Chapter Thirty-Four
“I don’t really know how to do this,” Iris said once Tucker had gotten them all set up.
Barrett nodded. She got it. She’d had an easier first time with it than Iris was having, but it was an unusual experience to say the least. It had gone against every part of her that didn’t want to waste or break things, but Tucker had talked her through the whole thing and it had been good for her in the end. She hoped it would be for Iris too.
“How do you feel?” she asked quietly. The calm in her voice and the way she stood by the wall were at odds with the room, but it was what Iris needed.
“Sick. Dizzy. Confused.” She screwed her face up like that was both more than she’d planned to reveal and barely scratching the surface of what she was feeling. She sighed. “Like I want to cry.”
“Right, because it’s easier to cry and be upset with yourself than be angry at other people, right?”
She studied Barrett sadly. “I hate that you know that so viscerally.”
Barrett was filled with the urge to take Iris in her arms, to hide both of them away from all the things that hurt. But life would never give them peace. Learning how to deal with that without destroying yourself was important—and she wanted Iris to know that. “I hate that you know it too.”
“It’s fine. I’m fine.”
“You’re not. And that’s okay.” She gestured around the room. “This will help, hopefully.”
Iris was stiff as she looked around. “I’m not really sure how. It’s not very… me.”
Barrett could see that. If there was anyone she knew who looked like they didn’t belong here, it was Iris.
But people didn’t always look like the things they needed.
And, if Iris was any metric, the people who needed this the most looked the most unexpected.
Barrett had been there. Sure, she suited the space better than Iris, and she’d relaxed into the parts of her that felt anger, but she’d spent a lot of time trying to look like she had it all together.
As if a single hair out of place was a personal failing. It wasn’t. Neither was anger.
“It’s human,” Barrett said, her gaze unfocused. “And, despite how ethereal you are, you’re human.”
“Barrett…”
She grinned, focusing on Iris again. “I said what I said, princess, and I stand by it.”
“Of course you do.” She shook her head. “Tell me how.”
There were a million things Barrett wanted to tell Iris. That was one of the easier ones.
She sucked in a breath. It was going to hurt and she’d do anything to take away Iris’ pain, but this was better in the long run.
“That feeling of wanting to cry, the one that tells you you deserve all of this, that it’s your fault?
Feel it in your body. In your arms and your hands. Channel it into the bat.”
“That’s it? You’re not going to tell me to picture Natasha’s face or something?”
Barrett laughed. She’d actually love to tell her that. “Sadly, no. You’ll get there on your own. For now, you just have to let in where the anger goes. At least, that’s how it was for me. I couldn’t get myself to start at being furious with my mom.”
“But you got there in the end?”
“Yes. Not for the reasons people expect, but for the reasons I needed to.”
Iris paused, and in wondering or worrying about Barrett, some of her trepidation visibly drained from her. “What did people want?”
The complete answer, the whole story, was so readily available, on the tip of her tongue in an instant. She’d come such a long way. There was a time she couldn’t even tell herself the answer, let alone another person. Telling Iris felt natural, like it was something she could have already known.
She straightened from where she was leaning and approached Iris slowly.
“Society wants to be angry at her for having four kids with three different guys, ending up a single mother, and being poor. But it’s not really any of that.
I don’t care how many baby daddies someone has.
They’re my siblings, you know? And she was my mom. She was trying.
“The first guy, my dad, how was she supposed to know how it was going to go? And he and the others promised her the world. They said all the right things, they met me and claimed to want me. And all she wanted was to be loved, to have someone who wanted to raise a family with her. I don’t fault her for trying or for believing them.
They’re the ones who bolted when family life got too real.
When there were screaming kids and mouths to feed and a home to clean.
But everyone wants to hate her more than them. ”
“Not you,” Iris said softly, taking Barrett’s hand with her free one. It was a little awkward with the protective gear but the gesture still mattered.
Barrett shrugged. “I don’t know if I hate them, either, honestly. I’m angry with them, but hate…? I don’t know.”
She’d never been able to tell whether she didn’t hate them because she didn’t know them well enough or because she’d moved past hate into the simple acceptance that they left. They didn’t care about her enough to stick around. Maybe she just didn’t want to waste her life on people like that.
She looked at the bat hanging by Iris’ side. “I was angry with my mom because she never chased them for help. We were starving and drowning and she insisted we didn’t need them, that she could do it by herself.”
“But she wasn’t doing it by herself. She had you doing it.” Iris sounded heartbroken in the exact way Barrett felt when she’d finally gotten enough distance to understand what she’d gone through with her family.
“Yeah. But she had her own narrative on the situation. Her own success story. She gets to tell the world that she was a working, single mother with four kids, and her eldest is some big-shot architect in New York City. Didn’t she do well?
” She rolled her eyes. “She never knew me because she needed me to be this silent, obedient, barely existent game piece she moved around a board that didn’t care who I was. That’s why I’m angry with her.”
Iris’ eyes glistened as she nodded. “You deserve to be known, Barrett. It’s a privilege doing so.”
Barrett smiled. She was angry and sad, but she was also happy and filled with so much love for this woman that she could burst with it.
“I feel better when I sit with the complexity of her, you know? I’m angry and hurt but I understand her too.
I have compassion for what she was going through.
I can love her and still hate a lot of that.
And that’s why I know anger isn’t a bad emotion.
It’s a reasonable reaction to something I went through but it doesn’t erase the other stuff. ”
“I am not holding any love for Natasha, though.”
“You don’t have to. It’s that you can hold your anger and still be the person you are, the one you want to be. Being angry doesn’t make you less worthy.”
She winced like that got to the core of something she didn’t know how to process. Barrett knew her. They’d been through something so different on paper, but it left the same scars. They understood each other. Even in the ugliness of both their pasts, there was something beautiful in that.
Iris sniffled as she turned away from Barrett and took the bat in both hands, ready to swing. “You know the whole thing about my birthday?”
“Yes.” Barrett thought about it constantly.
She’d been aware she didn’t know when Iris’ birthday was the entire time they’d known each other, especially when her own birthday or Penn’s rolled around and they celebrated in the office, but, since Iris’ reveal that something had happened on her birthday that she didn’t know how to talk about, it had lived in Barrett’s mind every single day.
Whatever it was, Natasha was the problem and she was stealing joyful things from Iris.
“On my birthday…” Iris waved the bat like she was testing the weight of it.
“It was supposed to be a nice night. Just the two of us, romantic. We were chatting and laughing. And then she… grabbed me, tied me up against my will. Some random electrical cable she snatched from a shelf. Exposed me through the window as I screamed not to. And she told me it was my fault.”
As her voice broke on the final words, she swung at the 90s TV.
It was already bruised and battered, hence how it had wound up there, but Iris hit it with more force than Barrett had been expecting for her first swing.
And that was the moment she knew, just like she had, Iris really did need the experience.
She spoke through whacks, and tears, and the sound of splintering plastic.
“She told me it was a joke, a birthday gift. That nobody saw, but if they did, they weren’t hammering down the door, so why was I getting bent out of shape over a joke when nobody even wanted me?
If I was that proud of my body, why was I upset that she wanted to show it off?
It was just a little game. She said the cord would have come undone if I’d really tried to get away.
But I did try. It was too tight and she was too strong and I wanted to die.
The feeling of it on my wrists… her nails digging into my skin…
And after, it was all my fault. I tempted her, I went along with it and allowed her to do it, and I was ruining the joke now, ruining my own birthday, and we weren’t doing anything next year because I’d fucked that one up. ”
Tears streamed down Barrett’s face, matching Iris’.
She hated the way Natasha’s voice blended with Iris’ internal monologue, the way she’d become so ingrained in Iris’ psyche.
And she was relieved at how angry Iris sounded.
After everything, all this time, she deserved to be so angry the whole world burned.
When the TV set was no more than scraps at her feet, Iris collapsed to her knees and Barrett was beside her in a second, wrapping Iris up in her arms.
“She told me if I loved her, I’d let her have her fun. That she was my girlfriend and she had a right to my body,” Iris sobbed.
“I’m here. Let it out. You’re safe.”
Iris nodded as she screamed into Barrett’s chest like she finally believed that Barrett would willingly hold every little part of her, anger and all.