Chose to forget? I know it’s possible to forget some particular memories, but my mind doesn’t work like that. Right now, I can recount every single conversation, shouting match and every touch Julian and I ever exchanged with each other. In as much as I want to forget everything with him, I can’t, so how can I forget things about my father?
“That’s not even possible.”
“With you it is,” Nicky says. “You have an extraordinary mind, Mia and after what happened before…” she trails off.
“What?” I prompt, my heart racing. “What happened before?”
“You were so young. The doctors and therapists said you forced the trauma away, shutting it down.”
Trauma? Jesus…
“What trauma?” I whisper, my heart pounding now.
Just then, I hear commotion, then sounds like people talking in the background.
“I have to go. We’re making arrangements for the funeral and—"
“Can I be there?” The question tumbles out of me in a rush, like a torrent. But that shit quickly dries when the silence on the line is her response.
“Mia…”
“Please. I never…” I choke out, closing my eyes shut but when I do, I see her, Nancy, spasming in that bed. I quickly open my eyes and focus on the window in front of me. “I never said goodbye.”
Because I killed her.
Do murderers say goodbye to their victims? Are they that civil if they couldn’t even be bothered to do something while said victim was taking their last breath?
She sighs, then silence stretches between us.
“I know you want to say goodbye, but you can’t come here.”
I can hear the finality in her voice, and I know better than to press the situation. I’m not going to argue with her, I’m just going to make my own decisions. I’m still close to Palos Verdes, I can still find a way to be there for funeral without her knowing.
“At least tell me when it’s happening,” I whisper, brokenly. “When are you going to lay her to rest? I know they’re talking about her on TV that she’s sick.”
“Yeah, we haven’t announced to her publicist that she’s…” she trails off again.
She can’t even say it. I don’t want to believe it. It’s fucked up.
“Okay.”
“Yeah, but we’re planning for the funeral to be in five days, you know, to give everyone who loved her a chance to grieve.”
The fuck? What the hell does she expect me to do with that?
“Everyone else who loves her, huh? And yet you say I can’t be there? Wow.”
“Mia, that’s not what I meant…” she says, but immediately trails off.
“Yeah whatever,” I mutter. “You send me away, but you don’t give me answers as to why,” I grit out. “And now this?”
“You have to trust me,” she whispers, this time the voices in the background growing louder.
“You have never given me any reason to trust you, Nicky!” I cry, looking around the hotel room, as a crippling sense of anxiety starts blooming in my chest.
No, not again.
“I know we haven’t talked about the fact that I’m your mother before. There’s so much we haven’t talked about, but…”
No. I’m not doing this with her.
“How’s everything over there?” I quickly question, cutting her off.
I completely ignore the harsh breath she blows. I’m not even sorry if I just inconvenienced her shitty explanation, she’s not the one who doesn’t have a home or anywhere to go.
Closing my eyes, I come face to face with the tortured look on Julian’s beautiful face, his dark green eyes peering into my soul, making me sigh.
“How…are they?” I whisper. I know she knows show I’m talking about. She has to know.
“Mia…”
“Please.”
Silence.
“The boys are out of their minds with worry. They’ve been out looking for you. At the rate they’re going, I worry that it’s only a matter of time until they find you.”
Why does my heart skip a few beats when I hear that?
“You can’t let them,” Nicky presses.
“Why?”
“Because their father and yours are brothers.”
Holy motherfucker!
11
Present day
It’s been four days since dad dropped the bomb on me.
Four days since I found out just how rotten my mother truly is.
Four days of not knowing where the hell Mia is and three days of Liam being gone like the fucking wind.
But that didn’t mean I accepted that shit.
“Someone knows where she is,” I snap, running a hand through my hair. Someone has to have some information. “People don’t just disappear. Something happens to them or they hide.”
“Dude, she doesn’t have any friends, so there’s no point looking there,” Cole mutters, looking tired, running a hand down his face.
We’ve been out each day, practically combing the streets of Palos Verdes, checking out popular hangout spots for both my fucking prodigal brother and Mia. It’s stupid but fuck we have to try.
“Mia is a solo rebel at best. Even if she had ‘friends’ she would never go to them.”
“Yeah, but Lilo has friends,” I mutter. Just saying Liam’s nickname given to him by Aiden makes my chest constrict all over again. Lately, it’s been hard to breathe, hard to move on, hard to fucking exist.
Cole deadpans, staring at me like I’m out of my fucking mind. “You and I both know Lilo would never go to anyone when he’s in a… mood.”
A mood.
I wouldn’t describe the look on my baby brother’s face when he found out that his mother was nothing more than a well-dressed, Cabo-loving child abuser, as a mood.
He was devasted. He was angry and most of all, he was fucking sad.
And even with all that, he still has no idea what else I discovered when he stormed out. Fuck!
Where would he go with that shit pressing heavily on his mind like it’s destroying me.
I can barely sleep. I’ve been up for almost seventy-two hours.
Tension and a particularly unhealthy dose of anger have been my constant best friend, spurring me on, and that was perfectly all right with me.
Anger was better. Anger didn’t make me feel like shit inside. It didn’t ask the hard questions, the ones where the only one to blame would be me. No, anger was reliable, ready whenever I needed it.
And right now, I was angry at Mia.
Four days ago, I was worried about her driving away like that, thinking that I hurt her so much that she finally snapped, but now, now this is just ridiculous.
She left her phone in her room, that was deliberate.
I used dad’s resources to check the passenger lists from LAX for the past three days, her name didn’t pop up. I knew she was broke. Her personal account was still sitting at the same five dollars and ten cents from eight months ago.
Then there’s her asshole father, Nathan. His days are numbered. He’s a douchebag, a pathetic excuse of a man and I can barely control this raging need in me to end him for what he did to my girl.
Before I read that damn medical file, I never respected him as father for leaving Mia alone when she needed him most and for not caring that his daughter is nowhere to be found.
Mia was right for ignoring him, pretending like he doesn’t exist. I thought Nathan didn’t deserve her, but now I know, she was better off without him and if he so much as breathes in her direction again, I swear to God, I’m going for his head and I don’t give a damn what dad says.
Who hurts a four-year-old girl like that? What kind of sick fuck do you have to be?
I didn’t bother asking him where his daughter might be. Partly because he seemed out of it, drinking all day, sitting on his couch like he was contemplating his own suicide or my murder and partly because dad’s warning about him kept ringing in my head, thereby reinforcing that the dead look in his eyes
was there for a reason.
That brings me to Nicky.
There’s something going on with her and not just the way she dropped that bomb about Courtney. Something else is going on there.
“There’s something fishy going on here,” Cole starts, voicing my thoughts.
We’re at the cliffs, aptly named the Devil’s Track, with our cars parked at the shoulder of the road, staring out at the sea. I feel like I’m going to wither with the glare of the sun, so I turn around to grab my shades from the dash of my car. I also grab the rolled-up blunt in there that I got from Liam’s room. The shithead always has the good stuff.
“Fishy?” I scoff. “Don’t make me point out that we’re standing up here looking out at that fucking fishing boat out there,” I mutter, annoyed with him.
“Fuck you, asshole, you know what I’m trying to say,” he mutters. I pass him the blunt after taking a hit, chasing some kind of elusive relief from it. “Liam’s?”
I nod and he takes a bit. “That boy always gets the good shit.”
“I wonder where he gets it from.”
Liam has a hunger for danger that doesn’t sit well with me and this disappearing act, it’s not the first time he’s done it. But it is the first time he’s been livid with me. He hasn’t talked to me or sent a text or smoke signals at the very least. He’s just gone.
“You do know he was right about what he said right?” Cole mutters, the asshole blowing smoke in my direction. “You’re overbearing.”
“I’m protecting him.”
“You’re suffocating him,” he counters, all straight-faced and shit, the easy smile gone.
“Look who’s talking,” I fire back, wanting to hurt him because I haven’t yet recovered from how everything fell apart with my brother. With Mia. With Courtney and now I’m here picking a fight with my best friend because I’m all bitter inside. “The man who ignores his own siter.”
“Fuck you!” he growls, taking a threatening step closer to me. “You know that shit is different.”
“She’s your fucking twin. I know you fucking sense when she needs you. I know you have nightmares about her…”
“That was years ago, we’re not kids anymore,” he growls, cutting me off.
“Fuck that! You and I both know that age doesn’t matter with that shit! It keeps coming back over and over again, but for God’s sake, do something about it before you really lose her.”
Cole and I don’t do cheap, sensitive, corny heart to heart conversations and shit, but we know each other to the very core. I know why this thing with Mia is eating at him and I hate that he cares about her this much. I hate that the accusation in his eyes is eating at me.
“J, I’m fucking warning you now,” Cole growls, taking another step toward me. “You have no idea the demons I fight and you speaking about them right now when you’re the reason Mia ran, isn’t in your best interest.”
Yeah, I deserve that, but that’s the thing about guilt felt by assholes, it makes us even more vindictive.
“And you can’t even look your sister in the eye because you’re fucking selfish!”
It’s a shitty thing to say. Between the two of us, we have no illusions of who we are or how bad we can be, but fuck, I’m not too far gone not to realize that between the two of us, I’m the selfish one. Not him.
“I failed her!” he shouts. “I failed my sister, sure, but at least I admit it. I’m not out here pretending everything is all right while I’m practically prying my eyes open every morning, the hollowness of what I did eating at me.”
That’s a shitty thing to say because it’s true.
We stare at each other, breathing hard and deep, debating whether or not to beat the shit out of each other as we’ve done twice before. I knew a third time was hovering close but that third time had to be earned properly.
“Are we fucking done with this shit?” he growls. I stare at him, then nod, looking away from him to the ocean.
“Yeah.”
“Good,” he scoffs. “Now shut up and let’s go through this again.”
“Please, you have the floor, asshole,” I mutter.
He shoots me the finger but leans back on his car, still looking out at sea like he’s still contemplating the balance of probability of pushing me over the cliffs. If he did, I wouldn’t put up a fight. He’d be doing me a favor by putting me out of my misery.
Cole takes a puff, then passes the blunt to me. I inhale the damn thing, knowing damn well that we’re not supposed to be doing this, but fuck. I pass the blunt back and watch as he blows out rings of smoke. He isn’t even aware that he’s doing it.
“I think we’ve been going at this fuck-up the wrong,” he says. “If your mother…”
“Courtney,” I grit out, cutting him off. I refuse to refer to that woman as my mother. Like I told her four days ago, she forfeited that right.
A lot of people go through life without mothers, and have done well. Needless to say, that has been true in my case. That woman doesn’t have a maternal bone in her body anyway. If she did, she wouldn’t have… FUCK!
“Okay, if Courtney talked to Mia…”
“She didn’t talk to her, she planted seeds in her head and fertilized them with the shit that comes out of her mouth.”
“Are you going to cut me off at every turn, jerk?” He glances at me and I know he’s probably giving me a withering look. I’m glad I can’t see it.
“When it’s necessary,” I mutter, passing him the blunt. “You phrase your thoughts slower than a spelling bee full of stutters.”
“Tell me something, does your assholery ever take a day off?”
I take a moment to actually think about that. There were days when I would actually try to be a decent human being. But when I was with Mia, she never asked me to be anything else other than who I am to the core.
“Not since she left,” I mutter.
“Since you made her leave, you mean?” he fires back. I can’t see his eyes as they’re now hidden by his Ray-Bans but I’m sure he’s hard gaze is judging me, seriously contemplating on whether or not to throw me over the cliff. I bet the vote is close and honestly if he did, I wouldn’t fight him.
“Fuck you!”
“It’s the truth, isn’t it? You wanted her to leave when you blurted that sappy, pathetic drunken shit that night.”
“I thought we were done with this shit.”
“Yeah well, I’m still bitter.”
“Evidently,” I mutter.
“You do know that you could’ve talked to her like a normal human being, but you didn’t, so now you feel shitty inside your cold, black heart because you’re finally facing the consequences of being an insufferable jerk with a mouth that makes the devil sigh.”
“I hardly use mouth that much,” I grumble. “Maybe Mia. She’s the one with a mouth that dirty and fiery anyway.”
She’d made the devil proud. Everything about her, is an act of war, like she was designed to set me off and make me obsess over her. I still didn’t like that she had this much power over me.
He tilts his head to the left as if really thinking about it. “Yeah, that’s probably true.”
“Exactly.”
He shrugs, passing me the blunt. “For real though, when last did you actually make an effort to not piss someone off?”
“Not since Aiden passed.” The admission passes through my lips, leaving an ashy taste on my tongue.
The truth is, I don’t want to hear whatever my best friend has to say because it’s probably the ugly truth. But unlike that fucking romcom movie Liam forced Cole and I to watch with Aiden a few months ago, this doesn’t have some cute happy ending that made Cole and Liam cry like little girl scouts.
This was real life, straight out of the Fitz mansion.
“Anyway, back on track, again, Courtney said she talked to Mia, and that she apologized and set the record straight, do you think she was lying about that?”
I think about it for a second, then shake
my head. “She was telling the truth.” I meant what I told Mia the other night. My mother was a piece of work, but when she was caught in an act, she didn’t lie.
“Yeah, I didn’t think she’d lie about that,” Cole sighs. “Not with that whole good riddance veiled insults she alluded about Mia leaving, which means she really doesn’t know where Mia is.”
I groan, staring at the sky, begging for strength not to murder the best QB who has a bright future ahead of him.
“Dude, we know that already,” I groan. “Are you hellbent on getting a broken nose today?”
“Nah, look at the bigger picture, asshole. What would a girl like Mia do after finding out that the woman who raised her has been having an elaborate long-ass affair with your dad, the man who ruined her father’s life?” he questions, then a shudder rolls off his shoulders. “Dude, I’m still stunned with that one.”
Stunned? Try disgusted.
What happened between John and Nancy was more than an affair. They were in love, but I don’t want to talk about that. Because it probably means dad interfered in Nathan’s life because he wanted Nancy to himself. It’s fucked up, selfish, but damn, I get it. I’d do the same for my Little Minx.
“Other girls would have broken down and cried or whined,” Cole says with a soft chuckle. “But not Mia.”
Yeah, but not my Little Minx.
“Mia would set the whole damn house on fire with that black heart in her chest.”
At this point, with everything that has happened with Mia, I’m convinced that she’s some kind of arsonist; at least an arson with everything that has to do with me.
“Exactly! So, why didn’t she?” Cole asks.
“How high are you right now? Nancy died and that was after that shit at the police station,” I mutter, that horrible feeling coming back to bite me in the ass. “She was going through a lot and adding that shit between dad and Nancy… I guess it was too much.”
But that still doesn’t mean she would have run, does it?
“Yeah we know that, but what we don’t know is what happened after that.” Cole pushes away from his car. “After passing out where did she go? Who carried her out of the room and where did they go?”
A strange sensation takes root in my stomach and I pause, my mind racing.
Cruel Kisses: It’s Just High School #2 Page 12