Luis sank to the floor where he stood. His whole body was shaking, the tears finally falling down his cheeks. Everything was a mess of scattered papers, books open on their spine. The tears made his cheek burn where she’d hit him, and his heart ached like she’d torn it out.
He didn’t understand. The way she could love him and hate him. The way she didn’t want to change, didn’t want to listen.
Didn’t understand how he could know all of this, and it still hurt this badly.
Sobs shook themselves free as he curled himself inward, hugging his own body.
He cried for all the years he’d spent trying to get her understanding and acceptance, and been left wanting. For the years he’d lost trying to make himself into someone she could approve of.
For all the years after when he’d been living a half-life, trying to hide who he was and still find enough to fill the hunger of want that always sat inside him.
But the truth was that his mother had never loved him. Not the real him.
And she never would.
Chapter Fifteen
Luis didn’t sleep. After she left, he laid in bed staring at the ceiling, oscillating between crying and numbness until the sun rose. Only his aching stomach forced him up.
The apartment was still a mess. He trudged through the debris to the kitchen.
He wasn’t hungry, but the stomach pains were making him sick. He grabbed a box of pop tarts and took them back to bed.
Luis crawled under the covers in last night’s rumbled, sweaty clothes. Tucked under the comforter, he made himself chew down two poptarts that tasted like cardboard.
At some point his phone pinged with a text, but Luis couldn’t be bothered to find it. He drifted in between asleep and awake.
He kept replaying what had happened. Trying to figure out where it had all gone wrong. He couldn’t stop seeing the hate on her face, hearing the way she’d spit the wordthrallat him.
How could she hate him so much? What had he ever done to deserve it?
Hours later, Luis shuffled back to the kitchen and found the cold lunch meat still in the refrigerator and ate it standing in the open door. Then he filled a glass with tap water and drank the whole thing.
After, in the bathroom, he caught sight of himself in the mirror. There was a dried crust of blood on his cheek where the ring had scraped his skin. It was swollen and looked like it would bruise.
He wiped the blood off and went back to bed. Another text sound chimed from his phone, but he ignored it.
He shouldn’t care about what she thought, about the things she’d said, but he did. It hurt in some secret deep place he didn’t even know he had. A place that had held a hope he’d had that one day she’d see him for him, and love him for it.
Now it was like an infected wound, corroding from the inside out.
Luis scrubbed a hand over his wet cheeks. He hated everything. Her bigotry, his years of cowardice that had led to this outcome. The way he couldn’t even imagine it going any differently.
Was it always going to end like this? Had he just been kicking the can down the road?
Stupid, he was so, so stupid.
Near evening, Luis’s phone started to ring. It roused him from a partial sleep, and he reached blindly to find his phone and silence the call.
When it started ringing again a minute later, he dragged the screen to his face to look.
Cassie.
The texts from earlier were from her as well.
It was Saturday, and they usually chatted on Saturday. She was probably confused why he wasn’t answering.
Guilt gnawed at him as he watched it ring. She’d worry if he kept ignoring her. She had no idea what was going on.
