Another gut punch, but sweeter this time, dipped in honey.
“Please don’t hold anything back from me,” she says. “You don’t owe me anything, but I…I want to understand. I want to be there for you, I want to know every inch, not just your body, but your mind and your heart and your soul. You can trust me, you know. I’m not going anywhere.”
But that’s a lie. In a few weeks you won’t be here at all. Then you’ll have my heart and all my secrets, too.
I swallow that down and nod.
“I’ll keep it short and not so sweet because…” I exhale, my hands sweaty on the wheel. “You need to understand that this isn’t easy for me to talk about. I haven’t talked about this with anyone, and I rarely even think about this myself. There are a lot of things that just need to stay in the past, and the person I was is one of those things. But I need you to know that it’s all over and done with. Everything that happened is over. You have to trust me on that. Do you trust me?”
“I trust you,” she whispers.
“Okay,” I say with a slow nod. “Okay. Well, uh…when I was first brought into Jessica and Donald’s home, well it all felt too good to be true. You’ve met them now, you’ve seen how they are. They are nice people. Good people. They took me in, a scrawny, damaged young boy with no potential for anything, and they worked around the clock to prove to me that the world wasn’t out to get me, and that not all people were bad. But…when it was all I had ever known, time and time again, it wasn’t an easy thing to believe.”
I blink hard, trying to compose my words. “They gave me everything I could ever want, including honest, real love. But I never felt worthy. I went through high school, I got my degree, and I tried to live a normal life. The problem was…people knew them, knew I wasn’t their son, and even though that was rarely an issue, unless some wanker made it one, it was something large and heavy in my own mind. I guess I never really trusted them or their intentions. I never even unpacked my bag—I kept it by the door, always, just in case, because too many times I’d either be thrown out of foster care or I’d have to escape. And those horrors, the horrible, sick things that lurk out there in the minds of some people, waiting to prey on you, they’re always out there. I wanted to trust Donald and Jessica, even Brigs, but I couldn’t. My last year of high school I started to backslide. It’s the same old story. I hung out with the wrong people. I stole cars and drank moonshine and shot guns into the sky. Then the drugs came into play, and I was spending weekends in Glasgow, scoring chicks, scoring drugs, being the person I knew how to be. Unworthy, you know? I didn’t deserve shit.”
I glance at her to see if she’s listening, and she’s staring at me with so much interest, so much concern that I feel like she’s actually there with me, in the past, holding my hand.