Chapter 58
Quill
What Do You Know About Love?
The Distant Past
Past Day
Normally, it felt pleasant when Lara brushed my hair, but now she wasn't paying attention to any tangles and was literally ripping the brush through my hair, causing me to grimace with every pull.
I sat on the edge of her bed, she behind me in a cross-legged position, both of us in our evening dresses, because in half an hour Lara would drive us to the Fitzeks' estate, where the gala was to take place, which, according to the whispers on campus, had to resemble a gala of the century.
Prestigious lawyers and respected judges from all over the country would be there with their families, and I had already made plans to circumvent Monica's plan to drag me from lawyer to lawyer as if I were a gift basket that no one had asked for.
I knew from Anthony that Arnold was worried that honored investors would withdraw their financial support for the law school as soon as they caught sight of me.
I should have written on my hands. But who was I to rob other women of the chance to attend the country's most prestigious law school with my urge to rebel in every area of life? Even though I doubted I would ever be able to scare away any investors and thus drive Maplecrest into ruin.
The almost floor-length dress I wore was made of midnight blue, pearlescent satin, hugging my waist, and the neckline fell loosely into an appropriate rounded depth.
Straps stretched across my shoulders, while my back was completely exposed down to my butt, adorned only by the low-set laces that Lara had carefully tied earlier.
Not to be overlooked was the slit in the skirt area.
“I feel like backless is a little too daring,” I expressed my concern.
I didn't care what people thought of me, but something inside me cringed at the mere thought of attracting attention in a room full of unscrupulous men who saw me as nothing more than a sex object.
I would rather be at the book café downtown working a double weekend shift than being stuck in a room with people like that.
Meghan’s Theme
David Buckley, Luke Richards
“Why?” Lara ran the brush through my hair a little too roughly, causing me to bite my lower lip in pain. “Are you afraid that too many older men might look at your back? I thought you enjoyed their attention?”
There was a hint of irritation in her voice.
She had barely spoken to me for the last two days, and I was slowly starting to worry whether I had done something without realizing that it had hurt her, or whether something was stressing her out that she couldn't talk to anyone about.
We had argued maybe three times over the years. Nothing serious. Mostly about matters where she had been concerned about me, and I had nevertheless ended up putting myself in danger or making bad decisions.
But this? ...was new to me.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
Lara paused, and our eyes met in the mirror decorated with pumpkin fairy lights three meters away, between her wardrobe and the windowsill where I sometimes read with Streusel on my lap.
“No.”
She continued brushing.
I wanted to take a deep breath to calm myself down, but I suppressed it because I didn't want her to feel like a burden just because I was being one once again.
“Your dad is worried about you.”
Only when I said it out loud did I realize how stupid it sounded. As if her father's concern would emphasize or even justify my concern for her, even though it existed independently of it.
“Did he tell you that?”
Her brushing became faster.
Oh great, Quill. Why do you have such a knack for starting conversations that can make everything worse if you're not careful?
“He…” Stop lying. Lara is your best friend. She deserves better than the rest of the world, Quill. “No.” I swallowed. “He just always looks at you so remorsefully.”
Davian was good at avoiding my gaze, pretending in front of Lara that we weren’t even close friends. And it hurt in the same suffocating way every time.
This morning, it had driven me crazy, that, like a woman possessed, I had yearned for him to turn to me just once in the kitchen, to prove to me with his eyes that he had indeed been lying behind me in my bed last night.
Not my imagination. Not a ghost. Not Vincent.
Him. Davian Rydell. My mirror. My downfall.
His body, warm, strong, steady... pressed against mine.
I couldn't stop thinking about it. But I had to. Because he had made himself clear. The reason why I wouldn't tell him that this was the first night in years that I had slept for five hours straight.
“Does he?”
Her voice dripped with provocation. And slowly, a strange feeling settled in my stomach.
I didn't want her to feel that way. It hurt.
What a selfish thought...
“Lara...” I began, exhausted.
“No. It's okay. You're right. I'm a shitty friend. Though it's Dad's fault. Not yours.”
I couldn't help but let my expression slip, and my head turned toward her.
“What?”
Lara stared at me, took a few seconds before she looked away and slid off the bed.
My heart was racing, on the verge of drowning in sudden confusion.
She couldn't... No... How...
“He rejected Mom for years, didn't want to listen to her even once, never gave her even a single chance. Though she's the perfect woman for him. One who would finally pull him out of his endless spiral of self-pity and change his life.”
Something inside me calmed down, but it was followed by a constricting pain in my chest.
“Mom tells me every time that she would try again. But I know how Dad is. He would ruin it. He would push her away because of something that should be a thing of the past.”
Confronting the Past
Luke Richards
Blinking, I tried to make sense of her words.
“Wait...”
I watched as she turned away from me, ran her fingers frantically through her hair – which, for a second, reminded me of Davian – and sorted her makeup into the mini drawers of her dressing table.
“I thought you didn't know your mother?”
Davian had said she was gone, not part of their lives.
“Did Dad tell you that?” she laughed, as if she were on the verge of madness, and heat immediately shot through my cheeks. “Anyway. I can’t keep secrets from you. I just can’t.” She turned back to me.
“I've been seeing Mom every month for the past four years.”
Tears welled up in her eyes, while I could only sit motionless and let this muffled, heavy feeling wash over me, gathering into a growing ball in the middle of my chest.
“For years, I tried to be angry with her, just like Dad. Before going to bed and after waking up, I would think of all the reasons that should make me hate her.”
She put her hand on her chest, visibly fighting back tears, just as I had once done as a child.
“But I never hated her, Quill. From the first day I met her, from the moment she smiled at me, shed a tear for me, and took me in her arms, I knew I would always forgive her.”
The tear escaped her and she wiped it away hastily, reaching for a box of tissues and sniffing into one.
All this information was overwhelming me.
Lara was seeing the woman who had abandoned her from the beginning since she was fourteen.
“Does your father know about this?”
Lara shook her head frantically.
“No. And he can’t find out.”
“You’re an adult. He can’t forbid it. But…”
“He would hate her even more. And that’s the last thing I want.”
“She abandoned you.”
I bit the tip of my tongue.
It was the truth. But Lara's stare, as if I had slapped her, shoved me into a sea of remorse.
“She was young, inexperienced, afraid of a life of poverty.”
“She brought you into poverty, forced your dad to depend on people like my father.”
Anger toward a woman I didn’t even know gathered into another ball inside me.
Never had I pitied Lara for not having a mother, because life had done her the favor of removing the person from her environment who would have been poison for her.
She had grown up sheltered, surrounded by people who wanted only the best for her, who had made sacrifices so that she could grow up into the woman she was now. From the very beginning.
“You have to see it differently.” Lara looked at me desperately, clinging to the edge of her dressing table.
“Back then, he only wrote, neglected med school, and dropped out immediately when Mom told him she was pregnant with me so he could find a job and continue writing at the same time. Instead of just letting it go for five years and prioritizing his family.”
I stared at her in disbelief, and she immediately raised her hands.
“That doesn't mean I hold it against him. He made just as many mistakes as Mom and in the end always took responsibility for them.”
She turned away from me and began pacing back and forth.
“But Mom told me what it's like to live with an author. Not knowing if you'll be able to pay the rent tomorrow...” She looked at me apologetically. “Nothing against you, but that lifestyle just isn't family-friendly. Not with small children.”
Why did I feel like each of those words wasn't coming from her, but from the mouth of a regretful false snake who wanted to manipulate her daughter to win back her ex, just because he had now made something of his life?
Secrets and Lies
Atli ?rvarsson
“She abandoned you.” I stood up, walked around the bed, and stopped five feet in front of her.
“A child who depended on her and couldn’t help being born into this godless world.
She could have taken you with her, raised you on her own, and done her best, but instead she chose to send you to a place where your father had been forced to grow up.
Don't you think all his anger is justified?”
It must have felt like betrayal to Davian.
Lara stared at me blankly, and it hurt to see her like that, but this was going too far. Davian wanted what was best for her. From the moment he had learned she existed.
“All that because he wrote books instead of living the life that was expected of him?”
That wasn't fair.
With growing anger, I pointed my index finger toward the window.