Even with Jace at my back, I was cold.
That had never happened before.
It should have been unsettling, but it actually made me feel better in a way. It meant I could not feel for a little while longer.
I liked not feeling.
It made things easier.
I’d felt a little yesterday when Jace had shown up at the motel, but that had been my own fault for going there in the first place.
For waiting for him to come, like I’d known he would. I should have just stuck to the plan.
I wanted to laugh becauseplanmade it sound like I knew what the hell I was doing. Like I had some reasonable hope of finding that one magic thing that would just fix everything in my life… fix me.
For a while, I’d thought it was Jace, and I’d clung to that for a really long time.
Too long.
I’d honestly believed what he’d told me – that if I just hung in there long enough, things would get better. I’d had this ridiculousvision of getting to the point where I was a normal guy and I’d show up on Jace’s doorstep one day to show him I was worthy of someone like him. That I was no longer the kid who’d let his own father fuck him for years. That I wasn’t the coward who’d watched his brother die and kept his mouth shut about the how and the why of his death.
But Jace was a liar, just like the rest of them.
Okay, so maybe liar was too harsh – but he was just like the others who kept telling me that things would get better.
Eli.
Mav.
My stepmother, Mariana.
They’d all promised me over and over again that my father would pay for what he’d done to me, to Eli… to Nick, and that I’d somehow miraculously get my life back.
But how was I supposed to get something back that I wouldn’t have even recognized? My life had been watching my brother succumb to his drug addiction while I pretended to be a regular kid, even as my father found his way into my bed night after night after night. Take those things away, and who was I supposed to be? I’d hated what my father had been doing to me and I’d hated losing my brother to the drugs that had given him the same numb feeling I now craved, but I’d still had moments where I felt alive.
Moments like when my father would take me to a baseball game and high-five me as our team won, or we’d go fishing in Puget Sound and I’d reel in the first salmon.
I’d feel that little spark of energy inside of me that lit up whenever my father told me he was proud of me or when I saw glimpses of the old Nick, the one I’d practically worshipped as a little kid. There’d be those rare times where I’d feel only good things when I remembered the days before my parents had gotten divorced.
Camping trips.
Christmases with way too many presents.
Elaborate birthday celebrations.
Barbecues in the back yard.
Those were the things I wanted back. Sometimes I thought I’deven be willing to pay the high price tag that came with it. As sick as it was, I almost hated my father more for ruining everything by doing to Nick and Eli what he’d done to me. If it’d just been me, I would have found a way to live with it. But my father had been a greedy man… and an arrogant one.
I felt Jace shift behind me, and then he was getting out of bed. I didn’t ask him where he was going, because I knew.
He’d felt the cuts on my arm. He’d known what they were.
Now he’d be trying to find the cause of them. I had no doubt that he thought this was something else he could fix for me.
When he returned a moment later, I didn’t need to look to know he’d found what he’d been looking for. I felt him sit on the bed, but I didn’t turn to look at him. The old me would have been eager to please him, but I wasn’t that naïve seventeen-year-old kid who’d seen only a hero when Jace had stood over me in that psychiatric hospital and answered my whispered pleas for help.
I’d come to realize in the last year that it wasn’t so much that Jace wasn’t a hero, because he absolutely was. Just like Eli and Mav were heroes for everything they’d done for me.
