chemical kiss | ashton irwin

Chapter Ten

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"Ashton," I said, thinking about how to explain my being there.

"Thalia," he said, staring at me with a perplexed look.

"Look, I-I don't know what I'm doing here, but I--" I started, pausing in the midst of my sentence. "I need someone to talk to."

"Well come inside, it's freezing out here," he told me. He didn't seem to be cold when he was practicing with his band earlier today, with a muscle shirt on and the garage wide open in front of him, but then again at the moment he was just wearing that denim jacket with the grey hood attached to it, no shirt.

I stepped inside and waited for Ashton to shut the door again and I sat on the couch. Ashton sat beside me and kept his mouth shut, silently urging me to tell him what the matter was.

"You know how my parents are divorced, right?" I asked, just for clarification.

"No, I didn't actually," he shook his head. "But mine are, too."

"Oh. Well, my mother is a bitch, and she seems to think I should forgive her for breaking my dad's heart," I sighed.

"Like how?"

I pulled my phone out of my pocket and replayed the last phone call I made, having Ashton listen to the whole argument. The majority of it was me yelling at my mom, but she still had some say, which was what my problem was about.

"This used to happen everyday between my parents, back when I lived with them," Ashton said when the call ended.

"It did?" I asked. Ashton nodded. "How'd you deal with it?"

"I ran out," he said. "I ran away from the things that caused me pain and went straight to the things I cared for."

I didn't ask anything else, like for instance what the things he cared for were, because he seemed to have heart of stone. I just hunched myself over and held my chin in my hands.

"How do I deal with it? As a part of the fight, I don't know what my part is. I mean, I'm not going to talk to my dad about it, I know how that'd turn out. And I'm not going to apologize either because my mom really doesn't deserve it."

"See, this is the part when you break free. You leave everything that causes you grief and you do whatever you want."

"But I don't know what I want. If I left, I'd have nowhere to stay, and my dad would never forgive me."

"Who said anything about forgiving? Life's not about doing things to make others happy, it's about being who you are and making sure you're happy by yourself. You can't let anybody change your goals, you can't let people take control of your future. It's all your choice, you do what you want, and you don't tell a soul what that is. The reason you don't tell is because they have the power to make you feel bad about who you want to be, so you end up doing what you don't want to do. So in order for your dad to forgive you, he has to do it on his own, and there's no telling whether he's going to do that or not. You do what you want with your life and see if he's under enough control of himself to realize that you're just doing what you've intended to do, and that forgiving somebody doesn't affect anything, it just makes one feel better. But this leads back to what I said: life's not about doing things to make others happy. Happiness is what you live for. But what's the point in living if you have nothing to live for?"

I sat quietly for a second, smiling a bit at Ashton's encouragement. I didn't think such words could tumble from his lips, it was outlandish to hear them from him. But then I frowned.