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“I’m fine. I’m in the car. I just… I think I forgot—no, not I think.” I shake my head, frustrated with myself for being so out of sorts. “Ididforget all the groceries. They’re in a cart in the baking aisle. I should go back in, but I don’t want to run into her.”
“No, don’t go back in there. Jet and I will be there in a few minutes. Just stay in the car. If she comes up to the car and starts harassing you, call the police.”
I feel like an idiot hiding in the car.
I also have no peace.
The balloon of dread doesn’t go down until movement registers and I look up to see Milo standing outside my door.
Immediately, my stomach starts to feel less nauseous. I start to feel safe again.
The look on his handsome face is dark and thunderous, and it fills me with an even greater sense of safety.
I unlock the doors and he rips mine open, grabbing me and pulling me out of the car.
I go into his arms, sliding mine around him and holding on tight.
“Are you okay?” he rumbles, absently grabbing a handful of my hair and pulling me even tighter against his chest.
I nod. “Yeah. I’m sorry, I feel stupid, I just…”
He doesn’t let me finish. “You have nothing to feel stupid for.”
A chilly gust of wind blows past us, but I’m warm in Milo’s embrace. I feel him turn his head above me, then he asks Jet if he can run in and get the groceries I left behind.
“Of course,” Jet says. “Baking aisle?”
I peek out from the shelter of Milo’s chest and nod. “Thanks, Jet.”
“Come on,” Milo says, walking me back toward the car. “Let’s get you home.”
I feel Milo looking over at me as we drive down the road, but I’m quiet and unresponsive. My head is full, my heart is heavy, and I don’t feel like talking. All the energy I had as I thought about making Christmas cookies for the guys while dinner cooked is gone. My mother’s thorny words stick in the soft parts of my brain to haunt me later.
At the root of it is just the simple yet incomprehensible fact that she doesn’t care about me the way mothers are supposed to. That she never has. Even though logically I know it’s her that something is wrong with, I can’t quiet the faint voice at the back of my mind that whispers maybe it’s me. I must be unlovable if my own mother can’t even love me.
But I know it’s not true because I am loved, just not by her.
It makes sense that some people just aren’t cut out to love me.
But she’s the one person in my whole life who wassupposedto.
I found love where I wasn’t supposed to find it.
I can imagine the things she says about me to her friends. How she bashes me and makes up things that never happened about me tempting her boyfriends, and how I’m living with the one that gave in to the temptation. I can imagine the sympathetic headshakes. Poor her. What a backstabbing slut of a daughter she raised.
I wish it didn’t sting knowing the way she sees me. I know it shouldn’t. Most of the time it doesn’t, it’s just right now and only because I saw her…
Will I have moments like this all my life? Breaks in the happiness when her poison seeps in through a crack and reaches me. We live in the same damn town. We’re bound to cross paths every once in a while, and even if we don’t, just knowing Imightsee her... I’ll be looking over my shoulder, on my guard every time I go somewhere I know she goes, too.
The thought makes me sick.
I wish she’d just go away.
I wish I never had to see her again.
She can take her bullshit narratives and her complete ineptitude as a parent and fuck off right out of my life.
She’salreadyout of my life, I remind myself.
