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She told me all that.
She told me everything.
So all that care that I saw, back at his cottage, that threw me off, it was already there. It was real.
He cared.
He always did. Even though I can’t even imagine how hard it must have been for him. To care for me.
To care for someone so tangled up in his past.
“But not only that, you also sent me to St. Mary’s, didn’t you?”
His eyes darken and his jaw clenches under my palm but still, I keep my hand over his mouth as I continue, “I figured it out in the car. On the way back while I was crying. All this time I thought that you broke my heart when you sent me away. Every time you forbade me to see him, I thought you were breaking my heart all over again. But you weren’t. You were saving me. You were saving my heart. You were protecting it, weren’t you? You were protecting me from him. You were protecting me from myself. Because I was too headstrong, too rebellious, too fucking desperate for attention and I didn’t listen. But the thing is, Alaric,” I lean closer, my hand still on his mouth and his fingers still mangling my top as I whisper fiercely, “that you shouldn’t have. You shouldn’t have done all of that because I’m like her. I’m like my mother. Like her, I’ve lied to you. I’ve deceived you. I’ve hidden things from you. I’ve played pranks on you. I’ve…”
My eyes well up again while his narrow, his breaths bursting under my palm, and I lean even closer.
I touch my lips to the back of my hand that still covers his mouth as I whisper, “Like her, I tried to ruin your life. Can you believe that? I tried to ruin your fucking life, Alaric. Can you imagine how bad I have to be to do that? How malicious. How like Charlie. How like all those people who…” I pause as a tear falls down my eye, plopping onto his hard cheek, “hurt you.”
His abs flinch then.
His face flinches too as soon as the teardrop lands on his skin.
And I hear a rumbling in his chest but I hug his sides with my thighs and hold him in place.
“They hurt you, Alaric. They hurt you so badly. And I never knew. I could never figure it out. I could never even imagine. And I would. I’d try to come up with all sorts of scenarios, all sorts of crimes that Charlie had committed against you but I could never have imagined this. My brain, my tiny stupid teenage brain, could never have come up with something so horrifying, so… painful and life altering and…”
I breathe through my nose. I breathe through my mouth.
I simply breathe.
None of it helps though.
None of it calms this rage in my heart. This fire in my body.
None of it tames these violent emotions slamming against my bones and so my next words are spoken on a growl while my body bears down harder on him.
“It makes me angry. So angry. It makes me so fucking angry, Alaric,” I tell him, even as my hand presses harder on his mouth. “That I want to… I want to do something drastic. I want to burn this house down. I want to burn it to the ground because of everything that you went through here. Because of how your father treated you. How he made you feel rejected and unloved. I know about that, you know. I fucking know how much it cuts you, how much it hurts.”
I do, don’t I?
I know how painful it is. I know how it affects you. I know how lonely it makes you feel.
The rejection. The neglect. The very hatred from someone who’s supposed to love you.
I know.
I just didn’t know that he knew as well.
That he’s lived with it like I have.
“But that’s not all. Because then,” I continue, “then, Alaric, I want to find those people. The ones who dared to hurt you. The ones who dared to put their hands on you. Who dared to torture you. Who for even a single second dared to think that they were better than you. I want to find them and I want to burn them alive too. I want to fucking burn them until I hear them scream and beg and fucking shit their pants out of fear. Do you get that, Alaric? Do you understand what I wanna do before I can even think of calming my shit down?
“But before you say anything, let me tell you that I have thought about it. I have thought about maybe not resorting to violence. Maybe being the bigger person and letting bygones be bygones. And maybe breaking every bone in my body so I know how you felt. How painful it was. How terrifying. And maybe I’ll still do that, I don’t know, but then I thought that it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter that it happened a long time ago or that I’ve come to know how it feels to be in that much pain. It doesn’t matter because it doesn’t change the fact that it happened, okay? It doesn’t change the fact that it happened to you. It doesn’t change the fact that you were lying in a hospital bed for a month. It doesn’t. And it doesn’t take away your pain or give you that one month of your life back. So this is it. This is it, Alaric. This is what I wanna do. I want vengeance. I want to teach them a fucking lesson. Because I don’t think I’m ever calming down again. Ever. I don’t think I can let this go, Alaric. I’m fucking livid right now.”
