Page 16 of Taken With You

I didn’t want to answer.

“Just get it over with,” I whispered to myself. As soon as the screen went black, and I knew she had hung up, it lit up again, this time with a new call. My mother would keep calling until I answered. She didn’t understand that I needed time or space.

I picked up this time, steadying myself as I sucked in a deep breath. “Hello.”

“You don’t answer your phone?”

Petal Brown’s voice grated on my ears, but I was used to it. It sounded as if she had smoked a pack a day, which she most likely had, but she also made sure that it was a little low, a bit breathy for my dad. I hated that I knew that, but it was kind of hard to put that away and forget about it, especially when it was something he said to her often. He hadn’t cared that I was around. He was horrible.

My mom hadn’t been a terrible mother all the time. And that was something I needed to remind myself of.

I remembered the days when we played outside and laughed. Or when she’d dance with me in the rain or giggle and sneak me an ice cream cone without my dad knowing. I remembered how the sun shone on her bottle-blond hair, and I could recall thinking, you’re the most beautiful woman in the world.

At least, on the outside.

I hadn’t cared that she bleached her hair, or that she was always afraid of her roots going gray or dark.

I dyed my hair a darker brown now because I liked the color, and I wanted to be a new Meadow instead of the one with the ash-blond hair with natural highlights that Coby loved.

Or, at least, pretended to.

As my mother began to berate me over the phone about not answering and how I was a disgrace and an ingrate, I tried to ignore it.

I attempted to remember the good times. But there hadn’t been many.

She’d slapped me when I said too many things I shouldn’t, or when I questioned my father or the club. She’d pinched me behind the arms where the bruises wouldn’t show if I didn’t say the right things. She forced me to shove my fingers down my throat if I overate at dinner. And she’d smack me on the behind if I didn’t do the right things for Daddy like having the table set for dinner or wearing the right clothes that he would approve of.

She’d wanted me skinny and perfect with the best boobs that could fill a push-up bra. When I was fifteen, she’d told me she had been trying to scrimp for money to get me a boob job like she had, all because I hadn’t filled out the way she wanted. But then hormones and genes had done their best, and she’d scrapped the idea, using the money to buy herself things instead.

I hadn’t wanted a boob job. I’d liked my body, even as a teenager. But what I thought or felt hadn’t mattered to Mom.

She put me in too-tight jeans, leather skirts, bustiers, and other barely-there outfits to try and entice the other MC’s members. I had to be the perfect princess in a world that was anything but perfect.

Then, when I met Coby, and he treated me far differently than anyone else had, my mother thought I’d done the best thing in the world. She believed that I had become the woman she thought I should have been all along.

But I hadn’t. I wasn’t that person. Or maybe I had become what she wanted, and it wasn’t enough.

Either way, the woman on the other end of the phone call now had given birth to me. Raised me.

And yet, she’d never loved me.

I didn’t think she could.

“Are you even fucking listening to me?” she asked, and I brought myself out of my thoughts.

“I’m sorry. What is it you wanted?”

“Answer your fucking door.” She hung up the phone, and then the doorbell rang over and over and over again.

I froze, sweat sliding down my back as my palms went clammy.

My mother had never shown up at my house before. She shouldn’t be here, but it appeared she was.

I hadn’t changed my name or gone into true hiding, so it wasn’t like she couldn’t find me. After Coby had gone to jail, and my parents told me that they disowned me, no one really cared where I ended up. I told myself I was hiding, but in reality, I was just trying to be a different person and start over somewhere else.

And yet, here we were.

She was here.