“Says who?” He wiped my tears away with force, his dark brows crowding his face in a twisted bunch.
“Me!” I shouted. A sob was trying to wrack out of my body, but I broke it into pieces before it had a chance. “I’m messed up! My dad is abusive. I’m scared of the dark. I hardly sleep. I’m a fucking rape victim. Everyone hates me! You should hate me! Why are you so intent on fixing me? Protecting me? I’m not whole! I’m broken into itty bitty pieces. There’s nothing left of me to love.”
“That’s not true. You are not broken.” Eric’s hands wrapped around the back of my hair, and he pressed our foreheads together.
My chest split open, and tears ran down my face like rain droplets dancing on a windshield. They were scattered all around, dripping fast. I cried even harder, and Eric tried his best to wipe every last tear away.
“How can I make this stop?” he finally asked, his thumbs coming in and wiping my face clean.
I swallowed, gaining my control back for a second. “You can’t. The past is the past. Trust me, Eric, if I could change it, I would. I would do everything differently.”
The slam of a car door had us both pausing.
His thumbs stopped moving. I stopped sniffling. Eric craned his neck back, still keeping a hold of me, and then his entire body stiffened. He was like a brick wall, every muscle locked up tight.
“Eric?” You could hear the urgency in my voice. “Is it my dad?”
“No.”
Oh no. “Is…is…is it…?”
Eric’s features softened for a second. “Relax, Maddie. It’s my dad.”
“Your dad?” I croaked.
The vein in Eric’s temple was out, and it was proud. “You stay here,” he said before dropping his hands. “This conversation isn’t finished. But I need to take care of something.”
“Eric…” I warned. He was hurting. He was hurting, and he was using that hurt and turning it into rage. I watched the slow dip of his brow when he looked through the window. I felt the moment of betrayal go through his body. Then I watched as he hardened. “Don’t do anything you’ll regret.”
He chuckled as he walked out of my room. His voice had a poisonous bite to it. “The only thing I’ll regret is not doing this sooner.”
Oh, Eric.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Eric
They always say you see red when you’re angry. Red was the devil’s color, an angry color, the color of blood. But all I saw was black. A deep, dark tunneling abyss of pure blackness.
The moment I saw his stupid sports car parked in the driveway, my blood ran cold. He wasn’t allowed to just show up. It wasn’t okay that he was going to try and swoop in and talk to my mother face to face because she wasn’t answering his calls. I wasn’t stupid. I knew what desperation looked like. To be honest, it looked a lot like me trying to get through to Madeline.
Like father, like son, I guess. But he had some fucking nerve showing up at the house. And that was exactly what I said to him as I crossed over the green patch of grass and landed on the concrete drive.
“You have some fucking nerve showing up out of nowhere.”
My father spun around, glancing at me for a brief second and then at Madeline’s house. Something flickered behind his gray eyes, and it was a slap to the face. “You have some fucking nerve looking over there, too.”
“Eric,” he warned. “I’m about half tired of this high-and-mighty attitude you have with me.”
I laughed sardonically. “Just like I’m about half tired of you fucking around on Mom and trying to get me on your side.”
Grabbing my phone out of my pocket, I read his last text aloud. “Eric, I know you’re still angry that I put you in an unfair situation and that you saw me in a compromising position…” I snickered and continued reading. “But please understand I love you and your mother. I want to fix things. I made a mistake.”
My phone clicked off, and I slid it back in my pocket. When I met his face again, he was clenching his smooth jaw, the muscle jumping in his temple. “Don’t you mean…mistakes, Dad?”
Nothing on his tanned face moved. No dip of his eye, no twitch of the nose. Nothing. In fact, he appeared bored.
“What are you referring to, Eric?”