AllFreeNovel
Share Us
These are notes between my parents. My mother was my father’s mistress. It’s so strange to even think it but the evidence stares me in the face. A time when my mother was passionate and articulate, before my time when they loved each other deeply enough to hurt the people around them to be together.
I can’t stop the flashes of my own life layering themselves on these notes. I wasn’t Xan’s other woman, but our love was still an affair. We were both betraying our parents, defying the social order, going against what was expected for us. My father arrested Xan once—more than once, but once because of me—because he’d caught us together. Xan was eighteen, I had just turned sixteen. Dad arrested him because I was a minor. They didn’t hold him, they had nothing to hold him on as I was over age of consent.
The sound of me screaming at my father from anger and embarrassment and complete helplessness echoes through my ears. What I said exactly isn’t clear but it’s the one and only time my father ever laid a hand on me, grabbing my shoulders and shaking me.
Jet’s footsteps sound on the stone path and I quickly stuff the notes back into the box.
“We’re not taking this greenhouse down,” I say with a hardness to my voice I only get when Millie hasn’t listened for the millionth time.
“Briggs” Jet sighs, but I cut him off with a shake of my head.
“I know I agreed, and I know that a greenhouse can make buyers skeptical if they think they need to use it. But we’re going to leave it up and restore it into a multi-use space. An art studio, a greenhouse, a writing shed, a pottery studio, whatever.”
I dust the dirt off my shorts and when I straighten up Jet’s intrigued which is better than the bored grimace he had while I explained why I changed my mind from the other day and wanted to take it down. Jet is so attentive to detail work so even though I haven’t thought it through for more than two seconds I know I can convince him.
“The skylight, the scenery, the location. Think about it Jet. The people who buy this place are going to buy it for its inspiration. We can give them a space to create an outlet for that inspiration in whatever form it comes.”
Jet scans the space in an entirely different way before he settles on me with a smirk.
“This would make an excellent jewelry making studio,” he says scratching his thick beard.
I laugh and crossed my arms. “You and your brothers gossip like fourteen-year-old girls.”
Jet shrugs and takes a walk around the small space. “Like a tiny house, feel?”
“Sort of, but rustic. That’s what the kids are into these days right?”
Jet snort laughs. “Yeah, no hipster kid could afford this place. You know how much your dad can sell it for, right? Land like this doesn’t exist anymore, it’s been subdivided for more profit.” He clenches his fist dramatically. “Fuck nature. Develop!”
I double over laughing at his absurdity and whack him in the chest. “Jet! Millie is out there. Watch your mouth.”
He joins me laughing, leaning against the bench and we stay there in silence for a long time after the laughter dies away. Jet and I were friends almost immediately. He became the brother I never had long before Xan became the love I wasn’t allowed to have. He always said that it was because he knew me right away.
You’re basically the girl version of Xan,he said to me once. I know you already. I like people like you, I understand your particular brand of fucked up.
At the time I was offended. Xan was a stubborn opinionated prick who shut out the world with anger and arrogance. That’s what I thought before I punched him in the face. When I really got to know him it didn’t take long to figure out what Jet meant. He was guarded, terrified, desperately trying to hold together his family and protect his siblings. He had more responsibility and pressure than anyone his age should have ever had. His parents were too busy falling apart to notice his anger.
It was something I understood. I didn’t have five siblings and the social misfortune of living in East Raston. I was the only child in a loveless middle-class marriage, I was also guarded and terrified and desperately trying to keep my parents together by being perfect at everything. I thought if I lived up to all their expectations and fixed all the things they criticized me for then we would be happy. That they would shower me with the loving affection and doting attention that the world would have you think a wholesome middle-class family has for each other. But my parents were too busy keeping appearances to notice my loneliness.
Then in a perfect storm of situation and circumstance I crashed heart first into Xan’s waiting arms and there was no place on the entire earth I belonged as perfectly as I did wrapped up in him.
As Jet wanders around the space making verbal plans my mind flutters back to the notes in the box that my mother and father wrote each other years ago. The words are full of emotion, the writing heavy and the language passionate. I feel the angst of forbidden love on each crumpled paper.
What happened to them? Maybe it was all in the chase. Once they ended up together it was no longer exciting, no longer forbidden.
I can’t help but wonder if that would have been me and Xan if I stayed. If things were different and I hadn’t listened to Mom—if I hadn’t been shipped out of town like a harlot off to have a baby in shame—would we have become my parents?
The hitch in my stomach says yes. We could have been two people drifting apart but held together only by the thin fragile thread of our daughter.
I have no idea how to feel about this entire complicated situation but the thing that keeps me moving forward stays steady and true. Millie.
She deserves to be the most loved child on the planet. I kept her away from the people I assumed didn’t want her.
No matter how uncomfortable it might be for me, no matter how hard I have to work to get to a good place with Xan, I’ll do it for Millie.
But the moment her happiness is threatened, I won’t hesitate to pull her out of Raston. I will do anything to protect her. Especially from a family that doesn’t want her, because I know how it feels to be rejected by a Ryker.
