Make Me Hate You(3)

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.”

He let out a long, slow breath, pressing his forehead to mine. My hands wrapped around his wrists where he held me.

“You are spectacular, Jasmine Olsen,” he whispered. “Don’t you ever forget that.”

I nodded, something between a smile and a grimace finding me as two more tears slipped free and fell between us.

Tyler’s thumbs smoothed the skin between my ear and my cheek, his grip tightening at the back of my neck. Through my wet lashes, I watched his lips as he rolled them together, his nose as he let out another long, slow, shaky breath.

Suddenly, the air in his room thickened, heating like the sun itself was inside it.

Another moment stretched between us, and then Tyler slipped his hands farther into my hair, his hands cradling my neck, thumbs still running the length of my jaw. Somewhere in the house, the air conditioning kicked on, the soft hum of it finding my ears but doing nothing to cool the heat in that bedroom. Then, Tyler pulled — just a little, just enough — and my head lifted, our foreheads still touching, but now our noses touched, too.

His hot breath met mine in the center of that space between us, and I blinked several times, eyes still blurry when I found his gaze.

Tyler’s eyes flicked back and forth between mine, then fell to my lips, then slowly crawled back up. He swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing hard in his throat, and something sharp and hot and unfamiliar hit me like a lightning bolt, shooting from the point where his hands touched me all the way down between my legs.

I should pull back.

I should pull away.

This is Tyler.

This is my best friend’s brother.

Each thought came faster and more urgent than the first, but I didn’t have time to listen to them, to act on them.

Because in the next breath, Tyler traced my bottom lip with the pad of his thumb, sucking in a breath at the contact.

And then, he tilted my chin, and lowered his own, and he kissed me.

My chest tightened in a completely new way — not from pain, or from abandonment, but from a yearning desire so deep and demanding that it stole my next breath and every other thought I had. I was completely frozen in his grasp, so focused on the way his warm lips caressed mine that I couldn’t concentrate enough to move a single muscle.