Chapter 26
AREK
It’s close to three in the morning when Kylen eventually falls asleep. The only thing I can think is that I’m going to kill this woman who touched him without his permission. Who touched a fucking child and made him believe it was his only option!
Rage fills my body in a constant, rolling boil.
I won’t ask him for the woman’s name again.
Asking him means he’s forced to keep thinking about it.
About her. It’ll be easy enough to get this information to Orev and have him track her down.
I don’t even have to tell him why. All I need to say is that I need to have the name and location of Kylen’s fifth-grade teacher.
But there’s something else, too. Something that settles like a hellish beast in my gut because where the fuck was Kole during this period of Kylen’s life?
She’s so fucking hell-bent on me being bad for him, but where the fuck was she?
She’s all about protecting him from the big, bad psychopath when their fucking teacher was molesting him for a whole fucking year right in front of her goddamn face!
Because I’m seething, I very carefully extract myself from Kylen. He sighs in his sleep, and when I’m free of him, I wrap the blankets snugly. For a minute, I stand over Kylen and watch him sleep, just as I had weeks ago.
Silently, I leave my bedroom and retrace the steps I’d taken earlier in the night to Kole’s room on the floor below. I don’t care if she’s asleep. This bitch is going to wake the fuck up.
I rap on her door twice and then push it open. Kole’s awake, sitting up in bed and reading. She stares at me, expression… hard. It kind of reminds me of looking at my dad Loren when he talks about the serial killer who nearly murdered my dad Oakley.
Without her invitation or permission, I step into her room and shut the door behind me. There I remain, leaning against her door. “What did he tell you?” I ask.
She stares at me for a long time before answering. “That his freakout had nothing to do with you.”
“You don’t believe him.”
“It’s difficult to believe his words when they contradict what I can physically see and hear.”
“You were in the same class as kids, yes?”
Kole frowns but nods in answer to my question.
“What’s the name of your fifth-grade teacher?”
Her frown deepens, likely not understanding why this is important.
“Delores Rowling.”
“Rowling,” I repeat.
“R-O-W-L-I-N-G,” she spells for me.
I study her face for a long time. I’d like to say a lot. I’d like to pummel her face for letting someone hurt Kylen while she did nothing. While she didn’t see it happening right under her self-righteous nose.
“I think I told you I have an antisocial disorder. Correct?”
“Yes.”
“You’ve since figured out what that means.”
“Psychopath.”
Of course, that’s the one thing she found and took note of.
“That’s one of a few diagnoses under the umbrella term, yes.
When the world looks at my family, they see wealth.
Power. Privilege. They see perfection. What they don’t see is that my family is riddled with a very long history of antisocial disorders.
A hundred years ago, there was no diagnosis.
There is now. But it means that we’re all genetically predisposed to the probability of contracting this disease. ”
Kole sets her book down as she listens.
“It manifests differently throughout my family. My Uncle Ellory is happy and fun and smiles all the time, but he’s…
unhinged on a good day. Then you have people like my father, whose environment pushed him to become the sociopath he is.
An environment that the world would be horrified to know because he’s a spoiled, rich Van Doren, and such a situation of abuse doesn’t go with the Van Doren name. ”
She frowns, her eyebrows furrowing. Likely trying to understand why this is relevant at all. It is.
“Then there are cases like my twin and me. We’re simply born psychopaths. Do you know what that means?”
“It means you’re violent and lie.”
I roll my eyes. “I suppose you didn’t read further than that, did you?
” Kole glares at me. “Yes, it means that we tend to be both of those things. It’s a whole lot more nuanced than that, but for this conversation, the point I want to make has to do with how differently you and I are wired.
You see the world in a rainbow of colors.
You feel a rainbow of emotions. There aren’t simply seven colors in your rainbow; they bleed together, blending to make different shades and hues.
Each of those corresponds to a different emotion.
For me, I have seven solid colors. They don’t bleed.
They don’t fade. They don’t even become translucent when the sun shines through them. I have seven solid colors all the time.
“My family knew from a very early age that my twin and I had this disorder.
My family before me had already put into practice how to teach us to deal with everything that makes us different.
The things we struggle to understand and control.
Which means I learned how to control and curb any violent urges inside me.
It also means I know the significance of truth, of lies, of consent.
“My biggest struggle has always been with people, though. Because you feel a whole lot of bullshit, and that bullshit often drives your actions. I don’t understand that bullshit because I can’t relate to it.
I don’t feel the same things you do. Not just to a lesser extent, but often, I don’t feel them at all.
However, my family and I are very close.
Three generations live on the Van Doren Estate. Did you know that?”
Kole shakes her head. She’s being very amenable to story time.
“It’s not just my twin and me. We have two sisters.
Our sisters are neurotypical—they don’t share the same diagnosis.
They’re normal, so to speak. Which means, every single day for nineteen years, Orev, my brother, and I spent our days with two people who were normal.
We do rather well understanding their facial expressions, reading their tones, and interpreting their body language.
Something I’m sure you take for granted because it comes naturally to you.
Beyond our sisters, we have twenty cousins our age, and most of them are neurotypical as well, and while they were a little more nuanced than our sisters, because god for-fucking-bid all you crazy people filled with emotion processed and expressed it in the same way—”
Kole snorts in amusement.
“So we learned a little more. In school, when we were exposed to people beyond our family, we learned a little more. Still, none of that prepared me for Longwood U because none of you grew up in the world I did. Not on the Estate. Not in my school. My first year here was… trial by fire. I’ve since stopped trying to understand you all because all that emotional baggage is fucking exhausting.
“This is a very long explanation for my point, though. I shared all this because I want to express how difficult it is for me—with a brain wired a lot differently than yours, missing maybe a hundred of the wires you have—to recognize when someone is struggling. When something is wrong. My sister Adalaide is trans. She was born in the wrong body, and she struggled through her young childhood. As a ten-year-old psychopath who couldn’t grasp the difference between fine and fine on any day, I knew that my sister was struggling with something.
Orev and I knew because we were there every single day watching her and trying to understand why she was so…
uncomfortable. It was a battle she fought alone for a very long time.
Partly because she didn’t understand, and when she did, she was afraid.
“Even missing a hundred of the wires that you have to process everything around me, I knew that something was wrong with my sister. I knew.”
I hold Kole’s stare. Her expression has changed, but as I just spent the last fifteen minutes explaining to her, I have no idea what she’s feeling right now. I note that her breathing is shallow, though. Her eyes are unblinking, riveted on me.
“So tell me, Kole, tell me why I knew that my sister struggled with something huge when I literally have every single disadvantage, and you didn’t see that your brother was abused for a fucking year!”
Kole inhales sharply. Her eyes immediately turn glassy.
“The first time we met at Hush Anonymous, I knew who he was. I recognized his voice almost as soon as he spoke. He was very obviously nervous, so I asked him what his hard limits were. Do you know?”
She frowns, shaking her head.
“He said not to suck his dick.”
Kole’s eyebrows pinch together.
“I’m not going to pretend I’ve slept with a hundred guys.
I was a proud whore and definitely took my fair share, and while I know it’s not unheard of that someone doesn’t enjoy a blowjob or even a handie, this was different.
I recognized that. In the way his voice trembled.
The way his body stiffened. I agreed, no mouth between his legs.
I’d stay above his navel. It became clear shortly after that day that Kylen doesn’t like to be touched there at all. ”
Kole’s face screws up, and if I had to take a guess, I think she’s upset. Maybe she’s finally getting it.
“Happenstance brushing or rubbing is fine. Purposeful or intentional touching makes him tense immediately.
“Earlier this evening, we attended a sensation play class. It left us horny, so we went back to my room and we were fooling around. I was kissing him and when I went too far south, I brushed his dick with my chin. Immediately, I went back up his body, but that simple touch sent him over the edge, plunged back into the trauma he faced alone. He hadn’t told me anything about why he didn’t want his dick sucked, and I didn’t ask.
It was obvious—even to me—that he struggled with something, and I wasn’t going to push a conversation that would upset him. If he wanted to tell me, I’d listen.
“But I fucked up. I got too close. Even though I moved immediately when I realized, it was already too late, and when I looked at his face, Kylen wasn’t there. He was transported to a time in his life where he was the victim, and no one around him saw it for what it was.”
A tear trickles down Kole’s cheek. Her jaw trembles as she stares at me.
I know I’m borderline repeating what I promised Kylen I wouldn’t, so I don’t say more than this.
“You’ve spent the last couple of months determined I would hurt him.
That I was bad for him. You wanted me far away from Kylen from the moment it became clear we were together.
Because I put bruises on him? Bruises that he welcomed and said as much, mind you.
But when he needed you to see that someone hurt him and didn’t leave a visible mark, where was your demonic protection then, Kole? Where was it? Where were you?”
“I was a little kid too,” she whispered, tears now running down her face.
“Yes, and so was I when Adalaide was going through some shit. That didn’t mean I didn’t see it.
That didn’t mean I didn’t check in with her.
It meant that Orev and I became obsessively protective of her.
I love my sisters, and while a lot of highly educated neurotypical experts insist that I’m not capable of love, I love my sisters, and I would do anything to protect them.
Keep them from harm and abuse. Even as a kid who spent most days frustrated because people were annoying and confusing and so extra that I just wanted to scream.
I still knew! I was there. Making sure she knew she wasn’t alone and that she could talk to me. ”
“You said she didn’t tell you until years later,” Kole says, wiping her face roughly.
“But she did tell me. Has Kylen told you? Did you even think to ask? Do you not have memories from childhood where you didn’t know something was wrong with your twin brother?”
“This isn’t my fault,” she whispers.
“I didn’t say it was. Just because it’s not your fault doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have recognized that Kylen was being abused. For a fucking year, Kole. A whole fucking year.”
She drops her face into her hands, and I hear her soft cries. Much like I found Kylen a couple hours ago, she brings her knees to her chest to make herself smaller.
I grip the handle and open the door. Kole looks up at me, her eyes red and face stained with tears. “What do I do?” she asks.
“Nothing. He wants to keep it in the past, where it can’t hurt him anymore. He wants to forget what he suffered through as a kid. He doesn’t want reminders, and he sure as fuck doesn’t want to talk about it now. All I needed was a name, and he couldn’t bring himself to repeat it.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Just what I said I’d do all along if someone touches him,” I answer. “I may be prone to lying because of my disorder, but I was raised that we don’t lie. Just because the world doesn’t want to admit that my truths are real doesn’t mean I’m lying.”
I shut the door behind me when I leave. On my way back to my bedroom, I call Orev. I’m not in the least bit surprised to find that he’s still awake. Still at his computer.
“Delores Rowling,” I tell him.
“Fifth grade,” he says, proving that he’s found his school records already.
“Yes. What can you tell me about her?”
He shakes his head. “Nothing.”
“Find her. I need to know where she is and how many I’ll need to kill on my way to killing her.”
His eyes move from the computer to look at me through the screen. “She’s responsible.”
“Yes.”
“I’m not sure if it’s good news or bad, but she’s still in the same school district. She teaches third grade now.”
I cringe. While I don’t generally feel affected by the thoughts of other people’s abuse, especially strangers, I can’t help but wonder how many more kids she’s hurt like Kylen over the years. And now, there’s a possibility that they’re younger than Kylen was.
“That’s disgusting,” I mutter.
“I’ll get back to you,” Orev says and ends the call.
I return to my room where Kylen is right where I left him. Before climbing into bed, I strip out of my clothes. Gently, so I don’t disturb him, I bring Kylen back into my arms where I plan to keep him for the rest of our lives.
Kylen murmurs in his sleep, and I kiss his forehead. “It’s alright now,” I assure him. “Everything is alright. You’re safe. I’ll always keep you safe. I’ll always pay enough attention to know when something is wrong, even if I will never be able to guess what it is on my own.”
He sighs, his body melting into my hold until he’s little more than a heap of loose limbs and quiet snores.
Your abuser will die, little kit, I tell him silently.