Finding Atlas

I pulled away from him faster than I could imagine. I felt shocked, offended, horrified, confused. Hurt. I felt hurt.

"When you—when you saw me? When you saw me? What is that supposed to mean mean?" My heart rate spiked, my breathing uncontrolled. I scoot away from him before his mouth dropped and his eyes widened.

"No, no! Not in a bad way! God, I didn't mean it like that, I swear! That came out all wrong," Atlas stood up and paced around before his hands went back to his head. "I just—I don't know how to explain this without making myself sound like a complete idiot, you know? And that goes without saying that explaining would kind of ruin the entire 'friends' thing we've got going on." Atlas's explanation hardly helped.

"When I first saw you, a piece of me fell away, and it's like you've got it sitting in the palm of your hand and you can crush it or you can keep it. And more and more of me breaks away and all of the pieces just sit in your hand."

"You got all of that from Bardia's? Really?" Atlas was starting to sound like he was lying, coming up with things just to save me from being hurt. What he didn't know was that I didn't need it, I didn't need saving from anybody. I was capable of saving myself and fixing myself, and he needed to know that. "By the way, if you're just using this as a cover up to protect my feelings, I'm perfectly fine with saving myself." Atlas groaned before continuing.

"No, that wasn't the first time I saw you! We go to the same school, remember? St. Bart's, yeah? I saw you on the first day of school. Before Bardia's, before I ran into Delphine, before all of that. I saw you in the morning and you were getting out of your car and you had your hair down and you looked beautiful and I just knew that in that moment, you already had a piece of me."

I was rendered speechless and absolutely terrified. No one had ever said things like that. To Delphine, yeah—I heard no end to those tales, Delphine always telling me about how some boy made some big profession to her and she had to remorsefully turn him down—but never to me. Never to me. Atlas sounded like he'd known me for years when he'd only known me for, what, a month or longer?

"Atlas," I mumbled quietly. His cheeks were pink and his face was the picture of exasperation and exhaustion mixed together. His shoulders sagged and he looked like he had given up everything.

"You cant—you can't just say something like that and expect me to be okay with it. It's not fair, it's not fair to me or to you and I need time and I have to go, okay? We're friends. We're friends," I repeated, as if I was reminding him, when I was really reminding myself. I brushed past Atlas as I walked out of the door, unsure of the way we left things.