Page 199 of Seizing Control: Part One

The soles of his boots scuff on the concrete floor.

I chuckle, uncertain why he’s threatening me about his younger brother. “Calm down, sugar plum. Your brother won’t discover I’m alive until it’s time.”

He juts his chin. “Fuck, I wanna kill you.”

“Ditto.” Slash tries again to wrestle out of my hold. With deliberate cruelty, I jam his arm higher, pinning his wrist between his shoulder blades. Infusing sarcasm into my voice, I tell him, “But, Lily might get upset, so it’d probably be better if we faced things like adults.”

My offer is genuine, even if I didn’t phrase it that way.

The only way I can see through this drama is to build a treaty.

A pact where we agree to put Lily first and our grievances with each other second.

“What the hell would you know about actin’ like an adult, huh? You think ’cause you wear a suit nowadays that you have some kinda moral high ground... that this posh voice you’re affectin’ makes you better than you are?” When I shove him away from me, Slash wheels around and shapes up. I let my arms hang loosely at my sides, keeping my expression blank when he snarls at me, “Not a thing’s changed... you’re still the same motherfuckin’ hothead you've always been. A fuck-up... the Grade A dickhead who screwed up all our lives with his stupidity.”

Every words he sneers is a liver punch.

A reminder of my deficiencies.

Negating all the work I’ve been doing.

The Dyslexia diagnosis.

Elocution lessons.

Speech therapy.

Cultural enrichment.

Etiquette tuition.

Class protocols.

As I head toward my thirty-first birthday, I’m basically finishing my Higher School Certificate, recovering from a near-death experience that robbed me of my voice and my humanity, learning the entire history of the line of Adjudicator’s preceding me, and undertaking fight, torture, and weapons training all at once. It’s intense. A whole new way of living. An instantaneous reversal in everything I thought I knew and believed.

My instinctual responses. The voice in my head. Every mannerism.

I have changed from the inside out.

So, I swallow down the hurt Slash’s derision causes, ignore the flare of violence that my dented pride demands as retribution, and focus on the fear beneath his anger. Try to decipher why he’s coming at me with resentment when he’s the one in the position of power.

Slash has Lily.

I have an empty bed.

He should be crowing, not floundering.

I examine everything while I breathe through my cycles.

Four. Two. Six.

Repeat.

My parasympathetic nervous system engages. The catalogue of emotions that have been drummed into my head are sorted through. Complete with definitions and correlations. A complex directory of feelings that remain foreign to me.

I’m a simple man.

I love.

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