
The whole class cracked up.
‘God help those aliens.’ Mr Bannerman shook his head. ‘Have the paper to me by the end of the day, Jeffrey.’
‘But it’s already several light years away by now!’
There was a crash as Travis Ela, who’d been swinging on the back legs of his chair, lost his balance from laughing and fell backwards.
And right then, the thing I’d been both dreading and hoping for happened. Hayden turned around and our eyes met.
I felt myself give a small gasp, and then I was tumbling. Tumbling down into the depths of his gaze, to a place where only Hayden and I could go — like the place between dreaming and waking. A tremulous connection that could be lost in a millisecond by the simple breaking of eye contact. And I couldn’t break it. I couldn’t move a muscle or whisper a word. I was lost in its intensity. A weird terror came over me that Hayden would be the first to look away, leaving me alone with this feeling.
But it was neither of us who broke the spell — it was the end-of-class bell.
And then I was grabbing my things and running from the classroom in a daze. My feet didn’t seem to touch the ground and my whole body was trembling. An earthquake had hit me and I knew that things would never be the same.
I was in love with Hayden Paris!
In love with his beautiful eyes and his teasing smile, with his softly curling hair, with the way he made me laugh, with his bordering-on-irritating level of intelligence, with the way he lit up the stage. In love with his passion for a cause, his integrity, his honesty. With the boy he’d been at six, and the boy he was now, at sixteen.
Madly, crazily in love. Oh god!
I finally stopped running at the archway where I’d attempted to talk to Hayden on the opening night of the play. I tried to catch my breath, along with the thoughts and feelings flying around me like butterflies. In love! Where had that come from?
I laughed — how could I have been so stupid? It had been there all along, like some kind of ticking time bomb. Jelena’s comment came back to me: One of these days you’re going to discover why Hayden Paris gets you so worked up. The reason I got so worked up was because I CARED about what he thought of me.
The trembling in my knees when he got really close to me, the kiss I’d almost given in to twice — it was obvious now. I was in love!
I paced up and down, saying it to myself like a hymn: In love. In love. I am in love. With Hayden Paris. I was lost in the exquisite feelings.
Half an hour later, after I’d registered that I had a biology class and made it with two minutes to spare, the exquisite feelings had become misery. Why did they call it love? It was TORMENT. It was a thousand flaming arrows striking you in the chest. Hayden wasn’t speaking to me. He didn’t want to spend time with me. This was unrequited love.
Just then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Hayden dash in the door. My heart became a jackhammer and I snapped my eyes down to my textbook. This had to stop. Hayden’s heart wasn’t doing any reciprocal hammering when he saw me. To hope for his forgiveness was one thing; to hope for more was madness.
I kept my eyes lowered as Hayden took his seat in front of me. Oh god, I was going to hyperventilate. Little did Mr Blacklock realise, as he went on and on about a field trip to see sea squirts, that one of his students was dying of respiratory failure. And yet I felt headily alive. Being near Hayden was intoxicating. I felt like my chest would burst with adoration.
I gazed at Hayden’s hands, which were scribbling something on a sheet of paper. He had beautiful hands.
Those same hands tore the sheet of paper from the notebook, folded it over twice and placed it on my desk. Before I’d even glanced up, Hayden was facing forward again. I stared at the note. Part of me desperately wanted to know what it said and part of me didn’t dare touch it. What if it just said something like I want my jacket back? Or worse. That moment in history class, that look we’d exchanged — my realisation of love must have been written all over my face. The way I’d dashed off — I was transparent. He must know! I couldn’t bear to read an I don’t feel the same way scribble. That was what it had to be. How could he feel anything but resentment towards me? I looked away from the piece of paper.
But what if it didn’t say that? What if it said he was ready to forgive me? Even if love was out of the picture, I’d still have our friendship — he’d still be in my life. I could regain some semblance of sanity. I grabbed the note, but just as I began unfolding it, another hand closed over mine. Mr Blacklock’s!
‘Hand it over, Ms Skye.’
‘But …’ I clutched the note, which was oh-so-temptingly almost unfolded. I couldn’t hand it over. I didn’t know what it said yet!
Mr Blacklock wrenched the paper from my clasp. ‘I will not have illicit communications in this class.’ In one swift motion, he crushed the paper in his fist, along with my hopes. ‘Count yourself lucky that I’m in a good mood today and have decided not to read it aloud to your classmates.’
My mouth was an O of outrage.
Thankfully, before my revenge fantasies got too out of hand, the bell rang. I dashed for the door.
‘Aurora!’
Hayden was calling out to me! I almost spun around in delight. But stopped.
A note was one thing, but face-to-face communication? If what he had to say was bad, there was no way I’d be able to hold it together. I kept running without looking back, and didn’t stop till I was at home, safe in my lounge room.
I’d always imagined that falling in love would be enjoyable. Not a mad seesaw of emotion that plunged me from euphoric to terrified, hopeful to hopeless, energised to exhausted. Even now, absurd hopes filled my mind — that there might be the tiniest chance that he felt the same way about me.
Could he?
My palm tingled as I remembered the soft kiss he’d given it while we were spying on the NAD. He’d bought me those beautiful balloons on Valentine’s Day, and there’d been that odd moment when he’d stroked my cheek and looked all intense. The expression on his face when he’d seen me in the ball gown, the way he’d breathed ‘exquisite’. That had to be good!
I gave a twirl on the living-room carpet.
Then I remembered how I’d thrown him to the ground after that palm kiss. I’d pushed him out the door on Valentine’s Day. I’d threatened to throw him off the school stage! I moaned as I heard myself yelling, ‘There’s no romance and there never will be!’
I’d sabotaged any feelings Hayden might have thought about having!
Misery hit me with full force then. Hayden had kissed my palm, not my lips, even though he’d had the chance. I’d been right there in front of him. There was no way he had feelings for me. No way.
I groaned and collapsed into an armchair. Love truly was torment.
