third time's a charm

psychoanalysis & freckle astronomy

chapter nine: psychoanalysis & freckle astronomy

Wednesday, December 13. 8:57 pm.

"Will knows?" After suffering through thirty or so minutes of sitting a table away from Jamie and the rest of North's basketball team, as well as hearing Vales make a comment about the situation every other minute, the four of us went back to my house. We had been hanging out in the living room for over an hour, and the longer I sat there, the more antsy I became. I couldn't wait another second to tell Rowan what Will had said to me at dinner, so I excused us and pulled her upstairs, to my room.

"I don't know how!" I told her, still confused as to how he had figured it out so easily. "Now it really is just Vales holding me back."

"You can't tell Aaron, Elle. He'll eat the two of you alive." I groaned and fell backwards onto my bed, out of frustration. "Will knowing is good enough! No questions asked—he supports you to make this decision. Oh, man... I can't believe he supports it. I love Will, do I say that enough? Because I love Will."

"I feel like I'm being set up," I told Rowan, almost feeling more nervous now that Will had figured out my secret. "I just don't get it, he would never be okay with this."

"Ellie... Aaron would never be okay with this, but Will is different. Will is protective over you, yes, but Aaron is controlling. He doesn't mean to be, but he can't help it. He's been trying to boss you around since you guys were little. You're not biologically related, and Will's always going to have a deeper connection with you, and that makes him jealous. So he tries to be the bigger brother. He wants to keep you safe, just like Will does, but he knows you won't listen to him like you listen to Will... so he takes it to the next level," I listened closely as Rowan spoke and wondered how she could analyze people so well. "You and Will are his family, and you mean the world to him. When Will backs down from giving you a hard time, Aaron doesn't understand why he does, so he swoops in to hopefully secure the annoying brother position. He just tries really hard to show he cares for you, and that he doesn't want you to get hurt. And his personality causes him to take things really personally sometimes, so that's why he gets so much more heated over certain things than Will. Whenever you do something that Will can forgive you for, it takes Aaron two times the effort to forgive because he takes it so personally sometimes. Sometimes he doesn't think you care for him the way you care for Will, which is probably true, but that's because he isn't Will. You care for him as Aaron, which is just as important and special as how you care for Will, but sometimes he can't see that."

"Fuck, Ro... you going into psychology next year?" Rowan laughed quietly to herself, but only shrugged her shoulders. "I've never realized any of that." I sighed quietly as I started to see Vales's actions a little more clearly. "I love Vales. He is my brother, I don't want him to think I don't care for him. I'm mean to him, but that's because it's our thing. We've always been mean to each other, but we also know that we'd do anything for each other."

"And I think he knows that, but sometimes he just worries. I think he worries that sometimes he goes too far when he gets upset with you, or takes picking on you too far... I know you've all told each other that you hate one another before, that's just a part of growing up, but I know the last couple of years, you and Aaron have gotten into some nasty arguments, and while he knows you love him, he just worries. He doesn't think you have the obligation to love him unconditionally, so he's scared that one day you'll stop." I felt my eyes tear up as Rowan spoke, and I hated that she was so good at whatever she was currently doing. "I'm not saying any of this to upset you, I'm just trying to explain why telling Aaron is so risky. He'll feel like it's an attack on him... not because he wants to play the victim, but because he can't see another reason why you would get with Burns. It just would not make sense to him, and it would really upset him."