Page 31 of Bad Luck Club

Before he could stop himself, he grabbed her hand. “Sorry if I’m being an asshole. You’re doing great.”

Surprise washed over her face. “Is it that obvious I’m struggling?”

“No,” he said, squeezing. “You’re hiding it well.”

She seemed to accept his reassurance and pulled her hand away. “Okay. Then let’s get started.”

He was already sitting in the middle of the sofa, so he turned to face the kitchen while she sat next to him and turned her back to him. They weren’t touching, but they were only inches apart. He could feel the warmth of her body, and he liked it.

They were silent for several seconds before she said, “Sorry. This is harder than I expected.”

Her voice broke, and a surge of protectiveness rushed through him. “You don’t have to tell me anything, Blue.”

“No,” she said, her voice wavering. “I do.”

Lee reached his hand behind him and fumbled around until he found hers, clasping his fingers around her palm and squeezing.

Her body stiffened, and he was sure she was going to pull her hand away, but instead she said, “First I need to go back to when I was a little girl.”

Chapter Ten

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Lee wasn’t supposed to be reassuring her.Shewas supposed to be doing that forhim. But she found herself leaning into the warmth of his back and the comforting curl of his hand around hers as she began. “I always knew my parents weren’t anything alike, but they used to joke about it with people. They’d tell people opposites attract.”

He squeezed her hand a little, and she remembered his parents had been the same way. Adalia had told her about their mother, Laura. She’d knitted a sweater for them every Christmas and delighted in surprising them with their favorite treats. And their father…anyone with an internet connection knew he was a man without morals, one who’d do anything to further his own agenda.

She squeezed back.

“But by the time I got a little older—six or seven—I knew something was seriously wrong. My mom would have ‘episodes,’ as Dad called them. They usually started with a burst of art. She’d paint five paintings in a day or crochet a blanket in an afternoon, working at it until her fingers were red and blistered. She’d seem really happy, but it always unwound quickly. She’s always fanciful…but at those times she’s a bit paranoid. Kids are always scared of things lingering in the dark, and my mom was too. She’d tell me there were things hiding in the shadows of my room, watching me, and if I saw any, I should chant to make them go away. It terrified me.” She swallowed dryly. “To this day, I have to sleep with a night-light. When she got like that, my parents didn’t get along. I’d hear my dad shouting at her, and her shouting back. Accusing him of working with ‘them.’ Then there were other times when she couldn’t get out of bed…”

“She’s bipolar,” Lee said softly. “Like Jack’s mother.”

“Both of them are, yes, but they’re not the same just because they have the same diagnosis.” She couldn’t help some pique leaking into her voice. “My mother’s a wonderful person. She’s more than a word.”

“Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to offend you. I guess I just don’t know much about it.”

Reminding herself she was being defensive because of her father’s attitude, not Lee’s—Lee didn’t even know her mother—she took a deep inhale, breathing in her intentions, and then a deep exhale, releasing the dark emotions.

“It’s okay,” she said. “I know. This is just…hard for me to talk about. Mom’s always been off and on medicine. She doesn’t like the way it makes her feel. The roller coaster is better for her art, she says, so every time she feels better she stops taking the pills. But eventually she always slides back into it.”

“That must have been tough for you and your dad.”

Blue huffed a bitter laugh. “My father hates me, Lee. He hates both of us. My mother was the only one who ever cared about me.”

He flinched at that, but he didn’t tell her it wasn’t true. He clearly knew from experience that the love between a parent and child couldn’t be taken for granted.

“What happened?”

“She got really sick when I was ten. She left me alone in the house. My dad was away on a business trip, and I didn’t know what to do. So I spent the week alone. There was enough food in the pantry that I didn’t need to go to the grocery store, and I walked to school. But she didn’t come back before he did. Turns out she was in jail. She got arrested for attacking someone in the park, someone she thought was one of ‘them,’ but she didn’t have any ID on her, and she refused to tell them who she was. My dad found her. She was hospitalized after that, and my father divorced her while she was still in the hospital. He was able to get full custody, with only supervised visitation for my mom. He made sure everyone in our lives shunned her and shut her out, until eventually she moved back to where she was from. To Greenville.” She swallowed back tears. “But it wasn’t because he wanted me, Lee. It was because he didn’t want her to have me. And because he didn’t want his own daughter to be ‘crazy’ too.”

Lee cursed under his breath, and she felt him tensing against her. Had she scared him off this time? But he stayed put, his hand ever on hers.

“What happened then?”

“He tore up her art. She took most of it with her, of course, but he tore up the things she’d left in the house. He destroyed anything she gave me too. Art supplies. Presents. He said it was part of her sickness, and he didn’t allow me to create anything either. So I had to do it in secret. And every day, every hour of my life in that house, I could feel him watching me. Waiting for me to prove that I was like her. That I was going to get sick too. Whenever I got angry or sad or…anything, it meant I was a time bomb waiting to blow. And then he got married again, to a woman who listened to every word he said as if it were gospel, and they had another daughter. I love my sister, Lee, but he has done everything he could to keep her away from me.”

“I can understand that,” he said. “My father always set me apart from my sisters. He told me spending time with them, and with my mom, would make me weak. Every time Georgie invited me to bake a cake with her, or Adalia asked us to play one of her games, I’d feel him looking at me. I knew he wanted me to say no, so when he was around, I did. Because I wanted toimpresshim. I only cried once around him, after my grandmother died, and he took me aside afterward and said tears were only for women and sissies. He told me that I wasn’t to cry again. Ever. Especially not around my mother and sisters.”

Oh, her heart ached for the boy he’d been. The boy who’d been taught at such a young age that he wasn’t supposed to feel…and if he did, something was wrong with him. The boy who’d been a little like her. “A real man is one who is free to be whatever he wants to be, Lee. That’s what this is all about.”

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