“Actually, I’ve got an early start tomorrow. I’m pretty tired. So…” I couldn’t meet his eyes. I was hurt. And when I was hurting it quickly morphed to outright anger.
I had cut open a vein for him. I had shown him the softer side of Skylar Murphy. And when I asked him to do the same he went to the fucking bathroom? Are you kidding me?
Maybe he really was the same as Mac but with a hotter face. I had learned to look out for myself first and foremost and alarm bells were going off in my head to retreat.
Robert looked slightly bewildered. “Oh, okay, I mean I kind of thought…” his words drifted off. He didn’t need to tell me what he expected. He thought I’d ask him to stay. And up until twenty minutes ago, that had been my play. Now I crossed my arms over my chest and watched as he got himself dressed.
“Is everything okay?” he asked as he zipped up his pants.
“Everything’s just peachy. Why wouldn’t it be?” Robert was a smart guy, and I knew he heard the ice in my tone.
“Did I do something? Did we move too fast? I don’t want you to think I expect anything.” He reached out for me, but I only let him take my hand, which he held awkwardly.
“I’m tired,” I repeated. I knew I should be a mature adult and tell him what was bothering me. That I was slightly humiliated now that he knew all this deep, dark stuff about me, and he gave me fuck all. But I couldn’t. Because I had developed a habit of shutting down when stuff got to me.
Robert picked up his keys from the table, watching me closely, trying to read the situation. “I’ll call you tomorrow?” He posed it as a question.
I didn’t respond. I walked him to the door and with a wave, I closed it behind him.
And that was the last time we spoke for months.
**
I traced the lines of the stained glass, appreciating the detail and trying to ignore the way my heart expanded to fill the empty spaces. Because it meant a lot to me that he wasn’t giving up even when I ignored him and was hateful and nasty.
And he bought me the most exquisite piece of art because he wanted me to have something beautiful.
Maybe a little mystery wasn’t the worst thing.
**
I stood on the doorstep of my parents’ house trying to think of a hundred excuses not to ring the bell.
I was abducted by aliens.
I decided to run off with the circus.
I left for a last-minute trip to Australia.
If only one of them would work. I would give just about anything not to have to go inside and spend the next hour of my life with the two people that lived there.
Which was an awful thing to think about your parents. Meg, Adam, and Kyle had tried to understand when we were younger. They listened to me bitch and cry about how bad things were for me at home. But the reality was they each grew up in stable, functional households. I had felt like the odd man out. None of them had a clue what it was like to be raised by narcissists.
I had always been an afterthought. They were too busy hurting each other to see how they were hurting their only child. Not that they’d care—or stop—if they had paid attention. They brought out the worst in each other. It wasn’t surprising that I escaped as fast as my legs could carry me.
And it wasn’t surprising that I struggled to find relationships with men that weren’t toxic.
I was a classic case of “live what you know.”
But I knew that if I didn’t commit to dinner once a month, my mother would make things so much worse. I had learned to manage our relationship mostly on my terms, but that meant succumbing to a meal on Nightmare Street to make up for the rest of the time when I could actively avoid them both.
I could hear my parents shouting from the porch. They were at it already and I hadn’t even arrived yet. Usually, they saved the show for when they had an audience. I knocked on the door and waited. The yelling stopped and I could hear footsteps stomping down the hallway.
The door opened to reveal my dad looking decidedly frazzled. He hadn’t aged well. Living with my mother had taken years off his life. I had asked him once why he kept taking her back and he had shrugged. “It’s not like I can do any better.”
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why personal relationships were hard for me.
“Sky, there you are. You’re a bit late.” He looked at his watch. “You were supposed to be here at six. Your mom burned the lasagna.”
I stepped inside, not bothering to hug my dad. We weren’t a touchy-feely kind of family. “It’s 6:02, Dad. It took me a couple of minutes to find a place to park on the street.”
“You should always give yourself time to get to where you’re going. People that are late leave a bad impression,” he lectured, and I rolled my eyes, not bothering to hide it. I had to remind myself it was only an hour. I never allowed myself to stay longer than that. I could stomach their fighting and their nitpicking about my clothes, my job, my lack of significant others, knowing it was only for sixty minutes. I got the feeling that was all my parents could deal with too.
But my mom had this weird ‘keeping up with the Jones’ thing to her,
