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“I guess it’s...I haven’t had a cat in a long time. I never really had one as a pet at all, not for very long at least.”
I wasn’t going to dig into the subject, but Jess was getting too damn good about seeing past my evasiveness. She laid her hand against my cheek, stroking her thumb over the stubble on my face. “Do you want to talk about it?”
Yes. No. Both. Talking about it, disgustingly, felt an awful lot like vomiting. I didn’twantto — but it would probably feel better once it was over.
“There’s not much to talk about,” I said. “Pops didn’t like cats, but I found one when I was nine years old. A stray had a litter under our front porch, and once they started wandering around, my dad chased them off. One got left behind, the smallest. He had a weird face, a birth defect; it made him look like he was always frowning. I tried to hide him in my room, but you can’t really hide a kitten.”
My stomach felt like it was cramping. Manson would have called it a trauma response, but I tried to ignore it.
“He told me to get rid of it,” I said. “Told me to get it out of the house and that he’d shoot it if he saw the cat around the property.”
Jess sharply drew in her breath. Her expression was pained, horrified. This was something I rarely talked about, and I didn’t expect much of a reaction when I did. Most people I knew were raised similarly, so things like this wouldn’t strike them as shocking.
But Jess had experienced nothing like that; it was shocking for her. My knee-jerk reaction was to tell her it wasn’t so bad. I’d survived. I turned out just fine.
But maybe her reaction was normal, and the numbness and disconnection I felt around it...wasn’t.
I swallowed around the sensation of something stuck in my throat. My body felt strange but my brain remained a void, refusing any emotional input.
“I couldn’t let the little thing fend for himself,” I said. “So I took him and left. I planned to run away and never go back. I didn’t think it through; I was just a kid. Once night set in and I was still walking, I started to realize I’d have to go home. I had to eat. I still walked all night, with that cat’s little head sticking out of my backpack, bawling my eyes out because I thought I’d have to leave him somewhere.”
That memory cut through the numbness. It still felt real: the pain of being so alone, so helpless to do anything. I hated that feeling with every bone in my body.
“What did you do?” she said. She’d moved closer and it helped that she wasn’t looking directly at me but instead down at the cat. When she watched me, I worried too much about what my face was doing.
“There was an old lady who lived a few miles from us,” I said. “Mrs. Isabella Thorn. Most of the kids around town thought of her like our granny. I don’t know why the hell this old woman was sitting out on her porch at five in the morning, puffing on her pipe, but there she was. She took the cat and told me she’d keep him safe. That was that. I went home. Never had another animal until Manson got Jojo, and then Vincent moved in with Haribo.”
I finally looked at her again, expecting pity or sadness. Instead, there was fury in her eyes.
“Who the hell treats their kid like that?” she blurted. “Threatening to kill an animal? Scaring you so bad you ran away? What the fuck! If he wasn’t already dead, I’d —”
She cut off abruptly, her eyes going wide. But I stopped her before she could apologize.
“Trust me, if he wasn’t dead, I’d kill him again myself. I hated my father. Hated him with every goddamn bone in my body. Hemademe hate him. He thought that showing emotion or getting attached to things made you weak, made you less of a man. Toys, pets, my own mother — a real man wasn’t supposed to care about any of that shit.”
“You were a child!” She was so angry she sputtered, scaring a few cats. “Kids need comfort! Kids need toys! I just...I can’t imagine —” She shook her head. “I’m so sorry you went through that. It’s...it’s sick.”
Sick...yeah, I guess it was.
“I guess he was right, in a weird way,” I said. Despite how much I detested my father, he still raised me. He’d been the biggest influence in my life, after my brother was taken away. “You let yourself care too much about something, and it makes it that much worse when you lose it.”
“But it’s worth it,” she said fiercely. “Yes, we all lose things in our life. Things we love, people we adore, really important things. And it hurts. It absolutely sucks and sometimes the pain feels like it will never stop. It’s worth it even when it’s hard.”
My intent hadn’t been to get emotional. But I was anyway, further confusing myself. Something in my brain had decided it wanted to be heard; it wanted to break down the wall that had kept me safe for so long.
Now I was surrounded by the rubble of my defenses and didn’t have a clue what to do with myself.
“We should take her home,” I said suddenly, nodding toward the kitten. “The boys won’t mind, and she won’t survive out here. Not alone.” I petted her gently, getting another vicious hiss before she went back to inhaling her food. “Damn, so angry. I’m trying to help you, you know.”
Somehow, my own words acted like a boomerang. I flung them out without a thought, only for them to come right back and smack me in the face.
The people that cared about me would always try to help me. Even when I reacted angrily, on instinct, they still picked me up and looked after me. Sharp claws and all.
Jess lay her hand atop mine, and my heart skipped a beat.
“You deserve so much better than what life gave you, Lucas,” she said.
Looking at her perfect fingers on top of my crooked ones, I said, “I don’t know what the hell I deserve, Jess. I don’t want to be angry all the time. I don’t want to always feel like I’m fighting the world. I just want to live. That’s all.”
