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“Don’t fucking say it, Trina.”
He’d never liked compliments on his looks.
Ever.
“These were my foster parents. These...these monsters. And it didn’t matter where I went, it’s like it was expected of me.”
“What did they expect from you?”
His pained expression as his eyes slammed shut, as his head hung backwards tore at her heart. “Everything.” Two tears slid down his face that had yet to see its color restored. “Everything.”
He rushed past her so quickly she could feel the breeze of the air he’d disrupted. He didn’t run for the front door; instead, he threw open the doors down the hallway until he found the bathroom. He was retching, losing the contents of his stomach as Katrina stood shaking in the doorway.
Everything.
Once he was done, he slid to the floor, his knees to his chest, his head buried between them, his hands behind his neck, pulling at his hair.
“I can’t, Trina,” he gasped. “I can’t.”
She entered the bathroom then, sitting beside him on the floor. “Please,” she said even as her own tears threatened.
“I swear I said no,” he sobbed. “I swear I did. I swear it, I swear it.” He kept repeating this even as she moved to put her arm around him, pausing briefly when he flinched at her touch.
“Who was it, Ren?” she asked gently, her stomach in knots, the lump in her throat threatening to cut off her air.
“It didn’t matter where I went. It didn’t matter. It was...it was my foster parents.”
“Which foster parents, Ren?”
“It didn’t matter where I went. I was a gorgeous boy.” He said the words with such disdain that Katrina recoiled. “It was men. It was women.”
Katrina noticed a Christmas card lying in her hallway, its smiling faces taunting her.
The Torrences.
And then she looked closer.
Where she saw Lorenzo’s eyes looking back at her.
Miranda.
Katrina gasped as her tears won, as Lorenzo sat before her, his pained expression when he lifted his face one that she knew would replace all the haunting images of him from before.
“Ren, you’re safe with me.” He needed to know that, he needed to understand even as he fell apart in front of her. “What Emily said—"
“I swear to you I wasn’t cheating. It wasn’t like that. I never...I never wanted...”
His words trailed off as Katrina wrapped her arms around him properly for the first time in years, as she cried into his shirt, as his own tears slipped down his face and dampened her hair. Slowly she felt his arms circle around her, his touch feather light before he pulled her closer to him, sobs wracking through his body. She didn’t care that they were on the bathroom floor. She didn’t care how uncomfortable their positions were.
He needed her.
“I’m so ashamed.”
“There’s nothing for you to be ashamed of.”
“But I...I didn’t stop it. I didn’t know how.”
“When did it start, Ren? Not before, but with...with her.”
