AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I don't know what we are, but would I really have brought her here today if I didn't want us to be together? Would I have walked in here with her on my arm in front of half the damn town if I was willing to just let her leave next week?
I know the answer, but I'm not ready to admit it just yet.
“Look at you, I can see it in your fuckin’ eyes that you've fallen right back to where you were before and you're an idiot if you think she ain't gonna cut and run when she's got what she wants from you. Just like she did before.”
“Conan, I will not tell you again.” Mama glares him down with a look so withering it could wilt the leaves of evergreen trees.
“You don't know what you're talkin’ about, bro, so shut the fuck up.”
He looks to Mama as if waiting for her to have my ass for cursing. She doesn't.
“What's going on?” Thea's soft voice washes over me like warm water, cascading down my shoulders and soaking my soul.
“Nothing, princess.” I pull her into my side and press my lips to her temple. “Did you get a drink?”
She motions with her cup of cocoa, her breath puffing tiny clouds into the bitter air. It's afternoon and the sun is hot enough to melt the ice that freezes overnight, but the farm is on high ground and gets painfully cold even on the warmest of winter days.
Leighton hangs behind, watching us with an air of satisfaction, as if seeing Thea and me like this eases something inside her. I offer her a smile over the top of Thea's head and she returns a small one of her own before walking across the grass to sit with Clover and Luella.
“We won't be eating until the sun goes down, so how about I fix you a snack or somethin’? You haven’t even had breakfast.”
“Neither have you,” she says by way of an answer.
“Ate when you were in the shower.” I look at her pointedly, knowing exactly how this conversation is going to go. “So, a snack?”
She directs her gaze somewhere over my shoulder, to the group behind us maybe, though she's not actually looking at anything in particular. She's just avoiding looking at me. It's been like this every time I've tried to get her to eat something more than a few bites of her dinner or a handful of fruit and nuts.
She shuts down.
The mention of food has a veil of total vacancy falling down around her face, locking away the truth and closing her off. If it was a tangible thing, I'd tear it off her the way I do her clothes. Would see it as just a barrier I have to break through to get to what's hiding beneath. But how can I destroy it when it's not something I can touch, when it's not even something I properly understand?
“I'm good,” she says and a sigh of disappointment whistles out from between my lips.
“You'll eat later, though, yeah? Like a proper meal, not just the salad Mama always insists on servin’ even though no one gives a shit about it.”
At least that earns me an amused twitch of her mouth. “Sure,” she says finally, but she's blowing me off and I know it.
Taking her hand, I tug her down onto one of the logs laying around the firepit. The heat from the blazing fire licks at my cheeks, the flames spitting and crackling as we sit together, her hand held between both of mine.
Blowing out a long breath, I steady myself to say my piece without coming across like I'm attacking her or laying blame. “I Googled it,” I tell her. “How to help someone with an eating disorder, I mean.”
“I don't have an eating disorder.”
“Don't give me that, princess. You’re not fooling anybody.”
She's even admitted it before now—that night I drove her home from Clover's party. Told me how she only eats eight hundred calories a day to maintain her figure and how she makes herself sick sometimes just so she can fit into her costume at work the next day. Yeah, we were arguing at the time and I might've even been acting like an ignorant, insensitive asshole, but those facts stuck with me.
I hate it.
I hate how the world defines the value of a woman based on the circumference of her waistline. Hate how the worth of a woman is dependent on how sexually attractive she is to a man. Hate how my seventeen-year-old sister already worries about her weight. Hate how impossible it is for women to have any shred of self-esteem when all the influences around them are built to teach them that they'll never be enough.
I hate that I'm complicit in the issue.
Hate that she is too.
Most of all, I hate that she so clearly has a problem that I don't know how to solve.
“Anyway, I Googled it and it was no fucking help. Just a lot of shit about letting you know I'm here for you and talking about feelings. Which is all well and fucking good, but there was nothing about how to actually get you to eat.”
