Her back was to me. We both stared at the painting.
“Why cherry blossoms?” I asked, ten years later than I should have. She’d always had a thing for the tree. She painted other shit too, everything she owned had been doodled on: textbooks, backpacks, clothes, arms. But she always came back to the cherry blossoms. Even her hair was the same shade as her favorite tree.
“Because it’s beautiful and…I don’t know, the blooms are gone so fast.” I heard the smile on her lips. “When I was a kid, my grandmama used to take me to DC every spring to the Cherry Blossom Festival. Just me. I used to wait for it all year long. We never had much money, so to spend a day there, to go to a barbeque restaurant afterward…it was a big thing for me. Huge.
“Then she got sick when I was seven. Cancer. It took a while. I didn’t really understand the concept of her dying, going away and never coming back, so she told me about the Japanese Sakura. People in Japan travel from all over to see the trees at their prime. Cherry blossom season is short but breathtaking, and after the blossoms fade, the flowers fall to the ground, scattered by the wind and rain. Grandmama said that the cherry blossom was life. Sweet and beautiful, but so darn short. Too short not to do what you wanna do. Too short to not spend it with the people…you love.” Her eyes closed slowly as she took a deep breath.
She stopped talking, and I stopped fucking breathing. Because I knew what made her stop. Me.
Everything I did.
I prevented her from spending time with some of these people—her parents, her sister—for my own selfish reasons when she was only eighteen.
“Holy cow, I’m a buzzkill.” She let out a breathless chuckle. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be.” I swallowed, taking a wide step so we stood flush next to each other, still observing the painting. “Shit happens. My mom died when I was nine.”
“I know.” Her tone was somber, but not anxious. Normally, people didn’t like it when you brought up your dead mother. Grief was an uncomfortable emotion to deal with. “That must’ve been hard.”
“Well, you said you were a buzzkill. My competitive side inspired me to bring my A game.” I shrugged, my voice even.
“Vicious.” She laughed again, this time turning to me, giving me that look teachers give their students when they’re disappointed with them.
I grinned. “Dead mother beats dead grandmother every day, and you fucking know it.”
She swatted my shoulder but couldn’t hide her smile. “You’re horrible.”
“Horribly sexy. Yes.”
We ordered Vietnamese, and I told her how my mom got injured in a car crash, then died when I was nine. The usual details, except for the really sordid stuff about who made it happen. She was covered in paint, so we sat on the drop cloth under the easel. It wasn’t my thing, but I didn’t mind. The reason I told her about my mom was simple. I didn’t want her to bail on my ass if push came to shove. If I was going to corrupt her morally, I needed more ammo.
She cried when I told her about how I found out my mother was dead. My dad was away on an urgent business trip, so our housekeeper told me, between my hiccups and sniffs.
There were a lot of reasons why I didn’t tell her the whole truth. The one I’d kept to myself all those years. The reasons now weren’t that different than what they’d been back then.
I was still ashamed I hadn’t realized what Dad and Jo were talking about doing when I was nine. I’d felt guilty all these years, wondering if I could’ve saved my mom, warned her, told someone.
Which was probably stupid because who would’ve believed a nine-year-old.
And afterward, if someone did believe me, what then? My mom would still be dead and it could’ve been even worse for me. The shame, the pity, the gossip if there was a trial. When your dad sends his mistress’s brother to pull the plug on your mother? Yeah, there was no coming back from that sob story. I would’ve been forever labeled as “that poor kid.”
I wasn’t anyone’s “poor kid.” I was a rich man. Powerful in people’s eyes, and I intended to keep it that way.
I trusted Emilia. I knew I could confide in her. She’d kept our secret under wraps from everyone in high school. I trusted her to keep the one about my scars too.
The way she looked at me when we sat on her drop cloth—I was pretty fucking sure my nine-hundred-dollar slacks were stained with paint—made me want to tell her the rest. But I didn’t want her to think about me what I used to think about myself. That I’d made a mistake in keeping quiet. That none of it would’ve happened if I’d told someone. That I could’ve stopped it all before it started. That I was stupid. Weak.
“I wish you’d have given me more of a chance to be there for you when I lived there,” she murmured, looking down at her thighs and fighting more tears.
I wanted to touch her, but I didn’t want a hug. I needed to fuck her until every inch of her flesh was raw.
I smiled politely. “See? We all have our cherry-blossom story.” I looked around, suddenly anxious to stop talking. “Where the fuck is Rosie, anyway?”
I was starting to feel the way I did before, when she lived so close I could see into her bedroom window. I couldn’t pin that feeling down. Not then and not now. I just knew that it was unacceptable. I had enough fucking fires to put out in my personal life without creating another shit-storm.
She muttered something about calling her sister and checking up on her and got up exactly as the doorbell chimed. She twisted her head to me and quirked an eyebrow, as if to say what are the odds? and sashayed to the door to get our food.
It was the delivery guy. The smell of our hot, spicy food carried all the way to where I sat while she made small talk with the guy. Typical Emilia, nice to everyone and their mothers.
Emilia arranged some plates on our makeshift picnic blanket and opened a bottle of wine that she’d probably bought from the Dollar Tree, but dinner was nicer than the nicest ones I’d had in the last couple of years. We ate in silence, and that was okay, because Emilia wasn’t the type of girl who hurried to fill the air with meaningless chatter. She liked silence.
Like me.
Like my mom.
Then again, it’d been a while since I’d sat down for dinner with someone who wasn’t one of the Four HotHoles or my stepmother.
“Tell me something bad about you,” I said, out of nowhere.
“Something bad?” She took a swig straight from the bottle and placed it on the floor next to her thigh, wiggling her pursed lips from side to side. She was thinking.
“Yeah. Something that’s less noble than Little Miss Perfect helping her sick sister by working two jobs.”
She rolled her eyes at me but smiled, struggling to come up with something. When she did, she seemed half-elated. “I paint with oil paint!”
“Holy fuck, that’s badass.” I bit my lower lip and shook my head.