Downtown (auston matthews x oc)

-twenty-one-

𝓝𝓸𝓻𝓪

Nora nestled against Auston's chest, where she felt the heavy beating of his heart. She felt so safe there, like none of the anxiety of the world could ever reach her. Auston brushed the back of her neck with his thumb, gentle and slow.

"You said you had weird anxiety things," he began, pausing to kiss her forehead. "What are they?"

Nora lifted her eyes to look at him. "Hm?" she prompted.

"You don't have to tell me," Auston hurried, "but I want to make sure I never do anything to upset you."

At this, Nora sighed. She didn't know what to tell him—how much to tell him. All of her anxiety started the day she got the call from the hospital and learned of her parents' death. After four days of not hearing from them, previously talking to them every single day since moving from home, perhaps Nora should have expected a call like the one that arrived. And yet she still replayed it in her head each and every night.

We're confident that even if the car had been found sooner, the doctor told her, it's unlikely we could have helped them. The damage was catastrophic.

Nora shuddered in Auston's arms, and he tightened his grip on her. "It's okay," he whispered. "We don't have to talk about it." He buried his face in her hair, then found her hand and squeezed it gently.

"My parents," Nora stammered. "They died a couple years ago."

Auston pulled back to look Nora in the eye, expression pained. He opened his mouth to speak, and Nora could tell he was searching for the right words. She understood—no one could ever find the right words, probably because there were no words sufficient to encapsulate a pain like that.

"Nor," Auston managed after a moment. "I'm so sorry."

"It's okay," she replied, though her voice was weak. "It was a car accident," she continued. "Middle of the night when they were driving home from a camping trip in Nova Scotia, and there was a highway camera that caught some guy driving right behind them, swerving all over." Nora shook her head. "They figured he was drunk. Right as the cars are about out of the frame, he runs them right off the road."

"Jesus," Auston muttered.

Nora sighed, "It was a remote area, so it took four days for anybody to find their car in the ravine." She rubbed her palm over her face in exasperation. "They never caught whoever it was that caused it. The camera was too blurry, and I guess they couldn't get more than the model. He just drove away—didn't even slow down." Auston's hand tightened around hers, and it provided Nora with more comfort than she thought possible in a moment like that one. She admitted, "I guess the anxiety about bars is because some irrational part of me thinks anybody I see there could be him. And all I can do is panic about who he's gonna kill next."

"Come here," Auston concluded, pulling Nora all the way into his arms as he sat up and repositioned her on his lap. He leaned back against the headboard, one hand protective on the nape of Nora's neck and the other still intertwined with hers. "I'm so sorry, Nor," he mumbled into her hair. "I know that doesn't help much, but I'm so fucking sorry."

She nodded against him, fingering the collar of his dress shirt. "It just broke me," she confessed, vision a little blurry from the tears welling at her lashes. "It's when my anxiety started, and life's just sort of been weird ever since. My grandparents are dead, no siblings, an uncle who died before I was born. But that was it." Just the sound of her own shaky voice made Nora ache. She remarked, "It's just me out here."

Even as she started to cry, Auston never loosened his grasp on her. He just held her tight to his chest, where Nora felt more comfortable than she had in years. She never wanted to let it go.

"I hope you know you're never going to be alone here," Auston murmured after a few minutes of silence. "I mean, for one thing, I've seen how much your friends love you." He let out a little huff of laughter as he remarked, "Lex seems like she would burn down a city for you. Trick, too."

Nora knew he was right. The few friends she had now were more valuable than the any she'd ever had in her lifetime. Still, it was easy to forget in a world that had seemingly taken everything from her without giving her a chance.

"And that's not even counting me," Auston added. Nora couldn't help but lift her chin to smile at him. He ran his thumb over her bottom lip and smiled back at her. "Because you can add me to the list of people who would burn a city for you," he promised.

Nora believed it. She was so infatuated with him, so obsessed with the way he looked at her, spoke to her, held her. No one had ever treated her with such softness and honesty. She almost didn't know what to do with it—because she felt for sure that it was a mistake. After all, she was just Nora Mallone. She had never been anything special.

As if he could read her mind, Auston marveled, "You're so perfect." His eyes moved over her face as he admired her, lacing his fingers through her hair. He asked, "Will you stay with me tonight?"

Nora's heart slammed against her ribs, desperate for him in every sense of the word. She nodded without a beat of hesitation, and Auston leaned down to press his lips to hers. Nothing in Nora's life was even half as sweet as kissing him—that much, Nora knew for sure.