Page 92 of Unorthodox
I want to kill her.
“I watched you grow up. I watched you turn from a lostboyto…” she gestures to me, then drops her hands. “To whatever it is you are now. And I thought there was something good in you, all this time. After everything I watched you do. I knew you were hurting, but I thought something would heal you, Max.” Her voice is hoarse, and she breaks off into some sort of anguished cry.
I grip the gun so hard my hand hurts. My arm isshaking. I want to kill her.
“I saw what he did to you, before you got involved in…” she gestures past me, and I know she’s talking about Addison, and I hate her all the more for it. “Before you got involved withpeople, Max. I thought it was temporary. And maybe I was blind, and maybe I cared about you where your mother left off.”
I clench my jaw so tight it aches, cross my arms over my chest to stop my hands from shaking.
“And you never brought anyone here. Not likethat.And Evora…and all the other girls…I saw the bruises. I heard them cry. I saw the blood on your sheets. But I always thought it was…what you each wanted.”
“They did fucking want it,” I tell her, and I mean it.
“She doesn’t,” she counters, glancing past me, toward Addison’s room again. “She doesn’t, and you’re using her as a pawn—”
“I’ve usedmanypeople as pawns, Mamie.” The anger returns, and I keep thinking about it. About her watching what was mine. About her seeing me sodomized. About her seeing Oliver,hiding.About herfucking pitying me.Seeing what I really am.Nothing.
“Bad people,” she corrects me. “You’ve usedbadpeople—”
“You mean people just like me?” I point the gun toward my chest, the barrel against my heart.
Her face goes pale, her hands fluttering to her mouth again.
I laugh at her look of concern, but I don’t lower the gun. Instead, I raise it higher, point it to the side of my head. “You want this, don’t you? After everything I’ve done? Everything you saw? AfterDante?”My voice breaks on his name, but I don’t think about it. “You know I’m nothing, Mamie. You’re going to leave, aren’t you? That’s what this is?” I gesture toward her with my free hand, to the tissue in her clenched fist. “You’re leaving. Why is that, hmm?” I press the gun harder against the side of my head, my finger still on the trigger. “You don’t see the good in me anymore? That boy that got fucked, you don’t see him, do you?” I lean down to get in her face, keeping the gun to my head, my entire body trembling. “That’s because he fucking died, Mamie. He died, and he’s never coming back.”
She grabs my face in her hands, and I freeze, her touch making me feel physically sick. But I can’t move. I can’t think.
“You’re still in there, Max.”
I’m not.
“You’re still there. They didn’t take your heart. They didn’t take your soul.”
They took everything.
“You don’t have to become what they wanted you to be.”
I already am the monster.
“You could change—"
“Max.”
Mamie’s eyes dart past me at the sound of that voice, the soft one with the sweet fucking Southern accent.
I close my eyes, swallow down the lump in my throat as I straighten, gun to my head.
“Max,” Addison says from behind me. “What are you…” She trails off, and I hear her footsteps across the wooden floors, running toward me instead of away.
Mamie steps back and Addison is in front of me, her green eyes wide, her lips parted as she takes in the gun against my temple.
I half-expect her to tell me to pull the trigger.
I see the bruises around her throat. The ones I put there.
The burns on her chest, just above the white tank she’s wearing.
As she lifts her hand to me, I see the scars on her inner forearm, the tiny marks to keep track of the days I left her with Ben.
