This particular kind of sadness scraped her right down to the marrow of her bones. If she'd had a need for breath, it might've been stolen away by the hurt in Arthur's embrace. His arms wrapped around her like a simple gust of wind could carry him away and she clung back with equal desperation. How was it possible to feel light as air, yet heavy enough to tread on the ground? These were the constant — fixed, like a point in time — dichotomous emotions ebbing and flowing through a girl in the arms of one Arthur Spiros. And with one sentence composed of seven words, seven measly syllables, suddenly she felt the pull of a long-buried memory.
'Please don't give up on me now.'
She remembers a voice, low and lulling but with a weary trail, speaking those exact words to her. She remembers eyes like chips of jade — fading, always fading now — staring back at her, into her, pleading with her to not give up. Cassia had held her twin sister's hands in her own and had pressed a trembling kiss to her knuckles as she sobbed her goodbye. She'd turned away. She'd given up. She'd run. Could she run from Arthur now the way she had with Cassandra?
Her hands fisted themselves into the material of his shirt, pulling him closer to her in answer. No.
She wouldn't run again. The collapse of the first time had been enough to cripple her. This wouldn't balm the Cassandra-shaped wound inside of her, but it would be a step forward and a step made all the difference.
Nodding once, she kept herself tethered to Arthur as if they were each other's anchors and blinked back her tears before she spoke. 'Everything changed after he left,' she started, continuing on like she'd never stopped even when the break in her voice told otherwise. 'Not right away. I guess it took a little while to set in. I think we all just didn't want to believe it. Looking back now I could see it coming clear as fucking day, but back then? It just seemed like one day he woke up and decided he didn't want to be with us anymore. Mom .. she took it the hardest.'
Warily, incredibly so, she let the sadness of that memory seep into Arthur. She let it swim in his heart until it plunged the depths of him and then continued on with only a pause. 'She really loved him, you know? She really did. I thought I already knew how much, but it wasn't until he left that I found out.' Almost absentmindedly, she traced abstract figures into the hollow of Arthur's back as she recounted her story, like she needed the soothing gesture to keep them firmly rooted.
'We had this sitting room window that overlooked the walkway up to the house. One of those where you could see whoever was coming up to the door,' she explained needlessly, the image of those wooden slats and forest green walls floating into her mind. 'When he left, Mom would just .. sit there and wait. Wait. Wait to see my dad coming up the walkway to greet her at the door. He never came. She never saw him and all Cassandra and I saw was her back to us as she fucking waited.'
And there, nestled in the words she just spat, was another emotion for Arthur to latch onto. Resentment. Resentment for the twins' mother and her emotional abandonment of her own children. Cassia and Cassandra had tried to pull her back from the pit she'd been sinking into, but their mother refused their attentions. Thus a chasm was formed between the girls and their mother, one that had proved impossible to cross.
She took a moment to let the resentment settle into something more focused, more controlled, before she went on. 'To this day, I don't know what happened. What made her leave that damn window and go back out into the world. Believe me, I asked, but she wasn't good with answers. Not anymore. Not for my sister and I. And I was stupid enough to think that maybe things might be getting better. Yeah, she still wasn't really acting like our mom anymore, but we figured that she just needed time. She just needed time to find us, to find herself again.'
Cassia went quiet and still for a long beat, fighting to keep the tears and seething feelings at bay as she bit out, 'But instead, she found him.'