Page 44 of Tell Me Softly
“What are you doing here?” I asked, rage bubbling up inside me. I wasn’t in the mood for this shit. Not today. Kam was on edge too. She frantically combed her fingers through her hair, trying to come up with something to say. But before she could, I cut her off, trying not to look at her face, which brought up such confusing feelings for me. “You know what? Never mind. I don’t care.” I walked past her and slammed the door.
Once inside, I could hear my mother cooking in the kitchen and smell the onions in the pan frying in oil. My brother was on his way upstairs, and when he turned back briefly to look at me, I saw something strange: flushed excitement giving way to disappointment. So Kam had been with him. And he’d liked it. Well, I wasn’t going to dance around the issue.
“What the hell are you up to?” I asked, unable to hold back. I was surprised at the vehemence in my voice. I told myself it was because of Kam, because she’d entered a place I swore I’d never let her, but I could tell there was something else happening to me. I was jealous, even if I didn’t yet dare admit it. Taylor turned around and squared off against me.
“This is my house too.” I hadn’t seen him so serious in a long time.
“You’re still a kid, you don’t make the rules here. If I see her here again…”
“You’ll what?” He walked down a step, puffing out his chest. I held my breath to keep myself from slapping him across the face. I’d never done that before, and even the thought that I’d like to was shocking to me.
“I like Kami. And I think she likes me too. And I’ll have her over here as often as I like. You’re stuck in the past, and it’s time for you to get over it so the rest of us can carry on with our goddamn lives.”
He walked past me and out the front door, slamming it just asI had on the way in. I clenched and unclenched my fists, turned, asked myself what I was doing, what I thought would happen, whether I wanted a fight, whether I wanted to tell him off, but then I saw my mother—eyes sad—watching me from the kitchen.
“Thiago, you can’t keep avoiding it,” she said with…sorrow? “Ever since you were little boys, I knew this would end up happening. I just never knew which one of you it would be.”
What the hell?
“I’ve got no idea what you’re talking about,” I said, interrupting her and trying to control my mood. “But there’s one thing I know for sure. I can’t go on sharing a roof with someone who killed the one person I loved most in this world.”
My mother brought her hand to her heart. I thought she was about to cry, and I didn’t want to see it, so I ran up to my room and locked the door.
Chapter Seventeen
Kami
My nerves were frayed when I walked inside. Being back in the Di Bianco house—seeing my old best friends’ mother again, almost kissing Taylor, coming face to face with the hatred in Thiago’s eyes—had been too much. Too much emotion for one day.
I closed the door behind me and couldn’t hear a thing. No one making a late-night snack in the kitchen, no one watching the news or playing video games. But then a shout broke the silence: my parents were arguing. That was nothing new, but normally they tried to do it down in the basement so we wouldn’t hear them. I don’t think they were worried about me as much as my brother. Doubly strange, it was my father doing the yelling.
“Don’t you realize how fucking frivolous this is? If it can’t be done, it can’t be done, and that’s all there is to it, dammit!”
“Frivolous?!” my mother replied in a tone that told me this wasn’t going to be pretty. “Let me remind you who said he wanted me to get operated on after I had Cameron!”
“Yeah, because you cried for a month straight about how your tits had gone saggy, and that was the only solution I could think of!”
“Oh, please!” my mother said with a bitter laugh. “Even I could come up with something more original than that.”
I walked toward the stairs, but instead of climbing them, I stopped and listened to the argument.
“Everything I tell you, you twist around, trying to make me into the bad guy. I have to stay away from home sometimes. It’s work, get it? I’m tired of you always accusing me of cheating on you. Especially when there’s one person in this fucking marriage that we know has a record of cheating.”
I stopped breathing. Not because of what he’d said, but the fact that he’d said it. That subject was taboo in our house. It was never mentioned, and we all tried to act like it had never happened.
“How dare you bring that back up after all these years?”
I ducked around the corner as I heard my mother run out and stomp downstairs, sniffling. I hated my parents fighting, but I hated it even more when I noticed my little brother curled up in a ball in the living room with a terrified expression on his face.
“Cameron! What happened?” I asked, kneeling next to him.
My mother heard me and ran around to face me. “There you are!” She pointed a finger at me. Her mascara was running, and she seemed more angry than sad. “What the hell are you doing coming home at this hour?”
“I was busy with a project for school,” I said, standing up.
“Why didn’t you call and let me know?!” she shouted back. “I was out having drinks with my friends, and I had to leave to go get Cameron from school. You were supposed to bring him home.”
“Since when?”
