I've never been one to mince my words or control my thoughts and I certainly won't be starting now. I need to keep going in order to understand Samantha—to almost degrade her.
That's the thing about people like Samantha Kingston, they're just miserable, little bullies and if you push hard enough, you'll expose an insecurity; something embedded so deep that even the mention of it breaks them down.
“Stop it!” she warns lowly. She isn't the same stoic woman who walked into the house, she looks like a ticking time bomb.
“Is that why your husband left you? Because you're an ignorant, intolerant piece of shit?” I can’t feel any regret after speaking because my malicious words seem to set something wrathful in effect.
Samantha's eyes change, becoming darker and narrowed. When I'm up this close to her, I can see a vein protruding out of her forehead and her breathing becomes heavier; so dangerously heavy.
“How dare you!” she bellows out loudly. I half expect her to hit me, but she doesn't. She just points her finger in my face and says, “Don't presume to know things about my husband—”
“Ex husband,” I correct with a malicious smirk on my face. I hate it. I sound like Juliette right now—so bitter and venomous.
But I can't stop. I want to, so badly, but I can’t.
I had heard about Juliette's parents' divorce a few days after I had experienced Juliette's homophobic wrath for the first time.
I was too wounded about my own bisexuality being outed to even have a shred of sympathy for anyone else, especially her. I didn't know enough to be sympathetic anyway, all I knew was that her father divorced her mother and left.
I despise that this fury inside of me is going to make me use that against her right now. Nonetheless, I continue talking. “I don't blame him for leaving. I would leave too, if my wife and kid were miserable, homophobic bitches!”
Samantha narrows her eyes and clenches her jaw. “He didn't leave because of me!”
“Mom!” Juliette tries to interrupt her mother by walking up and putting her hands on her shoulders. It doesn't work. I know it doesn't because Samantha pushes Juliette's hands away gently, signalling to her not to get involved.
Her eyes turn back to me with pure ferocity. “Julian left because he's a fucking faggot who would rather leave and fuck his boss instead of staying with his family! He's the reason I hate your kind!”
Her words come flooding out with fury and I feel as though I've broken a dam and the water won't stop flowing.
She won't stop spitting out words, even while Juliette is hysterically begging her to stop. “He was a coward! He beat me to a pulp to stop me from divulging his dirty, little secret. He was happy to leave me for a man, but too scared to admit it!”
No. No. No.I wanted to push her, but to this extent? To this place of her shaking, falling to the ground while Juliette comforts her? No, not like this. I’ve just stepped down several levels past Juliette’s behaviour.
“Get out!” Juliette says coldly, holding her mother who's shaking with anger.
Chapter SIX
J u l i e t t e
Twoweeks. I have spent the past two weeks wrecking pure havoc on Adaline Emery. I'm not referring to our usual game of insults or the cattiness that I've become so accustomed to parading around her.
No, this is different. This is unadulterated and cold. It's vicious and it's been prodding at me since that day.
The day that my mother blurted out my family’s secret. The same secret that she had ingrained into me as a child to keep quiet, mostly because of high society and its judgment, but a small part had to have been because of fear—fear of my father.
She was terrified that day. I remember it so vividly. I had just come home from cheerleading practice. My mother had found out that my father was sleeping with his boss and was planning to leave us. Instead of apologizing for his adultery, he threatened and berated her.
He was on top of her, pummelling her face and screaming at her to keep his gay affair a secret. Seeing this, I ran as fast as I could to stop him.
I was foolish to think that scrawny, twelve-year-old me could pull my father off my mother, but I tried so very hard. So hard that he pushed me backwards. I got hurt as a result, so in a way, it stopped him from continuing to beat my mother.
I would have taken as many pushes, punches, and kicks as I could if it meant that he would stop hurting her.
He walked out that day and sent divorce papers the next week, turning my mother from an ally to an enemy. From that day, she didn't despise anyone as much as she despised gay people.
I wanted so terribly to explain to her that it wasn't fair to generalize all gay people just because of my father. Maybe I should have, but I didn't. I couldn't. Not when I saw the bruises that had formed on my mother, both physically and emotionally.
It's as if I had absorbed her pain from that day. I could feel it inside me; it covered every inch of me, rattled me and changed me in unimaginable ways. Now, I was just like her—homophobic and ruthless. I had to be.
