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Bile starts creeping up in the back of my throat, and I feel a tremor run through my body. I shouldn’t have made him talk abo
ut this. Maybe some things are better off living in the dark, where they belong. Where they can’t infect the sunshine and light.
“The scar is either from the ring he wore or the coffee table he threw me into. Who knows.”
His eyes close again, and I cup his cheek with my hand, trying to control the shaking and quakes of my fingers. I knew things were bad, but picturing the details in my head, Cole, as a little boy trying to help his mother, anger radiates through me, and pain seeps through my pores.
No one deserves that.
I know it makes me judgmental, and I have no right, but I don’t know if I feel more hatred for his father, or for his mother. His dad threw the punches but his mother calling him into it, to redirect the blows? He was a child. He had no one.
“I remember it bled so much I couldn’t go to school the next day, and then he was pissed about that.”
“You didn’t need stitches?”
“Can’t get stitches, Em. Then someone might find out,” he says bitterly. “He locked me in the hall closet, and the next day, when I did go to school, I had to tell them it was from a karting accident.”
Leaning down, I kiss the scar gently and swallow hard to keep my emotions at bay. Memories of kissing small scars on his body, years ago, come back to me. At first, he told me they were karting injuries, too.
“By the time I met you, my mom had left, and I was old enough to fight back, so most of the hitting had stopped. Or, I could at least hit back.”
I nod, remembering him saying as much—that his dad used to hit him. That didn’t stop the emotional abuse, though. I witnessed plenty of that myself. “I’m not judging you, Cole, I just want to understand. Why do you still talk to Stan? He’s a monster.”
His hands scrub his face up and down. “I don’t know. It’s fucked up. Guilt, I suppose. Everyone tells you you’re supposed to honor your parents, family is supposed to be some unbreakable bond. I wouldn’t be where I am now if he didn’t stay and put me through all the training and practice, pay for karting. I know it’s wrong, but…”
I shake my head. Everything Cole has achieved is despite his father. He’s earned it through hard work and discipline and has overcome every obstacle Stan threw in his path. And his mother who abandoned him to it.
He clawed his way out of hell.
“I don’t want pity, Em,” he misinterprets my expression.
“I don’t pity you,” I cup his cheek. “I’m proud of you.”
His brows furrow and I feel his muscles tense, like it’s painful for him to hear this, like he doesn’t believe me.
Stan had been poisoning Cole against me the entire time we were in high school, and knowing he still has some influence on Cole makes me wonder how much he had to do with Cole leaving me.
I don’t need one more thing to hate Stan for, and I understand why Cole has issues. It can’t be easy to cut your parents out of your life, even if they’re monsters. But it would make sense if Stan was the cause of Cole leaving me.
“Did Stan push you to break up with me when you left?” A pit forms in my stomach as soon as the words leave.
“Yeah, sure. You know how he was.”
I nod, remembering. We avoided Stan at all costs, back then, because every time he’d see me, Cole would get screamed at about me being a distraction. Stan said I was a gold-digger, and I was just using him like Cole’s mother did. Even though Cole was just a teenager when we met, Stan had already projected all of his fears, shortcomings, and vicarious aspirations onto Cole.
But, if Cole believed him then, and Stan is still in his life—to some extent—it can happen again.
“You believed him, though,” I whisper, the gnawing in my stomach growing by the second.
“No,” Cole reaches a hand up and makes me look at him. I hadn’t even realized I turned away, afraid of what his eyes would tell me that his words would not. “Stan’s a self-serving prick. I never believed anything he said about you and I will never let him near you again.”
“Then, why?” Two simple words. Six years boiled down into a couple syllables. They’re finally out into the open and swirl around us in space like smoke trails.
There are times when silence is comfortable, even needed. And there are times when silence is the loudest noise in all of the world. A sound so loud it shatters your eardrums, and the percussion deafens you.
As Cole sits up on the couch and runs his hands through his hair, thinking of his response, his silence is deafening.
“You see the good in people, Emily. It’s one of traits that makes you so beautiful, inside and out. When we first met, I was a mess, do you remember?”
