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Maybe it’s better that way.

I don’t know if I could force these things from my mouth if she was looking at me.

“They didn’t want me, Lennon, and they made damn sure I knew it.”

I suck in a ragged breath, my heart beating like a jack hammer in my chest. My skin crawls as memories of my childhood start filtering through my brain.

“My old man is a mean fucking drunk. One of his favorite pastimes was reminding me that. I was a burden to them, that I was completely unwanted.”

“That’s how my mom is,” she whispers, still facing away from me and I’m torn in half by my desire to reach out to her and the desperate plea of my past to run like hell. My hands are fucking shaking like crazy. I press them to my thighs and stay rooted to the spot, on my knees across from Lennon. “After my dad died, I was a burden to her because I got in the way of her new life.”

“You’re not a burden, baby,” I whisper, my voice breaking. “You could never be.”

She nods, another little sob slipping past her lips. “Neither could you.”

I don’t know what to say to that.

I can’t say anything to that so I keep going.

“His other favorite pastime was beating the shit out of me when he had one too many beers. Which was every day. I knew the signs. Knew that when he popped open his fifth beer in a row that I needed to find a place to hide. Knew that when I heard the footrest of the recliner slam down, he was coming for me.”

She sucks in a breath and turns, plopping down onto her ass before pulling her knees to her chest. She wraps her arms around them and just waits. The pain in her eyes is different now. She’s still devastated, still doesn’t know what to believe but I can see that her heart is breaking for me, too.

That’s not the point of this, though.

“My favorite spot to hide was the closet. And I’d shove things in front of my bedroom door to make it harder for him to get to me, hoping that if it was too difficult for him to navigate in his drunk state, he’d just give up.” I take a breath, remembering the little boy shaking in the closet as he listened for any movement on the other side of the door. “Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t.”

“Dalton,” she whispers and I shake my head.

I can’t.

If she offers me comfort right now, I’ll take it like a thirsty man in a desert.

And I need to get through this.

I have a point to make.

“And my mom… well, she didn’t care what he did to me as long as she didn’t have to deal with me. They left me alone a lot.” I take a breath, remembering what it was like to root through an empty fridge and try to find something to eat. Only to realize when I finally found something that I’d have to figure out how to cook it myself. “I figured out how to not need anybody. And I didn’t need anything from anyone for a long damn time.”

“That’s why you never lose,” she whispers and my head snaps up.

“What?”

“That’s what Hyde is,” she says, compassion flooding her hazel eyes as fresh tears well up there. “He’s the protector you needed from the monster at home and it’s why you never lose now.”

I stare at her, her words rattling around in my head.

Fuck.

She’s right.

But I push that thought to the back of my head.

“When I was fifteen, my old man beat me so bad that I couldn’t get out of bed for a week. And I knew… I knew that if I didn’t leave he was going to kill me so I started making a plan. But then he came after me again and that was the first time, the monster came out of the cage.”

“Hyde,” she whispers and I nod.

Not that I had a name for him back then.