“You could’ve told me that,” she said softly. “It might’ve helped me understand, if you’d just told me that.”
“How am I gonna tell you that?” I said lightly. “I’m gonna ruin the song for you, too?”
Maybe that was terrible of me to try to make light of the subject, but Angeline just shook her head. “Let me share in it.”
“In what?”
“In whatever you’re going through. That’s what a relationship is.”
“I’m not loading all my crap on you at once, Angeline. You’d drown.”
“I’m not kidding.”
“Neither am I.”
“It’s not loading all your crap on me, Johnny. It’s allowing me to know you. And while we’re being honest, I’m not taking on all your crap, believe me. I don’t expect you to take on all of mine. But can’t we, like, hold hands and skip down that road together or something?”
I laughed a little, because leave it to Angeline to paint that picture. “Did you actually just make me smile?”
“Yes.”
“Come here.”
She came, and I pulled her onto my lap. Her arms wrapped around me. “Why won’t you trust me to let me get closer to you?” she asked me, and I heard the pain in her words. “All I want is to be close to you.”
“You want to know the truth?” I took a deep breath and just fucking told her, because if I didn’t, I’d just be hurting her, and somehow that took the choice away. I couldn’t not tell her. “The truth is that she left me.”
“Who left you?”
“My mom. She left me in the car.”
“What do you mean?”
I blew out a breath, rubbing my hand over my face. It was still so painful, the memory of that moment… what I remembered of it… that it was hard as hell not to cry. Even when I didn’t particularly feel anything about it, on the surface… the tears would come. Because inside, it was still a deep, raw wound.
But I forced the words out, dry-eyed. “She got out of the car… and he got in the car. The guy with the gun. She left me there.”
Angeline appeared speechless.
“I mean, what was she supposed to do, right?” I said dryly. “He put a gun in her face. What the fuck was she supposed to do?”
“Johnny… I didn’t know. I didn’t really think about… how it all happened…”
“What the fuck was she supposed to do,” I repeated, the ghost of that old helplessness drifting in the cobwebs at the back of my mind. “But still… she left me.”
Angeline searched my eyes. “That’s it, isn’t it?” she said breathlessly, her arms tightening around me. “That’s the part that hurt you the most.”
I looked away. “All of it hurt me.”
She was right, though. That part had fucked me up so badly, I could never make sense of it.
Being hurt by a stranger… being hurt by myself over something I did in self-defense, as a child, when I didn’t even comprehend the consequences… those were hard hurts to survive. But being left by my own mother, in that car, to a stranger with a gun…
I’d forgiven her. Of course, I’d forgiven her. As an adult, I could see it from a point of view that was impossible as a teen.
He had a gun.
What the fuck was she supposed to do?
