His eyes harden. “Support sending my mom six feet under?”
“That’s not how I meant it. I mean that I wanted to be here to offer anything you needed. Company. Comfort.”
He lets me go and sits all the way back in his chair. His gaze flicks to what’s behind me then moves back to my eyes. His noseis red from wiping and pinching it. The color under his eyes isn’t much better. It’s nowhere near the shade it should be.
“I hate myself for not being there for her in the way she needed most,” he mutters.
“Colson—”
“No, let me finish.”
“Okay.”
He blinks. “I hate myself for what I’m putting you through. I don’t deserve to have you here after what I did.”
Yet here I still stand.
BecauseI love you.
“You do deserve it,” I insist, holding back the urge to crawl onto his lap and give him all my strength and love.
He grimaces. “I fucked your mouth the last time I saw you, Violet. Mercilessly. Then kicked you out to the curb when your ankle was fucked. After Ibroke upwith you. I don’tdeserve your kindness or generosity.”
My shoulders sag, and I clasp my hands in front of me. It would’ve been nice if he had been a little less prickly that night, but I understand it more than he knows. Even if it did feel like a sucker punch to the face at the time. “You’re having a hard time, Colson. We all go through stuff. What matters is that you don’t stay where you are. You can believe what I’m saying or not, but it doesn’t matter what life throws at you. You’re not your circumstances. And you know I’ve never judged you, so why would I start now?”
“Maybe you should’ve done that from the start. Would’ve kept you the hell away from me.”
“I didn’t want to be away from you. I wanted to bewithyou.” I still do.
“That’s the thing, Violet. I don’t want that for you anymore. I don’t want you to want someone like me.”
I huff out a breath, hating how he’s resorted to putting himself down because of what happened. It’s not his fault she was addicted to drugs, and it’s not his fault that her last breath was taken while strung up on them.
“Someone like me? What’s that even supposed to mean?”
“You know what it means.”
“I don’t.” I refuse to let him tell me with his stare.
I want him to spell it out with words, so I can pick up the letters and mix them into something decipherable. I want to put them in order like I used to do with my SpaghettiOs as a kid.
He licks his lips, looks away, then back at me. His shoulders knot under the pressure of our conversation, andgood. At least I’m not the only one who feels like a tea kettle on the brink of a whistle.
“There’s shit you don’t know about me, Vi.”
“Maybe so, but I don’t need to know everything to know that I care about you.”
I’ve known from the start that there were things he’s kept private. For instance, the night he showed up at my apartment looking less than stellar. Does he think I haven't wondered about that?Obviously, there’s shit going on that I’m not privy to, but I trust him. I trust how safe I feel when I’m by his side. I trust that I can share pieces of myself with him without feeling criticized. I trust that his heart pumps as ferociously as mine does when we’re together.
What’s more important than that?
“If you knew what I’ve done, you wouldn’t be saying that.”
“So then tell me,” I push. “Whatever you’ve done in the past, it’s not your future.”
He chuckles softly again, and it’s wild to witness considering he was weeping for the woman who raised him a minute ago.
“Don’t you see? Everything from my past has built me into the person I am today. All the bad shit I’ve done is embeddedin my flesh and bones. I’m carefully crafted from all the situations I’ve willingly—and unwillingly—participated in. You think you’re looking at a gold mine, Violet?” He scoffs. “More like a giant fucking black hole. You dive in and you’ll be lost forever.”
