Page 108 of Bad at Love

I walk to an area I’m unfamiliar with and find a bus stop, but I’m not waiting for the bus. I call a ride share and have them take me to the nearest hotel. I pay way too much money to get into a room, but once I’m there, I fall face-first onto the bed and go to sleep.

The room phone rings sometime later, and I reach for it blindly, swiping it from the cradle.

“Hello?” I mumble, face still half in the pillow.

“I’m sorry to disturb you, Mr. Andrews. This is Lydia from the front desk. It seems we’re missing a signature to run your credit card. Would you be able to come down to do that?”

I push myself up, rubbing my eyes before glancing at the clock. Late morning. I should get up and head back to the home.

“Yeah, I’ll be down in a few minutes.”

“Thank you so much.”

Hanging up the phone, I get to my feet, stretch, and ignore the ache in my chest. I make sure I have my wallet, phone, and keycard before leaving the room and going down to the lobby. I sign the paperwork the front desk needs, then request a car.

It’s rainy outside, just a steady drizzle which I guess is better than a steady downpour. I yawn, rocking back on my heels as I hide under the overhang of the hotel, waiting for my car. Every time the car gets close, I get an alert that there’s a delay. Must be stuck in traffic or something. By the time it gets here, I’m antsy as hell and ready to get this over with. Which is a terrible way to look at this situation, but I need to stay detached from it. What I’m doing with my life isn’t working, so I need to move on.

I tip the driver as I head up the walkway. There’s another new face at the front desk. I sign in, hand over my ID, and let them know I’ll be in my mother’s room but that I need to speak with Billy. They assure me they will get the message to him.

My mother’s door is open, as it usually is, and I walk in. The soft classical music I remember all too well from my childhood floats around the room, the mp3 player I bought her plugged into the charger by the nightstand so it never dies and can continue to play soothing music for her at all hours.

The relationship I have with my mother is confusing. My childhood wasn’t great. Hell, it wasn’t even good. We constantly fought to make ends meet, and as a child, I worked way too hard to survive. My mother did her best, but she should have done more. She should havewantedto do more. But there was nothing there. It’s like she’d given up on life, and every time something got just a little hard, she withdrew. When things got bad, she shut down and hid away in her room for days. As I got older, I realized what I was seeing wasn’t normal and begged her to go to the doctor. She never did. She outright refused and said nothing was wrong with her, that she was fine and I needed to mind my own business. It was a constant battle; dealing with her and trying to live.

I still remember the look on her face as I walked out the door the day after I turned eighteen. She was devastated. Betrayed. How dare I leave her after all she’s done for me? She thought she tried her best, and maybe she did. Maybe it’s all she had to give me.

I feel like I’ve been fighting to survive since I came out of the womb and I’m just… tired. I’m so fucking tired.

She did her best.

That’s what I keep telling myself. I don’t hate her. Of course I love her. But maybe there is some resentment there, because if I had a child, there is no way I would let them do as much as I did as a kid. I’d fight for them, not make them fight for me. But the guilt over leaving her is what had me come back as soon as I heard about her stroke. And the need to apologize and explain why I left has been eating away at my brain ever since. She’ll never get that closure, and neither will I.

I shouldn’t feel this way. I had every right to leave the house and make a better life for myself. But… I left her. I could have helped her, could have gotten her help. I’ve had the means to do so for years, but I never did. Maybe as a punishment because I was angry that she didn’t help me more. Or maybe it wasn’t something so cruel. Maybe it was just because I was enjoying my own life for once and didn’t want to deal with more responsibilities. But at the end of the day, those reasons don’t matter. I left her here to rot, to deal with her own shit, and turned a blind eye because I was just fucking tired of it. I was selfish. So fucking selfish.

“I’m sorry, Mom,” I whisper as tears sting my eyes. “I shouldn’t have left you. You did your best.”

I take her hand. The slow beeping of the machines and whooshing of air to breathe for her is softly heard over the music.

“But I’m so angry with what the world gave us. It wasn’t fair. I like to think that in a better life you could have been a better mom and I could have been a better son. But we didn’t get that, and it’s just not fair.”

I hang my head, working through my emotions. I need to get out of here and go far away. Back to Boston doesn’t even seem far enough at this point.

Where the hell is Billy?

I sit with nothing but my thoughts for a long while before there is a soft knock at the door. I can hardly lift my head to see who it is.

“Hi, Storm,” Billy says, giving me a sad smile. “Do you want to talk in my office?”

I bring my gaze back to my mother, lifting her hand to my lips to kiss before returning it to the bed. Then I lean in to kiss her head.

“Love you, Mom,” I whisper for the last time, knowing I won’t be coming back into this room ever again.

Chapter Forty-Three

Gabriel

I refuse to give up.

It’s been a full week since Storm left, and I can’t stop thinking about him and wondering where he is. I have no idea how to find him, or where to even begin looking for him. There isn’t much I know about his life, and I’m so angry with myself for not learning more.

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