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I wish I could stop crying so I could look at him.
So I could see him clearly.
But I just can’t stop my tears. I can’t stop feeling so stupid and foolish and so fucking evil for even thinking about doing this to him. Not to mention, what he said about Charlie back there.
I don’t know what it means but I know that it doesn’t sound good.
It sounds bad.
Very, very bad.
“Get out.”
At his low command, my breath seizes and I stare at his blurry form, my chest heaving.
“Get the fuck,” he repeats, his voice laced with so much venom that I feel it dripping over my skin, “out.”
And then I’m leaving.
I’m running out of there.
Because I’ve never felt this kind of hate before.
I’ve never felt this kind of anger.
Not even from him.
***
I pound my fists at the big brown door urgently.
I think I’m hurting myself, my fists, my knuckles but I don’t know how to stop.
I don’t know how to stop crying either.
So I keep going until the door flies open and Mo’s sleepy, concerned face stares at me.
Immediately, a frown appears between her smooth brows and her eyes go wide. Stepping over the threshold, she asks, “Poe? What are you doing here? Why are you crying?”
I hiccup. “M-Mo.”
Her concern grows at my broken voice and in the next breath, I find myself surrounded by her arms. “What happened, sweetheart? What’s wrong?”
I clutch onto her warm, motherly body. The kind that I’ve never known before and say, “I-I did a bad thing.”
“Oh, honey.” She squeezes me. “What happened? What did you do?”
I burrow my face in her neck, clutching her harder as I confess, “I made him hate me even more.”
I watch Mo pour tea in a white ceramic mug and dunk the tea bags.
It reminds me of the night when he made me tea and it causes such a pain in my chest that I whisper, “You don’t have to be so nice to me.”
Standing across from me at the small island in the kitchen, she smiles. “I know.” Then she looks up and winks at me. “But I like doing it.” I give her a small smile as she pushes the tea toward me with a stern order of, “Drink.”
Sniffling, I bring my legs up on the barstool and wrap my fingers around the warm mug.
After I showed up at the mansion crying like a lunatic, Mo ushered me in. And as soon as I stepped in, my knees gave out and I dropped to the ground with Mo’s arms still around me. So we sat there for a while in the foyer while I sobbed on her chest.
When I calmed down, I told her the first pressing thing as to how I got here: I snuck out of school, got a cab and asked to be driven out to the mansion. Which led me to tell her all the times that I have snuck out in the past, and how I have a cell phone and a credit card that I sometimes use, petty cash from my allowance that I’d saved up over the years and whatnot.
After confessing those crimes and making her sigh and shake her head with worry, I confessed the one that had really brought me here.
The one that wouldn’t let me sleep. The one that would probably haunt me for a long time, for the rest of my life even.
How far I’d fallen. How far I was willing to go to hurt him.
I told Mo everything. And I didn’t mince my words or gloss over any detail. I told her how long I’d been planning this blackmail thing. I told her why I’d been planning it, and how it came to me last Friday that I could create evidence instead of discovering it.
I expected her to kick me out by the end of it.
I really did.
I know Mo loves him. She loves him like her own son and it’s very apparent to see. And I’m not going to lie, I’ve felt jealous of him for it. For the fact that there’s someone who loves him like that.
Moreover, I’m also not going to lie that I’ve felt happy for him too.
I know what it feels like to be unloved and despite everything, I have felt happy seeing their dynamic these past four years.
Anyway, for this very reason though, I kept her at a distance in the beginning. Even though she was nice to me and I really liked her, the fact that she was so close to him made it harder for me to trust her in the beginning. But slowly she wore down my defenses and we became friends. I started to trust her with my thoughts — not all of them, of course — but most.
So yeah, I was expecting her to kick me out or at least have words with me about it.
