AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“I wish, Jems. I wish.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “You’re not saying much, and I’m obviously doing a piss poor job at comforting you. All I’ve done is talk about myself.”
“I want you to talk about yourself.”
“Well, I want to hear aboutyou,” I said.
“I guess that’s our only problem. You want to hear about me. I want to hear about you.” He let out a little laugh through his tears. Then he added, “What do you want to know?”
“Tell me… something I don’t know about you.”
“Something you don’t know?”
“We only have so much time together, so I want to learn as much about you as I can. Besides, dude, I’ve totally been the one doing most of the talking in this relationship.”
“Something you don’t know about me…”
“Something I wouldn’t know that would surprise me.”
“Oh. Ha. Well, that’s easy. My parents.”
“What about them?”
He shook his head. “Remember, this is still hard for me. It isn’t about not trusting you. I just…”
“What is it?”
“That’s the thing. My parents. We didn’t talk about things.”
I laughed. “You’ve met my mother. Sounds familiar.”
“No, Jemma. I mean… we didn’t talk about things.” His expression grew more distant as if he had suddenly withdrawn on me once again.
“You don’t have to tell me.” I squeezed his hand. “You could tell me something else, if this is too hard.”
“Uh, it’s hard. But I’d rather tell you this now,” Jamie said. “See… growing up with three older brothers, you learned how to fight. You also learned, as the youngest, you were going to get the brunt of the physical abuse, too.”
“Physical abuse?”
“Lots of it.” He paused, studying my face.
“Jesus Christ, that’s awful.”
“Yeah, I mean. Here’s the thing, it wasn’t like… oh, I don’t know… that typical shit you hear about. I didn’t walk in and get beat. No. It wasn’t like that. There was always a reason.”
“There’s never a good reason for it,” I said, voice stern.
“Well, in Dad’s eyes, there was. We were men, he used to say all the time. And we needed to act like men.” Jamie sighed, his eyes looking off into the distance. “Any time any of us ever showed any kind of emotion. Or feeling. Or expressed any kind of pain… crying? You’d wind up with a black eye for that. And the ridicule.”
“What would they do to you? I say they because… I assume your brothers hurt you, too?” A guess based off all the research I’d done on abusive parents, two books ago. Oddly enough, the main antagonist (the murderer) had come from an abusive family. The dad beat the oldest child who beat the youngest child who beat the dog. Classic situation—also, very unfortunately realistic.
“We didn’t have a dog, but otherwise, yeah, that’s basically how it worked.” Jamie buried his face in my chest. “I learned to associate pain with embarrassment. I learned to keep it all to myself. Dad taught us to lock everything away, to never care. But the problem, Jems, is that I always cared so deeply about things.” More tears escaped from his eyes. “I always thought something was wrong with me. They used to tell me I was too sensitive.”
“They? Meaning your entire family?”
“Yes. All of them. I was the crybaby… Dad even used to make jokes about me being gay. Based on the fact I couldfeel.”
“Well, first of all, if feeling makes you gay, then no one should be straight.” I hugged him, nuzzling my face against the crown of his head. “You know that they were wrong, right? For all of it.”
