Chapter Fifteen
Luis didn’t sleep. After she left, he laid in bed staring at the ceiling, oscillating between crying and numbness until the sun rose. Only his aching stomach forced him up.
The apartment was still a mess. He trudged through the debris to the kitchen.
He wasn’t hungry, but the stomach pains were making him sick. He grabbed a box of pop tarts and took them back to bed.
Luis crawled under the covers in last night’s rumbled, sweaty clothes. Tucked under the comforter, he made himself chew down two poptarts that tasted like cardboard.
At some point his phone pinged with a text, but Luis couldn’t be bothered to find it. He drifted in between asleep and awake.
He kept replaying what had happened. Trying to figure out where it had all gone wrong. He couldn’t stop seeing the hate on her face, hearing the way she’d spit the word thrall at him.
How could she hate him so much? What had he ever done to deserve it?
Hours later, Luis shuffled back to the kitchen and found the cold lunch meat still in the refrigerator and ate it standing in the open door. Then he filled a glass with tap water and drank the whole thing.
After, in the bathroom, he caught sight of himself in the mirror. There was a dried crust of blood on his cheek where the ring had scraped his skin. It was swollen and looked like it would bruise.
He wiped the blood off and went back to bed. Another text sound chimed from his phone, but he ignored it.
He shouldn’t care about what she thought, about the things she’d said, but he did. It hurt in some secret deep place he didn’t even know he had. A place that had held a hope he’d had that one day she’d see him for him, and love him for it.
Now it was like an infected wound, corroding from the inside out.
Luis scrubbed a hand over his wet cheeks. He hated everything. Her bigotry, his years of cowardice that had led to this outcome. The way he couldn’t even imagine it going any differently.
Was it always going to end like this? Had he just been kicking the can down the road?
Stupid, he was so, so stupid.
Near evening, Luis’s phone started to ring. It roused him from a partial sleep, and he reached blindly to find his phone and silence the call.
When it started ringing again a minute later, he dragged the screen to his face to look.
Cassie.
The texts from earlier were from her as well.
It was Saturday, and they usually chatted on Saturday. She was probably confused why he wasn’t answering.
Guilt gnawed at him as he watched it ring. She’d worry if he kept ignoring her. She had no idea what was going on.
And whose fault is that?
Luis chewed his lip watching the call end and another one start. Five rings later, the guilt won.
“Hello?” His voice was raspy from crying.
“Dude, are you okay?” Cassie asked. She sounded worried.
“Fine. Sorry I’m… sick,” Luis said.
There was a rustling sound, then a ping. Luis pulled his phone from his ear to see her requesting a video call.
Fuck.
“Pick up Luis,” she said.
But he was still in bed in last night’s clothes, his curtains drawn so the room was dark. There were poptart crumbs all over his bed, and he was sure his hair looked like a habitat for small birds.
Not to mention whatever his cheek now looked like.
“I’m not really—”
“Not really fine?” Cassie cut in. “Yeah, I figured after the seventh ignored text and the cryptic post your mom made on Facebook. Don’t bullshit me.”
“Mom posted on Facebook?” Luis sat up.
Luis swiped the call aside and then opened up the app. The post popped up immediately.
She’d quoted a Bible verse about evil, and then made several vague comments about ‘betrayal’ and ‘a mother’s burden’. She’d even thrown in a few slurs.
He took a shaky breath.
“Luis?” Cassie’s voice was careful.
“I’m fine.”
“Hey babe,” her voice went softer, and it made more tears well up. “Answer the video call. It’s okay, whatever happened, it’s okay.”
He sniffed and tapped to accept the video. There was barely enough light in the dark room to see himself on the screen as it connected.
“Are you in bed?” Cassie asked.
“Maybe," he wiped at his eyes.
Cassie frowned. She was in her bedroom at her desk. She brought the phone closer to try and see him better. “What’s going on?”
“Mom showed up at my apartment last night,” Luis said. “Or rather, she was in my apartment when I came home.”
Cassie’s brows went up. “I’m guessing you didn’t invite her.”
“No.” He scraped a hand through his snarled hair. God, he looked a mess. “I’ve been… kind of avoiding her for weeks.”
“Oh. So she showed up,” Cassie said, because she knew Luis’s mom. Had played nice with her for well over a decade now. “What happened?”
“Well, it was Friday, so I was coming home from the bar. Late.” His throat did something funny, and he coughed to try and cover it. “Um. It was like two in the morning, and I found out she’d been waiting for me.”
“How’d she get in?” Cassie asked. Then her mouth dropped open in realization. “Luis.”
“I gave her the spare key a long time ago, it was the only way to get her to let up.” Which was true, but he was ashamed of it.
“Fuck,” Cassie groaned. “Okay. Then what happened.”
Luis forced a rough breath. “I came in and she’d tore the apartment apart. Like, everything open, drawers dumped.”
“What?” Cassie looked horrified.
“She said–she thought something had happened to me. Because I hadn’t been answering her calls. But I think she was just looking through my stuff,” Luis said. He’d come to terms with that moping in bed. She hadn’t been concerned, she’d been snooping. Looking for evidence.
“Fuck, dude.”
“I kinda lost it.” Luis wasn’t prone to anger, but he remembered it overcoming him when he’d seen the guitar in her hand. “She–she had my guitar and I thought–I thought she was going to smash it.”
“She doesn’t know you still play, does she?” Cassie asked.
“No. Or she didn’t. I guess she does now.” Not that it mattered if she was no longer speaking to him.
“This is so fucked,” Cassie said. Her face was pinched with concern.
His throat felt so sticky. The next part required him to confess to what he hadn’t been telling her for weeks. “So I, uh, have kind of been not telling you something for a… while now.”
Instead of anger though, Cassie only looked more worried. “Okay. Hey, whatever it is, it’s okay.”
She was better than Luis deserved.
“So, um. I might have maybe been letting Julien and Karim bite me. As treatment. And it’s been going good. Really good. But when I came home last night, I might have had a bite mark on my neck.”
There was a loaded pause.
“Ho-ly shit,” Cassie said with feeling. “Are you serious? You–! Damn Luis, I didn’t know you had it in you. Wow. Okay. So yeah, I see why you would be holding that tight to the chest. For treatment, and not anything more…?” Cassie probed.
“Uh.”
She stared at him. “Luis.”
“I–I can’t talk about that right now,” Luis said. “The point is, I came home, I had a bite, Mom saw it.”
“Shit,” Cassie said. “Well, you’re still alive,” she joked.
“She did try to call the police,” Luis said.
“What? Why?” Cassie was so close to the screen now, staring.
Then the rest was spilling out. Luis told her everything except the part where she’d hit him. His room was hopefully too dark for her to see that.
Cassie grew more and more horrified the longer he talked. “Your mom is a bad person,” she said when he’d finished. “And I know I’ve said this before, but I’ve never meant it more. God, can’t she just fucking let you live? You’re over thirty! An adult!”
Luis shrugged, at a loss.
“She broke into your apartment, trashed your stuff and then threatened you with cops. That’s so fucked up and abusive.”
“She… was upset,” Luis said, but he didn’t know why he was defending her. “I forgot I had the mark on me, and I should’ve–”
Cassie gave him a look so cold it stopped his words.
“Luis, I love you so much, but the stuff your mom does is not okay. You are just trying to live your life. She constantly, constantly berates you and guilts you to keep you at her beck and call. You remember how long I had to beg and plead with you before you finally felt like you could move out? I bet she brings it up all the time that you don’t live there anymore, as if you did it to personally hurt her. ”
There was a lump in his throat.
“Luis. Look at me.” He did his best to face the screen.
“You are never going to be able to be who she wants you to be. If it weren’t the vampire thing, it would be the gay thing.
If it weren’t the gay thing, it would be about your music.
At the end of the day, she doesn’t want you to be you.
And that’s fucked up, because you’re great!
Like the best guy I’ve ever known. And I don’t know Julien or Karim, but I bet they would agree with me. ”
Luis huffed a wet laugh. “I just didn’t want—I didn’t want it to be like that with her,” he confessed.
“I know she’s… homophobic,” Luis cringed, “I know she—she’s bigoted in a lot of ways.
I shouldn’t give a fuck what she thinks.
I shouldn’t even give a fuck about her. I hate that I do.
I hate that I care. That I still fucking care. ”
He bit down on a sob, turning his face away.
“Oh, hey. Luis. It’s okay,” Cassie said gently.
“I wasn’t–I didn’t mean it like that. Family shit is complicated.
It’s… it’s so hard when the person you want to love you, that you want to care about you, hurts you.
It’s natural to want a connection with your parent, and it’s not your fault that she’s like that.
It’s not your fault that you still want your mother to love you. ”
She wasn’t trying to hurt him, but the words still stung.