Addicted for Now (Addicted #2)(109)

Rose is clouded by her own relationship with her parents. She sees a mother who inserts herself into her daughters’ lives to the point where compassion transforms into suffocation. She sees a father who loves his children, buying them fancy things and sending them to exotic places to show his affection.

“Loren,” Rose says, “finish what you have to say.”

“Every day, Lily asked her mother if she could spend the night at my house. The answer was always the same. And then when Lily was fourteen or fifteen, Samantha finally told us to just stop asking, that she’d approve no matter what.”

I remember Lily crying onto my pillow that same night. She never told me straight out, but I knew the only reason she even asked her mother in the first place was because she wanted to hear the word no. A single sign that her mother cared about her the same way that she did Poppy, Rose, and Daisy. That she wasn’t undeserving of her mother’s time and attention. Her mother doted on her other sisters. She put all her excess energy into them, skipping right over Lily as though she was worthless of that affection.

And so she tried to find it down the street. With me. And when that wasn’t enough, she tried to fill it with other men. With sex. With a high and an intense burst of emotion.

“You know why Lily was allowed at my house at night?” I ask Rose, starting from the beginning again.

Her cheeks concave, her back goes rigid, and a familiar chill fills her eyes. “Because you’re a Hale.”

That’s what I thought.

“What does that f*cking mean?” Ryke asks.

“Lily didn’t need to be good at anything,” I tell him. “Her mother passed over her because she was my friend. I was her future.” The heir of a multi-billion dollar empire. Her mother concentrated on Daisy, on Rose, who could be more successful in other facets. But Lily—her worth centered on a guy. Me. And I think, somewhere in her head, she believed it herself. That she would never amount to anything more than pleasing other men. That she was destined for a life less than her sister’s.

Daisy frowns. “I thought Lily just got a pass since she was kind of average at everything. I’ve always been jealous of the freedom she gets.”

I nod. “Lily thinks she should be grateful for the freedom too.” That’s why she has trouble admitting to herself that she’s been hurt by her mother. She could have been suffocated like her sisters. And she wasn’t.

But there should have been a happy medium between what Lily had and what Daisy is now enduring.

I pause for a second, these words some of the hardest to produce. “Your mother outwardly loved you, Daisy, and you, Rose,” I say looking to each of the girls. “Even Poppy was showered with this type of overbearing maternal affection. And Lily…she was denied all of that. She was like the runt in the litter.”

Rose’s eyes glass like she may cry. I’ve never witnessed tears from her. I always imagined that they’d ice over. Her voice, however, is strangely stoic. “I didn’t realize…” She shakes her head. “My mother wanted the two of you to become a couple. I knew that, but I blamed you more for taking my sister away from me. I didn’t realize that she really had nowhere else to go.”

Well that kind of makes me feel like shit. She makes it sound like I was Lily’s only option. “She could have stayed home.”

“She would have been alone, Loren. I was barely around because of school and ballet.”

And then a wave of guilt just annihilates me. “Yeah, well maybe she should have been alone. Look what good it did being around me.” I shake my head, running my hands repeatedly through my hair. My leg starts to jostle in anxiety.

“You didn’t do this,” Rose tells me. “Our mother should have told her that she loved her for something more than being with you. She could have found her something to do, something to achieve.” A dream, a passion, a hobby, a f*cking sport. Sex became all of those things for Lily. And I never stopped her. Not once. I was so consumed with my addiction that I didn’t care what the hell she did, as long as she was breathing at the end of the night. As long as she was by my side—my best f*cking friend.

“You don’t understand,” I mutter. I led her here. Unknowingly, I brought her to this place in her life. If I never even existed, she would have received that love from her mother that she craved.

“Then tell me.”

“You don’t get it.”

“Loren—”

“She slept in my bed!” I shout, my eyes welling. They burn so badly. “I let her sleep in the same bed as me. Okay, this wasn’t Dawson’s Creek. I never kicked her out after we hit puberty.”

Rose whispers to Connor, “I don’t understand the correlation.”

“Dawson and Joey stopped sleeping in the same bed together in the first episode. She said that he was old enough to get an erection.”

Rose looks back to me. “You didn’t have sex with her every night, did you?”

“No, but—”

“You can’t compare your life to a television show.” The fact that Rose is defending me does not entirely help. I’m used to her tearing me down, not building me up. I keep waiting for someone to thrash me with their words, with their feelings. With hate. I deserve that pain. It’s my f*cking fault.