Truth & Temptation

by Riley Edgewood

  Well, that and getting my shit from Gran.

  Double fuck.

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  THERE'S A SHINY black truck with new tags parked in front of my grandparents' place. I pull up in my ancient clunker and sputter to a stop right beside it. The sight makes my stomach twist, but I'm not sure why.

  Actually, maybe I do. If Gramps has a new truck…is that where my payments have gone? Rather than to water bills, he stashed them away for the down payment?

  Irritation starts to simmer in my gut, but I smother it. Why should I care about cold showers when I'll never have to take them here again? I'm letting go of this place today. Of them. Of everything from my past.

  I ignore the truck and I take the few steps up to the front porch. And my fucking house key doesn't work when I try to open the door.

  They changed the locks.

  Well, fuck this.

  I bang on the door until my hand feels tender. I kick it a couple times, too. I'm about to break through one of the screened windows when Gran finally opens the door. "Oh. You."

  "You changed the locks?" I don't meant to sound so hurt, but my voice is smaller than usual and, instead of anger, a confusing sort of sadness fills me.

  "You left."

  "You told me to."

  "Eh. You're old enough to look after yourself now." She glances over my shoulder.

  "Expecting someone?" I almost manage to laugh—my grandparents literally never have company—but the mangled sound makes it as high as the base of my throat before it fades. I brush past her. "Don't worry. I'll be gone in a few. I need my things, and then I guess this is over."

  I wrinkle my nose against the ashtray stench that assaults it. The stink seems worse now, but maybe that's because I was used to it for too long. I take the stairs, skipping the broken ones and avoiding the splinters of the handrail, and there's a certain sort of elation that begins to fill me when I remember this is the last time I'll ever do it.

  Because if something goes wrong with rooming with Vera, I'll live in my car before I come back here. I'll sleep under my desk. I don't care. Anything is better than this.

  I stuff most of my clothing in a duffel bag. I grab the basket, pulling out my baby blanket and holding it against my chest. Only for a moment. It's a bit more worn than I thought it was, but maybe that'll add to tonight's charm.

  Gran's still watching outside when I return, bag and basket in tow. "Where's Gramps?" I ask.

  "Trading in my car." She's sucking on a cigarette and…for the one moment while her cheeks are hollowed, I notice how the years have aged her. She's bitter, always has been, but maybe that's the life she was dealt.

  Her answer makes a bit more sense about the truck—maybe they traded in both their old cars for it. I glance at it out the front door. "Guess I won't get to tell him goodbye."

  Her snort puts a horse's to shame. "Guess not."

  Considering the last time I saw him he hit me—unintentionally doesn't make it that much better—I can't say I'm too upset about it.

  "Do you blame me?" I ask quietly, my stomach tighter than a dead man's noose.

  "For what?" Her words are more warning than question, and still she watches out the front screen. Hot summer air pulses through the grating, sticky on my skin. Her shirt is damp under the armpits and beneath her breasts.

  "For my mother leaving." My clarification is quieter than the question was.

  The answer's always been implied, but I've never had the guts to ask.

  Now she swivels her head my direction, and if looks could kill…

  I wave my hand in front of her monstrous expression. "I know, I know, mentioning mommy dearest goes against rule number one. But… I don't care." What I do care about, however, is the way my voice cracks. It doesn't stop me though. "I want an answer."

  Still, she doesn't respond.

  "What is it?" I pause, waiting for my throat to stop constricting. It takes longer than I'd prefer. "Do you have some… I don't know…some long lost fear? You can't let yourselves love me because you're afraid I'll leave you like she did?"

  For a moment, I can't read her expression. The type of tension that's actually hope runs its way along my ribcage, like mallets over a xylophone, lightly at first and then, after the reality of the moment sinks in, hard enough to snap. Because this is it. This is the moment I've always feared, always craved.

  In the deepest, most hidden parts of my mind, the rest of the conversation goes like this: Love you? she'd ask. Of course we love you. But your mother broke our hearts, and it's too hard to show love after that. You look so much like her it's sometimes painful.

  In reality, she begins to laugh, which is interrupted by series of hacking coughs. "When did you get this needy?"

  I press harder. "Is that it? You raised me to be hardened against needing things, or people, because she left you and you didn't want me to ever go through what you did?"

  She drags on her cigarette and the soured twist to her face takes regular contempt and makes it a little bitch. "What the hell sort of sissy shit are you talking about?"

  A part of me wishes I wanted to tear at my hair.

  A part of me wishes I wanted to scream.

  A part of me wishes I wanted to do anything other than offer the quiet smile that I do.

  Because that would mean I hadn't given up, that there was still some sort of hope for a semblance of a relationship with the only relatives I know. But it's over. Has been for a long time. From the very beginning, honestly.

  "Thank you," I say. "I needed to hear that."

  Tires crunch over gravel and a new truck—delivery, this time—pulls up to the house. And I watch, stunned, when a man uses a dolly to haul two boxes from the back. A new washer and dryer.

  There is a thought slamming its fist at the door of my mind, and I am doing everything I can to keep it out. Double lock. Triple lock.

  But this thought… It cuts through those locks with a chainsaw and comes through anyway.

  "Why did Gramps trade your car in?" I ask, a hot, tingling sort of pain dancing along my skin.

  "To make room for the new one," she says, her tone slow and steady, like I'm an idiot for asking.

  "For the new truck out there?" Please, please be for the truck.

  "No." She smiles a brittle smile. "That's his. Mine's a station wagon."

  "A…new station wagon?" Oh God. Oh God. "Where did you get the money?"

  Her smile goes from brittle to gloating in no time at all. "A friend of yours, actually. You seem surprised."

  My heart.

  My heart.

  There is a piece of barbed wire circling my heart, and my stupid fucking heart is twisting back and forth, like the wire is a Hula-Hoop. And it's shredding me.

  "Alec," I say. "He gave you these things?"

  Where is my breath? I clutch my stomach and bend at the waist. I'm so close to falling to my knees I almost give in and do it. But I don't think I'd get up after. And I have to be able to leave. That was my entire reason for coming.

  But I wasn't expecting this.

  "Why?" I ask, the word dropping like an anchor, pulling me down, down, down with it.

  "Guess you'll have to ask him." And after a few beats of silence, mine full of shock, hers full of gloat, "Told you you'd end up like your mama," Gran says, her cigarette breath making me gag. "Least when you spread your legs, we reap the rewards rather than just the consequences."

  Just the consequence. That's what I am to her. To both of them. I'm not their grandchild. I'm not their blood. I'm the mistake my mother made and didn't want to face. They were stuck with me.

  They never loved me.

  Never bothered trying to.

  This is actually what I came for. To learn the thing that will give me no regrets about never seeing them again.

  And now I have it.

  And now I can leave.

  I do it without a backwards glance.

  And with a heart dead in my chest.

 
CHAPTER FIFTY

  PERCHED ON A picnic table with the orange setting sun rolling over the water before me, I slap at a mosquito after it's had a few seconds of ankle blood. It's probably the tenth in the past five minutes. Guess I forgot citronella candles. Or bug spray.

  Guess I forgot pretty much everything.

  Guess I don't really care.

  My anger's only ever been a scorching thing. So this coolness coursing through me is difficult to understand. Difficult to feel. Or maybe it's so cold it's made me numb.

  The headlights of Miles' town car come into view, and in the back of my mind I wonder if I should be nervous. Shouldn't my stomach jump?

  Shouldn't I feel something?

  Anything other than empty?

  Because if that's the case, I'm failing.

  Even Alec's familiar stride through the park toward me only brings the smallest twinge.

  He's smiling.

  He's smiling, even when he knows what he's done.

  Huh.

  Guess I can feel pain after all. It hits in the weirdest spots. Beneath my belly button. Along my collarbone. At the base of my throat.

  I'm not sure what he sees in my expression, my face alone is still too numb for me to understand, but whatever it is, he falters as he gets closer, his smile vanishing.

  "Aren't you going to ask me what's wrong?" I ask when he doesn't.

  "Let me explain—"

  "Did you know I wanted tonight to be special?" I say. My voice comes out like a song, teasing with a bitter edge.

  "If you let—"

  "It needed to be," I say, talking over him. "Because I wanted to tell you I loved you."

  Surprise washes the edges from his expression.

  Pleasure follows, and he steps toward me.

  But uncertainty comes next, and he goes still.

  "Yeah, it's confusing, isn't it?" I laugh. It twists humorlessly through the air. "Thinking you know something and then realizing you don't."

  "You spoke with your grandparents." He's not surprised, just clarifying to fill the silence.

  "I've had all day to think about it—and, maybe it's because I'm slow," I pause, swallowing past the lump of torn pride in my throat, "but I can't figure it out. Were you trying to make peace with them for me?"

  "N-no, I—"

  "Because that is never, ever going to happen. I went there today to get my things and to cut them completely free from my life. To cut myself free from them." I study the water for a moment, steeling myself. My insides seem to be swaying with the gentle ripples. Soon, too much time passes and I have to look at him again. It nearly kills me. "I didn't realize I'd have to do the same with you."

  "Don't say that." His eyes dart between mine, like he's searching for a way to replace the meaning of my words with something else, something less set in stone. Panic loosens his features, tightens his stance.

  But anger is a zipper trying to close my ribcage, making me choke. It hurts. Every part of this hurts. "I am so fucking stupid. I thought…when you called me this morning you seemed nervous—I thought it was because of me. I thought you were reading the anxiety in my tone. But you weren't. You were nervous for yourself, because you knew I'd find out what you'd done."

  "You were always going to find out," he says. "I would never keep that from you."

  "When did you go to them?"

  He doesn't say anything, guilt wringing the truth from his expression.

  "When?"

  "Tuesday."

  I stare at the setting sun until my tears clear. "You did keep it from me then. All week."

  "Because I knew you wouldn't agree to it."

  "Oh, right." I scoff at him and grip the picnic table so hard a splinter slides into my palm. Guess I was always going to get a splinter today, no matter how hard I try to avoid them. "Because you know better than me. I'm just a little woman and you're the big man who gets to march around beating his chest and making decisions over my head when I'm too dumb to know any better."

  "You know that's not me." His tone is level but there's an entire ocean of anxiety beneath it.

  "The Alec I thought I knew would never, under any circumstance, go behind my back and to the people who literally never showed me any love in my entire life and reward them with shiny, new, expensive toys."

  "Hear me out," he says.

  "Oh, I'm going to," I say. "You get to say your piece—that's the only reason I didn't cancel tonight. And then I get to say mine. And then we get to go our separate ways."

  He winces and the pain in the shadows etched across his face makes my heart shred itself all over again. "You told me you didn't believe what you'd been told about your father."

  My soul goes still as stone. "I told you I had childish hopes that maybe he wasn't a total monster."

  "I wanted to give you the truth," he says.

  Not just my soul now—everything is still. The lake. The crickets. The air. "And?"

  "They were lying. The moment your grandmother asked how willing I was to make it worth her while to tell the truth, I knew they'd lied to you about him." He steps toward me, thinking I'll need him to hold me or shatter with the news, but I've reached my full shock capacity for the day and this… This is so big it will take me a lifetime to understand.

  Still, a question rises from my gut, from a place I can't keep it back. "He's not a monster?"

  "I can't speak for the kind of man he is," Alec says. "I wanted you to be able to choose whether or not to look into him, or contact him. But I can give you the number where he can be reached. And I can tell you…he never knew your mother was pregnant."

  My father never knew he was my father.

  My father…

  I start to laugh. Just a few whispers of a humorless sound, really. And when Alec's expression drops to absolute sympathy-laden concern, I laugh harder.

  And then I go quiet.

  I feel it happen.

  I feel my mind open to his words. I feel my mind sweep them inside and guide them into a very faraway corner, one I rarely access. I feel my mind lock them away to keep them safe until I can process them.

  I wonder if this is what going crazy feels like.

  Because all I feel is an icy calm.

  No.

  Wait.

  Rage.

  Rage I'm unused to, because there's no heat in it.

  My rage is an ice storm, and Alec's caught out in the cold.

  "How dare you?" My tone is dry ice, my words, raspy, scraping my throat. "Am I supposed to be grateful?"

  "No, I n-never intended—"

  "You can't just throw money at things to fix them. You can't—"

  "Yes, I can," he says, finally snapping, and I've never wanted to punch someone more than I want to punch him right now. He shakes his head at what he sees on my face. "Not the important things, Teagan. I know the things that matter most can't be purchased. But them? They don't matter. You matter. And you deserve to know who your own father is."

  "Stop." I throw my hand up like it'll do anything to block the word father from my ears. "You don't get to talk to me about my father. Don't you understand?"

  "You know what I understand?" he asks, his voice suddenly so quiet I have to strain to hear him. "I understand that I love you. That I started falling the moment I met you. That it's real, it's there, and it's not going away. That is what I know more than anything I've ever known. I never intended to hurt you."

  All week, this is what I've been dying to hear. I've hoped beyond my wildest anything that he would return the words I was so giddy to offer him.

  Now they're the last things I want to come from his lips.

  "You know nothing," I say, bitter with the truth of it.

  Heartbroken.

  Heart-kicked-out-of-my-chest.

  Heartless.

  "You don't love me. If you did—you would know I value my ability to act on my own behalf. You would know I can't stand when people go behind my back. For anything, but especially when it comes to my fam
ily life. I almost kicked Sam's ass the other week when he took my cellphone without my permission. And this? What you did? I don't give a shit about your intentions. Your intentions are the very reason I'd never be able to trust you again."

  "Teagan—"

  "Piper was right." I almost laugh again with this realization. How did I miss this before? "You have a savior complex." My world starts to crumble, finally, with the weight of my anger and my sadness, and I stand from where I'm perched before I crumble with it.

  "Piper?" he asks. "What are you—"

  "You're trying to save me. You've been trying to save me." I can't breathe. I am trying to pull air into my lungs but they've been crushed by my sudden understanding. "Audiobooks. Making sure I have health insurance. This thing with my grandparents. I can't breathe without feeling you somewhere in my life."

  Oh my God.

  I've been like my mom all along, letting him make my life better.

  And with this, my world is no longer tilting.

  It's disintegrating. I have no footing because it's no longer there beneath me.

  Dust. All I'm left with is dust.

  My face crumples a split second before tears run razors across my eyes. "You turned me into my mother," I manage to gasp out before I sob.

  "You're nothing like her." He strides toward me, all furrow-browed and concerned, and sweeps me into his arms and holds me against his chest and… I let him.

  I let him because I want to remember the feel of him, the scent of him.

  I let him because I can't stem my tears, and I'd rather press my face against him than let him see them.

  I let him because I need to walk away, but I'm too weak.

  "Tell me how to fix it," he says, his voice a jagged mess.

  "You don't get it." Finding the will to step back is like looking for an unburned sliver of wood after an all-consuming bonfire. But I dig, and I dig, and I find it. Even if it still burns me. "You took the one thing I based my entire life on and crushed it."

  "Teagan." Panic makes a knife's edge out of his voice. He drops to his knees, gripping my calves, looking up at me, the destruction of the entire world in his eyes. "D-don't do this."