Credence

He kisses my forehead.

“You are beautiful,” he tells me, “and pulling my body away from yours was the most pain I’ve ever been in, but I did it, because it was the right thing to do.”

“It didn’t feel that way.”

“Because feeling anything felt good,” he throws back. “You have a lot of big emotions going through that young mind of yours right now, and you needed a release. You broke. I could’ve been anyone.”

I shake my head, pulling away from him. “It was more than that.”

But he looks at me sternly. “Why did you throw the candy away, Tiernan?”

What?

“I…” I search for my words. “I didn’t want it. You…you made me get it.”

“That’s bullshit. Why did you throw it away?”

“Because I didn’t want it!” I say again. “It’s just candy. What the hell? What does it matter?”

“You threw it away, because it did matter,” he barks.

I start to walk away.

But he grabs my arm. “Don’t you see? That’s what happened.” He turns me around, but I turn my head away, refusing to look at him. “At some point, you started denying yourself anything that made you happy. Out of spite, maybe? Or pride? Candy? Toys? Pets? Affection? Love? Friends?”

I flex my jaw, but I’m breathing hard as he shakes me.

“And I know that, because I did it, too,” he tells me. “You don’t want to smile, because if you do, it means everything they did to you didn’t matter. And it has to matter or else they’re off the hook, right? And you can’t have that.”

I shake my head, but I still can’t meet his eyes.

“They need to know what they did to you,” Jake says, acting like he knows me. “Showing them how they hurt you will hurt them, right? They need to see how they ruined your life. You can’t just let it go like it was nothing, because you’re angry. You need them to know. You need someone to know.”

No. That’s not…

I have hobbies. I have things I like. I…

“So you’ll waste your life,” he continues, “blow off your future, going through the motions, and diving into anything that makes you feel good for even a moment…”

I shake my head, the tears pooling more and more.

No. I have interests. I let myself enjoy things. I…

“And then someday after the fights and the job you hate and the divorces and the kids that can’t stand you…”

I just keep shaking my head. I don’t care what they did or didn’t do. I don’t need this.

But the memory of our vacation to Fiji when I was eleven pops into my head and how they only took me, because the press had caught on that I was rarely ever with my parents.

And how one morning I woke up in the suite alone and waited for them for

two days, because they took an overnight trip around all the islands and forgot about me.

I was so scared.

“You’re going to look in the mirror at the seventeen-year-old girl in a fifty-year-old body and realize you wasted so much time being devastated at how those fuckers didn’t love you that you forgot there’s an entire world of people who will.”

I crack. My eyes close, my body shakes, and I just sob, letting it go. The anger, the pain, the exhaustion of them taking up nearly every ounce of my brain, because for so long, there was nothing else I lived for, than for them to notice me.