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“What was your first time?”
“It was a fucking quickie in a park,” you say, and she laughs. “So I know what I’m talking about. It lasted like two minutes in my case, but still.”
“Sounds rough,” she says, still laughing, but her amusement fades when she presses her palms to your cheeks. She looks at your face in the moonlight. The faint beginning of a bruise paints your jawline with discolored hues. She runs her fingers lightly along it. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” you say, pulling her hands away. “Nothing to worry about.”
“Does that happen a lot?”
“What?”
“You know what,” she says. “Your father hits you.”
You laugh, but it’s not a happy sound. “I can take care of myself. I’m not a little kid.”
“But you’re still his kid,” she says. “And you’re only seventeen. Besides, I’m guessing this isn’t something that just started.”
You don’t say anything right away. You don’t want to talk about it. She’s not going to drop it, though. So you sit down beside her on the picnic table and say, “I turn eighteen tomorrow.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah, and you’re right,” you say. “It isn’t new.”
So you tell her. You tell her how he’s always been hard on you, because you were a mama’s boy. Your mother had been an aspiring actress, and that’s how you got involved at such a young age, but your father never liked it. You were supposed to follow in his footsteps. It was a source of contention between your parents, and as your father rose in political ranks, your mother stepped away from her dream.
The first time he hit you, you were twelve, but it didn’t become a regular thing until a year later when your mother swallowed a bottle of pills and never woke up from a nap. Your father blamed her career for killing her, but you blamed him.
That’s why you can answer any question thrown at you in class. He drills it into you every chance he gets. He seems to think he can beat your mother out of you and fill the hollowness left behind with more of him.
She sits beside you as you talk, her head on your shoulder. Afterward, you’re both quiet, before she says she needs to get home.
Her parents don’t know she’s gone.
“Tomorrow night,” she says as she picks up the comic book. “If you’ve got nothing better to do, come hang out with me.”
“What time?”
“Eight o’clock,” she says. “My house.”
“Your house, huh? I’m starting to think you might like trouble.”
She grins as she kisses you, just a soft peck, before saying, “I’ll see you tomorrow, Jonathan.”
“I’ll be there,” you say as she walks away.
You don’t know this, but that girl? She’s always been a bit of a plotter, and at the moment, she’s devising a plan. You see, her parents are going out of town tomorrow night. She’s supposed to go along, but she’s starting to feel like she might be coming down with something. *cough* *cough*
Chapter 9
KENNEDY
Before I can take even one more step, I’m yanked to a stop, a hand grasping hold of my wrist.
Turning, caught off guard, I look at him. Jonathan. We’re still in the park, not far from where we started. There’s a look on his battered face. I’m not sure how to read it, not sure what he’s thinking or how he’s feeling.
That’s the thing with him, though.
He’s an actor. His talent comes natural. He’s never had to work very hard at it. He can switch moods in a moment, change scenes in an instant, flip the script without anybody even realizing it’s happening. It’s hard to tell if he’s just playing a character or if you can trust that he means things.
“Don’t,” he says, his voice low but pointed. “Don’t do that.”
“Don’t do what?”
“Don’t act like you weren’t enough for me.”
“I wasn’t.”
He shakes his head, his expression flickering with something else. Anger? Hurt? Frustration? “I don’t know how you can say that, how you can even think that.”
“Because it’s true,” I whisper, glancing down at where his hand is wrapped around my wrist. He isn’t letting go. “I’m not saying that to be spiteful, but it’s obvious I wasn’t enough for you.”
“How is it obvious?”
I can’t believe he’s asking that, that he’s pretending to not understand what I mean. Is he pretending? I don’t know. Either that or he’s spent way too long ignoring reality.
“You wanted so much more than you ever had with me,” I say. “I couldn’t keep up. I tried, but I couldn’t. The late nights, the parties, all those different places and faces… I got lost somewhere in the middle of it all, but you never stopped to look to make sure I was still with you. And then with the drinking, the drugs… the women.”
He cringes when I say that. “I never cheated.”
He’s told me that before, but it’s not the point. Good for him for keeping his pants on, for keeping his hands to himself, but still, time and again, he chose them. He left me behind, all alone, in a city where I only had him, so he could be with them.
