Tyler radiated care and safety, and so I leaned into the heat of him, his skin still warm and sticky with sunscreen. He must have been lying out by the pool, or doing his calisthenics in the yard. My hand splayed the area where his rib cage met his abs, and I swallowed at the way they felt — hard muscles covered by soft, bronzed skin.
For the longest time, he just held me there, silently rocking me until my tears had dried up. At some point he handed me a tissue, though I couldn’t be sure when. It was like I was in a dream — or rather, a nightmare.
“Did something happen with James?” Tyler asked after a while, and I didn’t miss the hardness in his voice at the mention of my now-ex-boyfriend. He’d broken up with me a couple weeks ago, right before senior prom, and I’d been devastated.
But that was nothing compared to this.
I shook my head, and Tyler let out an almost-relieved sigh.
“Good,” he said. “I didn’t want to have to fight that little bastard.”
I tried to smile, but failed.
After another long pause, Tyler whispered, “Is it your mom?”
My heart squeezed so violently in my chest that I curled in on myself, and I knew that was an answer in itself. Still, I nodded against his chest, and he held me tighter.
My mother was an addict, and had been my entire life. Of course, I didn’t know it — not really — not until the summer after eighth grade when I found her on the floor of our trailer with a needle in her arm and a dead look in her eyes. Luckily, she was just short of overdosed, and she survived.
But it was the rudest wake-up call of my life.
I didn’t know my father, and according to my mother, she didn’t know him, either. She had been sexually assaulted at a rave party in the summer of ‘94, and I was the product of that night — a constant reminder of the most brutal violation that can happen to a woman.
Part of me wondered if I was the reason she turned to drugs so hard, if seeing me brought back that night of her life every day. My Aunt Laura assured me that her habit had started well before I was even born, but I still wondered.
I moved in with Aunt Laura that summer, not too long after the incident, and my mom had been taking the last four years to work on herself. She went to rehab, got a job, and even managed to rent a house in the next town over — though I still didn’t see her often.
I just need some time to find myself, she’d explained to me the day she’d moved me in to my aunt’s house. And when I do, I’ll come back for you, and we’ll be together again.
Except once she found herself, she also found a new boyfriend — one who lived in Phoenix.
And today, she told me she was moving there to be with him.
I could still hear my aunt screaming at her older sister, begging her to be reasonable, to be responsible, to put her daughter first. It was the loudest I’d ever heard my aunt raise her voice, and yet it was somehow muted in the moment, like it was all a distant memory even before it had actually happened.
I could still see my mother’s tears as she tried to explain herself, looking at me with a mixture of pity and guilt and regret that made for the worst combination. Nothing she could say made it better, no matter how she tried to explain that she was finally happy for the first time, that she was in a good place, that she wanted to stay there.
No matter what she said, all of it amounted to one thing in my eyes.
She didn’t want me.
She never had.
And I was a fool to believe she’d ever come back for me.
“She left,” I managed to whisper, and Tyler stiffened at the words. I pulled back, looking into his deep brown eyes — eyes that had been the first to truly see me when I’d walked into Bridgechester Prep High School freshman year.
Eyes that had been the first to truly see me. Period.
“She’s gone, Ty. I thought she was coming back for me, but she just…” I sniffed. “She just came to say goodbye.”
Tyler’s nostrils flared, and he reached out for me, cradling my face in his hands as I bit my lip against the urge to cry again.
“Listen to me, Jasmine,” he said, leveling his gaze with me. “Your mother does not define you. You understand me? She’s an idiot for not seeing the amazing daughter she has, for not wanting to get to know you the way our family knows you.” He swallowed. “The way I know you. But that’s on her, okay? That is not on you.”