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Thud. Thud. Thud.
“For my sake, Bubba, please!”
“I’m done, Mam!” I called over my shoulder as I narrowly avoided Brian in the landing in my haste to reach my room. “Conversation over.”
Feeling my mood grow darker with every step I took, I blew out a breath and shook my hands.
“Calm the fuck down,” I instructed myself when my heartbeat rocketed to new heights. “Just breathe, asshole.”
Using every ounce of willpower that I had inside of me, I forced myself not to take my bedroom door off its hinges when I reached it.
This house didn’t belong to Keith.
It didn’t even belong to Mam.
Nor did the bakery.
The name Gibson was on the deeds of every financial asset in my mother’s possession, not Allen. This was my father’s house. That bed Keith slept in every night belonged to my father, just like the woman who slept beside him every night for that past ten years.
So much for true love.
Mam and Dad had been together since they were twelve and this was their end result: Mam shagging the prick laying down the new patio in our garden, while Dad worked his bollocks off to pay for said patio and give her everything else she wanted.
Fucking typical.
Now, I loved my mother with all my heart, I truly did, but the fact that she shacked up with that man in a house my father had paid for made me sick to my goddamn stomach.
Remembering that Dad used to have to pick us up on the weekends and wait for us at the front door that he paid for, while Keith was warming his bed, made the bitterness inside of me fester and stew.
I tolerated their relationship because what other choice had I? I was polite and civil when I could be, but that’s where I drew the line. I didn’t want a relationship with the man. In fact, I wanted as little as humanly possible to do with him and everyone related to him.
The bitter taste in my mouth was only intensified by the fact that she allowed her husband’s son to use my dead sister’s bedroom for his own. In my eyes, the man who married my mother represented the beginning of the end for my family.
For my father.
For my sister.
For me.
Goddammit, I didn’t like to dwell in the past. It was behind us for a reason. I was okay now. I had a good life, with good friends. Everything was good, dammit, and I refused to think otherwise. I refused to let my mind fuck that up for me.
I could handle Keith and the grief and the anger. I could handle the bad days. Really, I could. But the sleeping—or lack of it—was a real problem for me.
It was hard to function on little to no sleep, and the nightmares… Jesus Christ, the nightmares were beyond disturbing. It made me so fucking angry that my subconscious refused to move on from something I’d put to bed years ago. I didn’t need the reminders of all the horrors of my childhood. Of the image of my sister disappearing beneath the surface, or the feel of my father’s hand, or the look of fear in his eyes, or the feel of his…
“Fuck!” I snapped, springing up from my perch to pace the room. “Not cool. Not fucking cool, dick!”
Wisps of echoed voices and memories bombarded my mind, setting me into sensory overload. On mornings like this one, everything was a trigger, spurring me into an agitated state of needing to move. Unease thrummed inside of my veins like a drum, pushing me to move and laugh and run and do anything I could to get the feeling out of me. To push him away.
Because it was too hard to remember.
I was, as my mother once referred to me, “wearing.” Meaning I was exhausting to handle, and that drove people away.
Not Claire-Bear.
She never left. She always seemed to have a level of energy that balanced mine. Our personalities complemented the other, and when I was little, I used to believe that Holy God had put her on earth just for me. Because she was the only person I didn’t seem to scare off. Hell, even Hugh and Feely got tired of me. But never her.
I guess that’s why she had always been so perfect for me. I was boisterous and she was full of beans. We went together like bacon and cabbage. It just worked. She never seemed to grow tired of me, which was something I couldn’t say about everyone else in my life.
