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“God. Reece.”
I reached for him then, unable not to. I leaned across the table and took his hand. He let me but didn’t really grasp back. His hand was limp in mine.
“He didn’t show up for another three weeks. And when he finally did, he wouldn’t say one goddamn word about where he’d been.”
His brow furrowed, still pained. “But he was different after that. He was still the brother I’d always known. He tried, anyway. He couldn’t fool me, though. There was this… this seriousness to him. A shadow that separated him from me after that. He had less patience for what he called my childishness. As if we weren’t both eighteen years old.
“And he had money for the ticket east. He said it was time to stop fucking around. That if we stayed on the streets, we’d end up like all the other street kids, or dead.
“The other street kids… well, a lot of them… They did whatever they could to earn money. They sold drugs. They sold… whatever they could. And it was my fucking fault. I should never have let him go without me, I shouldn’t have—”
“Reece, no, you had no idea—”
He looked over at me, alarmed, and pulled his hand away from mine. “Shit, I shouldn’t have told you this. Jer would kill me if he knew I ever told—”
“I’ll never say a word. I swear. I swear. And I’m so sorry both of you went through that.” I shook my head. “And I can’t believe you were in San Francisco too,” I said. “We might have crossed paths and not even known it.”
That had him looking my way. “Charlie, what happened to you there? What made you run?”
My first instinct was to shut him down like I did everyone when they started poking too close. But as I sat there in that chair, my mind a little cottony from the pills and the wine, I just wanted to laugh at myself. What good was keeping this precious secret to myself doing?
Bottling his secrets up kept Reece awake at night and mine were slowly eating me up from the inside out.
So I just blurted it out. “I was going to Stanford. I’d grown up in San Jose. My parents weren’t really rich or poor. They were kind of the last of the middle class but my mom was never happy with that. God, nothing could make her happy, and certainly not me. Nothing I did was ever good enough.” Then I realized complaining about my mom to a man whose mother had abandoned him when he was just a kid was a dick move. At least I’d had a mom.
I waved a hand, embarrassed. “Anyway, so I got to Stanford on scholarship, hoping for better things. That was where…” I swallowed and then pushed through. “That was where I met m-my husband.”
Reece straightened in his seat, his shoulders turning more towards me. I definitely had all of his attention now, though I had a feeling I always had.
I swallowed, my mouth suddenly tasting sour and dry. I ignored it and continued anyway. This story wouldn’t get any easier to tell even if I was well-hydrated. He’d shared and maybe I could too. I wasn’t likely to get therapy anytime soon and he was the only ear I could see myself trusting anyway.
I took a deep breath and then jumped in. “I was a freshman and he was everything out of the romance novels I’d read all my life. Confident, smart, handsome. Everybody loved him. When he started paying attention to me, little ol’ me, I was flabbergasted. And at the beginning, it was something out of a movie. Gifts, constant messages, I felt so adored.”
I closed my eyes. “He loved how sweet and innocent I was, he said. All the other college girls were just there to party and sleep around, but I was a serious girl.”
I huffed out a bitter laugh. “I thought that meant he really saw me. I thought that meant he understood how hard I worked to keep my scholarship, how I didn’t take school for granted, that I’d worked hard for everything I’d earned.”
I shook my head, so angry for buying up everything he was selling. “They say cults go after people like me too. Vulnerable, love-starved, searching for meaning. Smart, but stupid in the ways that count. We’re like narcissist catnip. They come in and fill up every hole that’s been empty for so long. But it’s all a lie. It’s just to draw us in. And then, after we’re hooked and caught in their web, everything changes.”
Reece’s hand reached out and his fingers closed back around mine, squeezing. “It’s him you’re running from, isn’t it? He’s why you were hitchhiking with nothing but the clothes on your back?”
I nodded, tears squeezing out of my eyes and rolling down my cheek. I swiped them away angrily with the hand Reece wasn’t holding.
