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I frown.
She goes on, quieter, “I know you are not a child, Maksim. And I know better than to reduce you to one simply because I am your mother.” Her fingers tighten lightly around mine. “But being legal and being safe are not always the same thing.”
That one gets under my ribs.
I look away first.
“He didn’t force anything,” I mutter. “He never would.”
“That is not what I asked.”
I press my lips together because, of course, it isn’t. The room feels too white and too honest again.
“He didn’t promise me anything,” I say after a while, and that sounds smaller than I intended. “That’s kind of the problem.”
My mother is quiet.
I can feel her looking at me, but she doesn’t rush in to fill the silence. She lets it sit, lets me hear my own words.
“It just kept happening,” I admit. “We’d fight, circle each other, or not talk for weeks, and then somehow we’d end up…” I make a frustrated gesture with my free hand. “There. Again.”
“In his bed?”
“Oh, trust me, mother,” I say, managing a sly look despite everything. “You really wouldn’t want to know where else that man has fucked me.”
She pulls a face.
“That’s not what I meant, stupid.” She curses in Thai.
I manage a chuckle, and she rolls her eyes but says nothing. Instead, her hand comes back to my hair, moving slowly through it again, gentler this time.
I shut my eyes.
“I don’t know what he feels,” I say more quietly. “I only know that when he looks at me, it feels like something. And when he pulls away, it feels as if I imagined all of it.”
She doesn’t answer right away.
Then she brushes her thumb across my forehead and says, “That is not a small thing to carry alone.”
Something in my throat tightens.
“I wasn’t alone,” I say, because for some reason I need to defend myself from the charge of loneliness.
Her eyes go soft in that unbearable way mothers’ eyes do when they know you’re lying, at least a little.
“No,” she says gently. “You just suffered it privately.”
I give her a look.
She returns it without shame.
Then, gently, she asks, “Do you want me to call him in?”
My whole body tenses, and I blink.
“he’s here?”
“Yes,” she says softly. “He’s here.”
