“I don’t either.” Resting my phone in my lap while the stream continues to play, I reach for Castor’s arm. “Unfortunately, I do love her. So…please don’t do anything bad.”
“Bad?” he murmurs, almost touching me before closing his fingers and cementing his fist in his lap. “What would you considerbad?”
“Hurting her.”
“Physically or emotionally?”
“Castor.”
He pouts. His whole lip juts and everything before he puts the back of his head toward me, displaying his straight white hair partially pulled up into a small bun pinned with a jet black hair ornament. “I could curse her jeans so that her belt loopsalways catch on door handles.” Soft, he mutters, “Women hate when their belt loops catch on door handles.”
Okay, the way I would actually allow that kind of retribution is uncanny. Unfortunately, I have never seen my mother in jeans. “I’m sure you have better things to do with your time.”
“I could round up another emu army. Storm your mother’s home. Have a bird lay an egg on her pillow.”
I guess Zahra did mention something about Castor being anemu captain.
I’m not certain I want to know the details of what propelled him to become one before, but I am certain I don’t want a giant bird to lay an egg on my mother’s pillow.
Ideally, I don’t want to think about her anymore. Ever.
“Castor, please,” I murmur, drawing my attention back to my phone. “My relationship with my mother is complicated, and it doesn’t even matter anymore. I ruined all her schemes by leaving home, and you took me outside where she can ever hope to reach. That’s good enough.”
“For now, I suppose,” he notes, cryptically. “There is a unique pleasure to be had in allowing the woman’s panic to sink in. She may never understand what she’s lost, but she shall suffer your absence as her life turns upside down.”
My skin goes clammy at the thought.
Every horrible thing my mother has done can’t erase the fact she has been my single source of affection and emotional closeness for my entire life. Leaving her was the worst thing I’ve ever done, and I wouldn’t have managed it without Frelsi’s emotional support. My little pixie friend assured me every step of the way that I wasn’t a terrible person, but the sick feeling lingers.
Frelsi countered every doubt, reminding me constantly that not wanting to marry a man nearly a decade older than me was a reasonable boundary.
Yet, still, I feel awful for even thinking about reveling in my mother’s pain, regardless of how much she has heartlessly caused me. Since she was incapable of caring about me more than she cared about herself, I grew up in an environment that taught me to diminish myself so there was more room for her.
I learned to sacrifice so she wouldn’t have to.
I subdued my own feelings and became responsible for hers.
Embracing anger and spite would be so much easier than dealing with whatever mess of emotions I have instead.
After so, so long and so, so much abuse, the best option is to never think about her again.
But if I could just get past the guilt…would revenge be sweet? Or would twenty-three years of appeasing everyone around me be too hard a habit to break. Presently, it’s much too simple to concoct reasons that excuse my mother’s behavior in an effort to suggest—somehow, in her own flawed way—she did love me. At least a little.
It’s delusion at its finest, of course.
Iknowthat love does not look like whatever my mother gave me.
But…well…whatever makes life easier.
“Sunday,” Castor says, interrupting my thoughts.
“Sunday?”
“I intend to meet with someone. Zahra is chaperoning.”
Oh. Is that…normal?
“I am hesitant to leave you with Willow, but I have few options where it concerns keeping you somewhere safe while I’m gone. At the very least, I know that her vampire cat can and will protect you if it becomes necessary.” Castor releases a pent-up breath. “The other day, when you two spoke…” The fist in his lap clenches. “What did she say to you?”
