Bet on It (13)

One thing at a time, he figured. He’d continue the search when he got home. He could already tell he was going to have a lot of shit to unpack.

He nodded at Aja, trying his best to convey empathy for desires that he didn’t actually possess.

They finished the rest of their food in silence. The quiet between them wasn’t exactly tense, but it made his knee shake under the table anyway. Walker ate slower than he normally would have. The conversation between them hadn’t really gone the way he’d expected. It was much less flirty and much, much more intense. But he still wasn’t ready to leave. He found that sitting in silence with her, leg shaking and belly full of grease, was more appealing than spending the evening with his eyes glued to his phone in his old bedroom. As long as she was willing to sit there with him, he was willing to keep his ass parked in that booth. He was even considering ordering an outrageously large milkshake as an excuse to sit there longer.

“Are we ever going to talk about it?” Aja’s voice shocked him out of his dessert menu perusing, and he looked up to see her leaning across the table with that round jaw clenched. He tried not to glance at the soft-looking cleavage that glowed golden brown even under the harsh light above. He failed. Spectacularly.

“Uhh … what ‘it’ are we supposed to be talkin’ about?”

She sighed, leaning back and narrowing her eyes at him. “That night in the grocery store, Walker. It’s weird that you haven’t brought it up yet.”

Walker cursed under his breath. “I didn’t think you’d want me to bring it up, to be honest.”

“Well, I didn’t, but you not bringing it up feels even weirder than if you had.”

He couldn’t make heads nor tails of her reasoning. All he knew was that he had plenty of experience with having panic attacks in public places. And he’d always hated it when the people who witnessed the attacks treated them and him like some kind of fucking sideshow after. He didn’t know Aja, not then and not really now either. He didn’t know whether she would want him to acknowledge it, so he hadn’t. It definitely hadn’t seemed like a new experience for her, so he figured the last thing she needed was to rehash a traumatizing moment with a stranger.

“So … did you want to talk about it?”

She floundered, her mouth opening and closing a couple of times.

“No,” she said finally. “Not particularly. I just needed to acknowledge that it happened because I can’t stop thinking about it. And I wanted to thank you for … for just being there. It helped me a lot.”

“No need for thanks.” He swallowed. “Like I said then—I get it. I spent my entire childhood with undiagnosed and untreated complex PTSD. I’m very familiar with freakin’ the fuck out.”

“Complex PTSD?” Her voice was soft.

Walker nodded but didn’t clarify any further.

“Generalized anxiety disorder.” She said the words matter-of-factly, like she was introducing herself to him for the first time.

He smiled.

“Is it awful that it makes me feel better that you understand firsthand that way?” she asked. “I feel like that’s an awful thing to feel comforted by.”

His mouth tilted downwards in thought. “I don’t think it’s a bad thing to want somebody to understand you in that way. I mean, I know we live in a time where some people feel more comfortable talkin’ about mental health than they have in the past, but it’s still easy to feel alone when you’re in the thick of it. Plus, it’s not like society as a whole makes it safe for people to be as open as they might want to be about this kind of thing.”

“Yeah.” The nod of her head was emphatic. “When I was first diagnosed, I remember feeling a ton of … shame. Some of it is gone, but not all of it, and what’s left definitely keeps me from opening up to people about my anxiety. Even if it would make life easier for me in the moment.”

“I was twenty before I saw a psychiatrist and got diagnosed, and I didn’t tell anybody about it for a long time after that. Not even Gram.” The unexpected intimacy of the conversation had his throat dry, so he took a sip of his sweet tea. “Shit’s hard. It’s important to be open and honest when you’re ready and willin’. But I don’t think we owe it to anybody to tell them shit we aren’t comfortable tellin’ them either.”

Aja bit down on her bottom lip, seeming to mull his words over. He hoped he didn’t sound like some know-it-all pushing his opinions down her throat. But if he’d only learned one thing in life, it was that not everyone deserved to know all of him. His soft spots were his to expose, and he had the right to be very fucking discerning. He must have felt some kind of kinship with Aja, seen parts of himself in her that made it easy to be so open and honest.

“This is a hell of a conversation for a…” She paused, then cleared her throat with a wince.

Walker couldn’t have stopped the smirk from overtaking his face if he tried.

“A…” he prompted.

“Nothing, just a”—she waved a hand around in the air—“an outing.”

“An outing otherwise known as a date?”

Her eye roll was drenched in exasperation, but he could tell she was a little flustered. She did this thing where she widened her eyes and pinched her chin between the knuckles of her middle and pointer fingers whenever she was unnerved. She’d done it when Gram had introduced them at bingo, and she was doing it now. The very last thing Walker wanted was to make her uncomfortable, so he watched her closely, hoping that his teasing hadn’t toed over the line.