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There was something almost tender in his voice, and I held myself rigid against the sound of it, refusing to let it penetrate my heart.
“I remember your mom too, just a little. Mostly, I remember fighting. I remember her screaming at my mom. My mom crying.” His voice was tense and strained like a rubber band that might snap at any moment, and when I looked at his face, the same desperate pain I’d seen before contorted his features. “I was eight when she died, so I didn’t understand what was happening then. I just knew there was something wrong with her. She was quiet all the time. She cried all the time. And then she—”
He broke off, dragging in a harsh breath.
“Finn told me you found her,” I whispered.
He didn’t answer that with words, but his silence, the tension rippling through every muscle in his body as if he might tear apart at any second, said plenty.
A heavy silence stretched between us until finally, I spoke again.
“I don’t understand though. How do you know it was anything my mom did? She’d been gone for years by then. How do you know your mom wasn’t…”
My words trailed off. It was possible Mason’s mom had been dealing with demons completely unrelated to my own mother. Depression was a real and terrible thing. But I didn’t know how to broach that subject without sounding like I was trying to deflect blame from my mom.
“She left a note.” Mason shrugged. His voice was blank now, devoid of any emotion, as if the excess of feelings had caused a complete shutdown in his heart. “My dad didn’t even let me read it until much later, but I kept insisting until he finally showed it to me. She said your mom was right about everything. That she was horrible, ugly inside, didn’t deserve to live… It was a long list of reasons she gave for killing herself, and every one of them, your mom planted in her head.”
Against every self-preservation instinct in my body, against the fortifications I’d built up and reinforced around my heart, against logic and common fucking sense, pity rose up inside me.
“I’m sorry, Mason. You didn’t deserve to lose your mom like that.”
He didn’t say anything, just pulled the ice pack away from my hand and set it back on the counter. The cold had numbed my bruised skin and made my joints feel stiff and awkward, but I squeezed the hand that was still holding mine as hard as I could, gripping him so tight he winced.
“But I am not my mother. What she did, no matter how awful it was—it had nothing to do with me.”
He looked down at our joined hands, at the bruising grip that held us together. “I know.”
“And what you did—every single thing you did to try to punish me for my mom’s actions—you decided. No one else did that. No one made you.”
“I know.” His voice was pitched so low I almost couldn’t hear it.
My bruises ached, my fingers were going numb, and I could feel my bones scraping together as I clutched his hand. He was squeezing mine back just as hard, each of us gripping the other like an anchor in a storm.
“You made it your goal to hurt me. And if I’d been a different person, or been put in a different foster home, or let my grandma’s hate get under my skin… I could’ve ended up taking the same way out your mom did. Is that what you wanted?”
His gaze snapped up to mine, a look of wild panic flaring in his eyes, and he released my hand suddenly, wrapping his arms around me and pulling me into his embrace, crushing me against him. His grip on me was so tight I could hardly move, and everywhere we touched, I could feel his body shuddering.
“No. Don’t.” His lips were in my hair, the words spoken directly into my skull, as if he could somehow plant them in my brain. “Don’t ever do that, Tal. Please. Fucking. Don’t.”
Chapter 19
Mason held me for a long time, and I didn’t try to push him away, didn’t struggle against his tight hold. I couldn’t quite bring myself to hug him back, so I rested my hands on his arms, feeling the muscles clench as hard as steel beneath my fingertips.
His heart beat heavily again
st mine, and his breath was ragged as shudders wracked his body.
Maybe I should’ve pushed him away or hit him or kneed him in the balls. But part of me needed this too, needed the support of someone else who was as fucked up by all of this as I was. We held each other like two boxers in a clinch, an embrace of exhaustion and violence that could almost be mistaken for tenderness from a distance.
Eventually, we stepped away from each other. As soon as I left his embrace, Mason turned and rested his hands on the kitchen counter, his head bowed. It was a look of utter defeat, and I gazed at him for a moment, unsure what I wanted to do.
Comfort him?
Exploit the open wound I’d found by stabbing it over and over again?
I couldn’t convince myself to do either, so I walked away and headed for the door. He turned his head slightly as I opened it, but he didn’t try to stop me.
A few fat raindrops fell from the night sky as I made my way back across campus. It hardly ever rained here, and I tilted my head up, letting the droplets of water hit my face and trail down my cheeks like tears.
