The Fragile Ordinary(82)
“Not looking for an argument? You’re giving me crap about spending the day with someone who loves me. Loves me, Kyle. Loves me!”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“It means where have you been my entire bloody life?” The words, the bottled rage, just popped out, pouring my vitriol all over him. “You’re a coward who chooses Carrie over me every time she kicks up a stink about you giving me attention. I know what happened to her. I know... I overheard one day. And I’m sorry that happened to her, I’m really sorry, but her hating me for existing and you choosing her over me, it hurts. It hurts so bloody much. You stopped caring a long time ago whether I was even in the room, so you don’t get to suddenly become my parent and demand things of me. You just don’t.”
Kyle looked at me, horrified. “I love her, Comet.”
That was his excuse, his answer?
What about me?
“More than you love me?”
His gaze dropped but before it did I saw the guilt. And although I’d always known it was true, it broke something inside of me. Tears built in my throat, blurred my vision. “It’s not supposed to work like that, Dad.”
He jerked at the name.
“You’re supposed to love your kid more than anyone else in the world.” A sob burst forth before I could stop it, my pain the only sound in the harshly silent kitchen.
I tried to control it, to find a way to pull back the hurt and hide it from him.
“I...” Dad stared at me, anguish written all over his face. “I know your mum better than anyone. And I knew the way she was acting when she was pregnant that she saw you as a threat to my love for her. I didn’t want that to turn into something ugly, Comet. I didn’t want her to become a person she’d despise, and I didn’t want you to suffer that kind of abuse. I knew I’d have to leave her if that happened, and I didn’t know if I’d have that kind of strength. So I... I distanced myself from you. She needed me to do that.”
More tears spilled down my cheeks as I grabbed my bag with the present inside it for the boy who did care about me more than anyone else. “I... I’ve sat alone in that bedroom for almost seventeen years, waiting for someone to choose me. You have no idea how alone I’ve been. I needed you to love me.”
He choked out a sob, covering his mouth, and as I walked out of the house, the sounds of my dad’s crying rang in my ears.
But it didn’t make me feel any better.
*
Tobias knew as soon as we met halfway between his house and mine that something was wrong. I felt shell-shocked after my confrontation with my dad, and I guess I looked it.
“You’ve been crying,” he said, his hands brushing over my cheeks where clearly my tears had left tracks.
“Crap.” Worry crashed over me as I rummaged through my bag for a compact. “I can’t show up at your mum’s looking like I don’t want to be there.”
“Comet, what happened?” he asked as I checked out my reflection.
I busied myself fixing the blobs of mascara at the corners of my eyes and rubbing the tear tracks away. “I overreacted to something Kyle said.”
“Overreacted how?”
I shut the compact, feeling my eyes burn with fresh tears. My lips trembled as I tried to keep it together. “They’re not having a party and he suggested I should stay home. I... I don’t know what happened. I just lost it. I confronted him about choosing Carrie over me all the time and never being there for me.”
“Shit.” My boyfriend enfolded me in his arms and I clung to him for dear life.
“He admitted he loves her more than me.” I shook hard with the force of trying to stop my tears. “I knew. I knew. But it feels like someone just punched a hole in my chest. I can’t breathe.” I shuddered and shook, struggling to contain the hurt.
Tobias’s arms tightened around me and then I heard him whisper in my ear, over and over, “I love you, I love you, I love you.”
My anchor, he pulled me back to myself, to him, and slowly, but surely, I began to breathe again.
*
Tobias had offered to spend Christmas Eve with me alone, considering what had just occurred between me and Kyle. Yes, I was devastated by the brief conversation. I was also confused by my reaction, because Kyle hadn’t told me anything I didn’t already know. To hear him confess his own weak will when it came to Carrie, to hear from his own mouth that yes, he did love her more than me and that he’d choose her over me no matter what was painful. I didn’t know if his fears about Carrie’s issues were founded. Maybe. I guess I didn’t know the woman who was my mother well at all. She’d never been verbally unkind to me, though. Her cruelty had always been in her indifference.
Those were my thoughts, going around and around like they were stuck on some twisted, hellish merry-go-round, when I walked into Tobias’s new house.
I tried to focus on Lena. I discovered, however, as I followed her through the narrow hallway of the three-bedroom house in the more affluent area of Porty that Tobias did take after his father in looks. There was a photo hanging on the wall in the hallway of a younger Tobias standing in between Lena and a man I knew must have been his dad. They stood outside a huge white house that reminded me of the wealthy homes featured in John Hughes’s movies. Like Tobias, his dad was extremely tall, broad-shouldered, with fair good looks.