Seating myself on the couch, I avoid answering him. His eyes track me as he walks over, sitting himself on the opposite end, leaving little room between us. I swallow hard at the small distance between us. Somehow, I want to make it smaller and bigger all at once.
“We all have our traumas, Sunny. And healing is never linear.I’m a perfect example of that. But just know that you don’t have to heal alone. You don’t have tobealone.”
And he’s right—healing is not linear. I wish it was, because I had this straight line. This plan that I’m determined to stick to. Yet I keep getting derailed.
“Being alone is the easiest way for no one to get hurt,” I say.
A small smile curves on his mouth as he lets out a soft chuckle. “A thought for a thought?” He suggests.
My silence is an indication that I need him to start. Clearly we are two people who have a past. It’s why we are here right now. It’s why he has scars on his arms and I have one on my neck. They are just a preview to the ones that are inside. We sit here together because anything after midnight is awfully heavy to handle alone.
“I think that a lot of people believe money creates freedom. When in reality it just creates a different kind of prison.” He toys with a loose thread on the couch. “My whole life has been planned for me. The story was written before I was born. My wife had already been arranged for me. My career. The children I should have. The place to live. Everything.” His voice matches the night. “And that prison was only made worse because of the man my father is. I couldn’t get us out, so I had to learn how to live in it.”
“I understand that.”
“I know.” He meets my gaze, his eyes have a softness I’ve never seen on him before. “My father loves his alcohol more than his family, even if it made him a violent man.” He bites the inside of his lip, formulating the words in his mind, contemplating how he’ll articulate this. “One day, he came home, drunker than I’d seen him before and he tried to force himself on my mother.”
My heart drops. Sam hadn’t given much insight on their parents except for the fact they are very old fashioned, cold people. I just didn’t think it was to this extent.
“I was eight years old. I was already in bed. Her screams rattled the house. I’ll never forget it. It was the kind of scream that begged for help in a moment where no one would come. I didn’t think twice before I jumped out of my bed, and I ran downstairs to him pinning her down. I grabbed a kitchen knife and got in between them. I tried to chop his dick off with a kitchen knife.” He looks at nothing specifically as he lets out a small chuckle. It isn’t humorous. It's the sad reality he had to face.
“He took his rage out on me. I’ll spare you the details. But the initial one was snapping my wrist to get the knife out of my hand. That’s what this scar is. I had to have surgery on it.” He shows the line down his wrist. “I ended up in the hospital that night because of him, spending my ninth birthday there the next day.”
“Your birthday…” I whisper.
“But it was me, and not my mom, not Sam, so I could live with that. Of course, with money and the connections my father has, you can make anything go away. So, he did. He made it seem like I was never even admitted in the hospital. The records were gone. The only proof was the scars on my body.”
“So that’s why your last name is on the pediatric wing? He paid them off.” I realize out loud.
He nods. “After that night, something changed in him, in me, in our family dynamic. He learned what he can get away with, and he learned what I could handle. He learned what I was capable of.” He swallows hard. “He broke me so badly that nobody else could.”
I nod as tears threaten my eyes, because I understand that too. Tyler and I, we may not be so different after all. We share similar pain, in different variations.
“I spent the rest of my years in that house paying for it. Learning how to live in that prison while protecting the two things that mattered most to me.” He toys with his hands in hislap. There are scars there too, and I want to lay my hand over his. But I don’t.
“He would always get so frustrated with Sam.” His brows crease. The only sign of emotion he’s shown tonight despite the painful words and memories he is reliving. “I couldn’t let her experience what I did. If anyone had to, it’d be me, never them. I just, I couldn’t imagine doing that to my family, let alone my children,your little girl.Sam says I have a savior complex, and maybe I do. But all I know is it shielded them from him, even if I was the shield myself.” He looks at his hands, peeling a callus on his palm.
I place a hand over his festering ones, feeling the calluses and scars because trembling hands need something stable, something secure to hold on to.His hands calm at my touch and his eyes meet mine.
“I’ve done some bad things, Sunny.” A warning, no doubt. “And it makes me wonder if that’s how he became the way he did. Because he was forced to do bad things, and in turn, it made him a bad person.”
With a sigh, he rubs his face with his free hand but never removes the other from mine. I don’t even realize until his thumb is swiping under my eye that I’m crying.
“Don’t cry, little fire.I’m okay.” His lips twitch to a smile.
I shake my head. “It’s not fair we have to learn to survive in order to get through life.”
Just because someone does bad things, doesn’t make them a bad person. And for some reason, I just know Tyler isn’t a bad person, even if he says he has done bad things. Darkness isn’t so scary anymore once you’ve lived in it for awhile.
“I’ve gotten so used to surviving, Sunny.” His smile gets a little bigger. “That sometimes, it almost feels like living.”
“How is that fair? How is it fair that some are given such tragic stories while others aren’t?”
“I think everyone has their own tragedies.” He stares at ourinterlocked hands, lazily drawing meaningless nothings along the skin of my knuckles and wrist.
“And despite yours, you still aren’t him,”
He smiles at our hands and looks up at me. “You don’t know me, Sunny. You don’t know the things I’ve done. The thoughts in my head. Who I’ve been formulated to be by the world I live in. And that I continue to choose to be that person.” He breaks our eye contact, bringing his gaze back to our hands.
