What's Yours Is Mine

Chapter 18- Everyone

"He swears he's going to give it up, it's never going to be enough."

I often wondered what true happiness felt like, the kind of elation only achieved when all negativity has been disposed of. I feel as though I am on the cusp of it, happiness is within my reach, so close it lingers on the tips of my fingers.

Do you ever sit and just watch the world go by? Watching passers by go about there day and wonder who they are and where they are going. There's a bench on the high street situated right in the middle of the busy shopping district. I used to sit there, I'd look at the people around me and wonder about their lives.

I remember one day, I was sitting on that bench waiting for Charlotte to arrive so we could go shopping for shoes. A young couple were sitting on the wall on the opposite side of the street to me. I estimated they were around the same age as me. The girl was reading something off her phone aloud to the boy, their hands gently entwined. I'll never forget the way he looked at her as she spoke, so deeply and contently, maybe it was my imagination running away with itself but i thought that must be what love looks like.

I would always look at those couples, those people so wrapped up in their own love affair and feel a deep set jealousy. I never thought I'd be on the inside of such a relationship. I never thought I would find myself happily in love with a boy who looks at me like I am everything he ever wanted in the world.

But here I am, sitting on that bench on the high street, with Aaron beside me. My head rests gently on his shoulder, and I feel his eyes follow my every move. And happiness is right within my reach, so close yet so far. I don't know how to prove to him that he is all I want. I don't know how to show him that everything that has happened in the past has been preparing me for this.

"What are you thinking?" Aaron enquires, he's tracing circles on the palm of my hand with his index finger, almost trying to pick me apart. "I'm thinking about how good I feel..." I bring my eyes to him and he lifts his head, his pretty eyes dazzling wondrously. "How happy I am to be with you." I finish. He smiles lightly, I know in the back of his mind there's a name, a name that has rooted itself between us. Ryan.

At the risk of sounding fickle and careless I want to say that Ryan is the furthest thing from my heart. I once thought he would always have a place there, but now I know it was an immature kind of love that meant nothing. The emotions I felt for Ryan, that intense mixture of love and hate we're all a part of my learning. The strange relationship we shared was preparing me for what I now have with Aaron.

In one month I have developed deep feelings for Aaron, a sort of love I never imagined existed. Something I never managed to feel for Ryan over a long length of time. In hindsight, my adoration for Ryan was nothing but a childish fantasy, loving him from a far was much easier then ever having to love anyone up close.

I only labeled my feelings for Ryan as love after I felt envious of him and Charlotte, perhaps that was more to do with the fact I felt I was being pushed aside by the both of them. He hurt me over and over, I let him because I wanted so badly to feel something, to remind myself that I was alive. The pain and the confusion was a strange addiction.

Now I have something to compare it to. What myself and Aaron have is a million miles away from that. Finally I realise that I never loved Ryan, I know that now because I am madly in love with Aaron. It feels so different but wonderful, I knew it was happening I could almost feel myself floating towards the love that has builded.

I want to tell him how I feel, but I am so scared. Not of rejection or out of confusion like with Ryan, but because I fear he won't believe me. I keep thinking of myself as the girl who cried love, how quickly my heart supposedly jumped from one to another. Will he find sincerity in my words? Or will he think I am foolish and emotionally immature. After all my antics with Ryan, I wouldn't blame him.