“Yeah?” I smile faintly. “I spent a lot of time real angry at my ma, but she didn’t really do much right.”
Peace doesn’t say anything, at first.
I lift my head to find her watching me, her eyes glowing in the firelight, and my throat threatens to close.
She’s so fucking beautiful it’s blinding.
What I can’t get? What in the world draws a chick like her to some gnarled wolf as screwed up as me.
But she reaches across the space between us, offering me her hand.
Right over the fire pit, like it’s some kind of strange sweetheart ritual gesture.
“Want to talk about it?” she asks, with that same openness that makes her so disarming.
It’s almost like I can’t say no to her.
Fuck.
What can it hurt? I slip my hand in hers, and it’s her who folds my fingers up and squeezes real tight, even though her hands are so small, so fragile in mine.
Doesn’t matter.
She’s a healer. Feels like she could hold the whole world in those hands.
I wonder if I’m losing it or is it just her superpower coming out as a massage therapist?
“I don’t even know where to start,” I say, swallowing to wet my dry mouth. “If you just look at one little thing at a time, it wasn’t much. But when you add it all up over the years, it’s a whole frigging mess. Ma, she’d pit me and my brother, Holt, against each other. Like, she didn’t just play favorites. One of us would stop existing. Whoever was the golden child got everything, and the other would just get shit on. She wouldn’t feed us; she’d forget us at school…I had to walk home in threadbare shoes in the late spring one day when I was nine. All because she picked Holt up and drove off like she didn’t even see me.”
Peace’s expression crumples softly.
Almost like she sees that sad little boy I’d been.
“Blake,” she whispers, squeezing my hand, stroking her thumb over my knuckles. “That’s not how any mother should ever treat her sons.”
“Don’t I know it.” It’s hard to talk, but I can’t stop, either. “She always had to be messing with us. Like we were her puppets, and she just had to have her fingers tangled up in our strings, mucking around in our heads. She’d lie to us, tell one boy one thing, one of us the other. We never knew what was true, what was real, but she’d gotten us so hooked on her approval. Instead of leaning on each other like brothers, we’d keep at each other’s throats.”
My free hand pinches into a fist. My chest hurts from harsh breathing, digging around inside me like claws, this sick feeling of razor-sharp memory. “Worst crime in her book was doing something she didn’t approve of. Bitch did everything she could to stop me from marrying Abigail. I think that’s half the reason I did it.”
There it is.
There it is, fucking out loud.
Hell.
So maybe Abby wasn’t the best mom, and a pretty lousy wife.
But maybe I was a shit husband, too.
Marrying her half for love and half to spite my Ma in the first place.
Growling, I hang my head, closing my eyes, starting to pull my hand back from hers. “Now you know. I’m goddamn trash. What kind of fucker marries a girl just to piss off Mama? Even if he was young and stupid.”
“That’s just it. Someone young,” she soothes, never letting go of my hand.
Never letting go of me.
I pull her fingers in, tangle them around mine, and squeeze till she gasps real sweet for me.
God.
There are a thousand reasons I shouldn’t be doing this, but a million more reasons why I can’t stop.
“Someone who, I think, gets his daughter more than he lets on.” Her other hand covers mine then, and I lift my head to find her watching me with so much compassion I almost can’t stand it, being seen like this. “Did you ever hurt Abigail?”
“Nah, don’t think so. Not the ways she backstabbed me.” I’m searching deep here, going back in memory, pushing past the grief to try to really see. “Thought I loved her, Peace. I really did.”
“We always think we’re in love…until we realize we’re not. That doesn’t make us evil. It makes us human.” She smiles, but her eyes are wet, glistening, like she’s just stolen away my pain so she can cry it out because I’m too fucking proud to.
And she squeezes my death-gripping hand so tight. “And it’s human to be afraid of hurting your kid, Blake. But it’s also human to love Andrea so much you’d never hurt her the way your mother hurt you. You love Andrea that much, and more—and that’s all that matters.”
I want to believe her.
I want to believe her so much.
But I can’t pin it all on her.