“You did,” he confirms.
It’s true. I did. I did leave behind my journals, the dresses he bought me.
My home.
I left behind my home when he sent me away and I have to hear it from him. I have to hear it from his mouth. All the reasons why he sent me away and all the reasons why he’s back now.
“Why?” I ask him again, my hands fisted in the hem of my red pajama bottoms. “Why are you here for me?”
His chest shifts again and so does his jaw. He clenches it for a second before saying, “Because I fucked up.”
I raise my chin. “Fucked up what?”
He notices my defiance. He notices how tight I’m holding myself, and I am.
I am holding myself tight.
I am standing my ground. I am gluing my feet to my spot because damn it, I’m mad at him. I’m fucking furious at him.
Yeah, I’ve been waiting for him. Yeah, I knew he’d come but he hurt me. He hurt me in the worst possible way and I’m not budging until he tells me everything in his own words.
I’m not going to him. Not this time.
He has to come to me.
As if to say that he heard me, he takes another step toward me. He closes a little bit of the distance between us and my heart starts pounding.
“My promise to you,” he rumbles.
“What promise?” I try to inject some sternness in my tone.
Another breath but this one is short. “That I’d keep you safe. I’d protect you. But I sent you away. I sent you back to the people, to the town who’ve always hurt you. And I hurt you myself in the process.”
My eyes sting with tears.
Bingo.
He hurt me.
He got that right. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to let him off the hook that easily.
No. Not after what he did.
I clench all my muscles, all of them, as I ask, “Why? Why did you send me away? And why did you send me away like that?”
“Because I wanted you to hate me. I needed you to hate me. So I did the worst thing that I could think of,” he confesses with a penetrating stare.
“You wanted me to hate you.”
“Yes. I wanted you to stop loving me and hate me, instead.”
“Why?” I ask again, probably for the third time.
“Because I thought I was doing the right thing. I thought I was doing you a favor. I thought I was…”
“You were what?”
My words – as inconsequential as they might be – seem to have hit him somewhere. His gut, maybe. His chest, his heart, I don’t know. But they have hit his body and he flinches with the strike.
He ducks his head down and scrubs his face with his palm. He looks even more tired now. More tired than when he arrived here a few minutes ago and my heart squeezes for him. God knows how many sleepless nights he’s seen.
I haven’t slept either ever since we came back from Colorado.
The strange thing is that I’ve never been a good sleeper until I slept in his bed, right next to him. And when he wasn’t there this past week, I became an insomniac again.
I became a child of the moon again. Lonely and invisible.
And I’m so mad at him, for giving me all the wonderful things and then, taking them away just like that.
So fucking mad that I almost shout, “Tell me, Mr. Edwards. I wanna know why you want me to hate you. Why can’t I love you? What’s so awful about loving you?”
At last, he lifts his face, all exhausted and sharply angled. “Because we come from different worlds, Violet.”
“What?”
He scoffs and looks at the sky for a second before saying in a hoarse tone, “Different worlds. We’re from different worlds, you and me.” He shakes his head. “My world is lonely. And I’ve always lived there. In a lonely world. I’ve always lived in a world where people leave. Where people break promises. Where people are selfish. Where no matter what you do, you always feel like you haven’t done enough, that you can’t do enough. That you’re not worthy. At least, not worthy enough for them to stay. That’s the world I live in. My mom left when I was five. I don’t even remember her. And as tragic as that was, it would’ve been okay if it was only my mother. But with her, my father left too. Of course, he was there. Physically. But he was never really there. He’d drink. He’d talk about my mother. He’d promise me that he’d stop but he’d pick up the bottle again the next day.
“So I got used to that, you understand? I got used to living in a lonely world. I got used to living in a world where people don’t mean what they say. I got used to cleaning up after my father. I got used to distracting myself with the first thing that came along: football. You asked me that, remember? If I wanted to be this big football player? The truth is that I never really liked football. I never really liked playing it. I was good at it. It was easy and it took me away from home. It gave me an escape and that was it. I never really cared beyond that because again, I got used to it. I got used to living in a world where I didn’t want anything other than that. Other than distractions and going through the motions and just making it to the next day until I could escape the town I was living in.