Chapter Twenty-Five #2
One plate of cheesy chicken pasta later, I grabbed my notebook and sat down on the living room floor, staring at the scribbles of an absolute madwoman.
And not the kind of mad Kiki would want to hear if she was in the market for a female rage song.
The podcast episode would air tomorrow, and I wasn’t certain what to expect, but I knew that Helen had given me her friend’s number with a clear vision in mind.
Turn all that anger and frustration from the roundtable into an anthem.
I tapped my foot against the floor, tapped my pen against the page, tapped my hand against my forehead, but no song magically spilled from my mind.
I knew what I had to do. I just didn’t like it. Shutting him out was easier than confronting my feelings. My old therapist would probably give me her judgiest raised brows for the idea alone. Shutting down hadn’t exactly worked for me before.
Fine.
Eyes shut, death grip on my notebook as if it could keep me anchored, I let the last few months course through me. Relived every eye-crinkling smile he gave me, every soft touch turning desperate on my body, every whispered conversation in the dark.
There is the girl I was before
You searched my walls, found the door
Didn’t climb or tear them down
Soft hands found the key around my neck
I never asked you to give it back
I felt safer with you around
And now I’m right where you left me,
where you dropped my hand.
Left the door ajar, and walked away,
left me with no defense.
Nope. No. That was…not rage. That was “Dreams.” Rewritten. Fuck.
Okay. I could do this. I just had to focus on how he had made a deal with Doyle behind my back and had tricked me into making music again. Had taken me to a stupid dive bar’s open mic night. I was angry with him. I was mad. I was raging. I was a dragon spitting fire.
I flipped to a new page in my notebook and tried again.
You met the girl behind the blue door,
Turned her into something more.
Running away became coming home.
Nope.
Nope, nope, nope.
I did feel anger. At myself. I flung the notebook aside and groaned. This should have come so much easier. Except, when I thought of Brooks, I didn’t feel angry.
Sure, I’d blown up at him in the saloon, because I always did. It was safer to claw people’s eyes out than to let them see how much they hurt you, how weak they made you. That kind of weakness only gave them more grounds to attack.
But at the end of the day, the heavy pressure on my chest wasn’t anger.
Before I could make myself confront that uncomfortable truth, my phone saved me. I pulled the buzzing thing from my pocket and unlocked it without hesitation when Skye’s name came up. Her face filled almost the entire screen, but it was dark and grainy.
“Skye, honey, are you okay?” I asked, protectiveness immediately overpowering all my confusing feelings.
“Addie, can you come get me?”
She sounded close to crying. Fuck. “Where are you?”
“I’m with my grandparents but they’re fighting downstairs, and my headphones are out of battery, and I can hear them even with the doors closed, and in the closet, and I don’t want to be here anymore.”
“I’m sorry, honey.” I pushed myself off the floor but hesitated.
I couldn’t just show up there. I had no claim over this kid.
I wasn’t her mom, or her stepmom, or anything.
The Greens could call the cops on me for trespassing and then the custody case would be royally fucked. “Did you call your dad?”
“No, I’m not talking to him.”
“Stay on the phone with me for a second, okay?” I minimized the video call and opened my texts. “Can you tell what your grandma and grandpa are fighting about?”
“Me,” she said, voice wobbling.
Oh, fuck them.
“I’m sorry, that’s rude of them,” I said, trying to sound as rational as I could, so she wouldn’t freak out more. But I also didn’t want to make her rehash that argument, so I needed a different distraction while I texted her father. “Do you know the five grounding things game?”
“Yeah,” she mumbled.
“Okay, tell me, while I figure out how to get you, okay?”
“I can see the phone. I can see clothes on hangers. I can see light slits in the closet door. I guess I can see the closet door. I can see my hands.”
“Good job. Keep going.”
Adriana: On phone with Skye. Greens are fighting. Go pick her up.
“I don’t want to touch four things,” Skye mumbled.
“Okay, you don’t have to. You can just tell me about the things you could touch if you wanted to.” I ran my hand through my hair, watching the text message thread like a hawk. Come on. Come on. Read it. Don’t leave it on received. “No repeats with the things you can see.”
“I could touch the shoes next to me. I could touch the carpet. I could touch the wall. I could touch my hair.”
“You’re doing such a good job, honey.”
“Addie, why are you not coming?”
“It would take me a really long time to get to you. I’m trying to figure out if your dad could be there faster,” I lied. Wow. Lying to children for their own good was way easier than I’d expected. Immediately, a pang of guilt soured my stomach. I’d thrown Brooks’s lies in his face.
“I don’t want to go with Dad.”
“Why not?”
“He’s a hypocrite.”
“That’s a big word.”
Skye took a trembling breath. “He said he wants to raise me in Wild Fields, and that he wants me to have everything I love about Bravetown, and that he’s never seen me happier. But then he breaks up with you. And you’re in Bravetown and I love you and you make me happy.”
My insides seized, my chest squeezing tight, cracking under the pressure. I was going to throw up. Or have a heart attack. Possibly both. I gasped through the pain.
“It’s not that simple,” I croaked, voice suddenly clogged.
Brooks: On my way! 20min
“Why not? Don’t you love him?”
“I do, but—” The words were out before I could mull them over, my eyes fixed to the text message Brooks had just sent.
Fuck.
How could I?
Why did I?
I wasn’t supposed to.
Love?
“Is it me? Do you not like me?” Skye whispered.
“Oh, honey, I love you so much. You have no idea.” That was easy to admit.
Skye had quickly become one of my favorite people in the world.
I would throw myself off a cliff for that girl.
I would stay on the phone for twenty minutes for her, even if every second added another crack to my fragile chest. “Love is really important, but to make a relationship work, you need more than love.”
“I looked it up, so I could understand.”
“You looked what up?”
“When people get married, they say they will have and hold each other, which means emotionally being together and also being okay with physically touching. I know you don’t like touching. Is that the problem? Because I don’t always like touching, but sometimes it’s nice.”
“No, I like it when your dad holds me.” The having part was the bigger issue.
“Okay, and staying together for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, until death.” Skye rattled off traditional wedding vows like a checklist. “Are you scared he’ll lose his money?”
“No, I really don’t care about—”
“He’s autistic but that’s not being sick. That just means our brains work a little different from most people. But he gets a cold every November, so you will have to make him lots of tea. And in thirty to forty years, he’s likely going to develop health issues due to old age.”
I couldn’t help but chuckle at her meticulous research. “That doesn’t scare me off.”
“Okay, then what?”
I pinched the bridge of my nose. “Your dad took something from me.”
Skye’s face scrunched up. “Your virginity?”
Air spluttered from my lungs, and I had to lower the phone for a moment to school my features. “Do you know what that means?” I asked.
“Kind of. Some of the marriage sites say that a man takes a woman’s virginity on the wedding night when they have sex.”
This was so not the talk I saw myself having even five minutes ago, and I wasn’t sure if it was better or worse than dwelling on the emotional turmoil of my relationship with Brooks.
“Okay, first things first, that’s not what he took from me.
And also, this is something you really need to talk to your dad about. Sex is a really complicated topic.”
“I’m almost thirteen.” She rolled her eyes at me through the phone screen.
I didn’t even know how to interpret that sentence though.
Skye was a very different girl from the kind I had been at her age.
At thirteen, I’d shoplifted a lime-green bra and had given myself a belly button piercing to feel cool and older, and I had been obsessed with losing my virginity.
The fact that Skye thought her dad might have taken it from me just told me that she needed a proper talk about this.
“I’ll make you a deal,” I sighed and sank onto my sofa. “Your dad’s gonna be there in about fifteen minutes. If you go with him, even if you don’t like him very much right now, we can have another girls’ day and you can ask me all the questions you have about sex, okay?”
“Can you explain condoms to me?”
“Uh…sure.”
“Okay. Deal.”
Maybe I should have cleared that with Brooks first, but even if I wasn’t going to be an official part of Skye’s family, I felt responsible for her.
And between having to ask her dad, her grandmother, or the internet about virginity and condoms, I was probably the least embarrassing or problematic option.
If she was already googling it, there was no point in pretending it wasn’t on her radar.
No matter where I stood with her dad, I knew firsthand how hard it could be to grow up with only one parent, who hadn’t prepared for that role either.
If I could be an extra supportive presence in Skye’s life, I would be.
Just maybe not on the phone while she was hiding in a closet from her grandparents.
“Did you see that new documentary on Netflix about the women of the California gold rush?” I asked. I’d watched it last night. Not that I’d suddenly developed an interest in history. It just seemed like something Skye would want to talk about.
“Ohmygod, yes. I had never even heard of Mountain Charley. But she wrote a book. I really wanna read that now. Do you think I can get that in the Bravetown bookshop? It’s not Tennessee though.
But I think she would be great as a character for the Mountain Railroad…
” Skye immediately launched into a full verbal avalanche.
It kept her distracted enough until I heard someone call her name in the background and she hung up on me with a quick “Gotta go!” sounding way more chipper than before.
And I was left in my living room. Alone.
Staring at my notebook full of sad lyrics, and the empty dining table where Skye used to go on for hours about her newest obsessions, and the discarded blanket hoodie that Skye had picked for me and Brooks had used as a buffer when he grabbed me and squished me against him, and we’d fallen asleep on this sofa wrapped around each other.
There was not a droplet of rage left in me.