Page 49 of The Last Time You Break Me

Her light emeralds twinkled, and I saw myself in those eyes.

Everyone always commented on how much we looked alike. How I was her double and I would always run from it. Deny it and shut down all of the comments with a vile and cruel backlash of brutal words spoken by a broken daughter in tremendous pain.

I couldn’t accept that I was anything like her.

I also couldn’t accept this deep hatred I also held for her.

A hatred nobody knew about.

How could they? How could I admit that out loud?

My mother was murdered. She suffered an unimaginable hell, and the anguish she must have felt screams to me in the darkness of every night I laid my head down to rest. I would hear her cries as they bellowed around me and brought me the demons of torment.

I imagined it.

I saw it.

And most often I swore I could feel it.

She was innocent and she was taken from us too soon, through no fault of her own.

But I couldn’t help this irrational hatred that brewed from her leaving me at all.

How could she do that to me? To us…

How could she have not come home?

It twisted me and turned me into a sick fucking cunt for harboring those feelings.

People wonder why I spiraled into the darkness by choice and never fought it when it came for me. They had said they didn’t understand why I was the way that I am.

Dalton said the same thing to me not even forty-eight hours ago.

But this here was the reason why.

That was why I needed the darkness.

That was why I needed the void that held all of my anguish.

It took away the knowledge of what a horrid and unforgivable person that I was.

What a vicious and ungrateful, bitch of a daughter that I was.

I traced my thumb over her face and wished that I could have felt something other than nothing. “I’m sorry, Ma. But you created the monster.”

“The monster has always been there, Lara. Her death just gave you the courage to let it out,” Reggie uttered behind me. His voice a husked whisper that engulfed my silent pity.

“How did you get in here?” I asked as I kept my back to him and stared blankly at the photo that sat at the top of the pile in the box.

“You think you have secrets from me? I know everything, pretty girl. I even knew to hire Techi to get my handprint activated on the scanner,” he admitted and I didn’t have it in me to address it any further. I was drowning at the moment, held down by a heavy sea of trauma.

Reggie stepped behind me and pulled me back into him. He kept me facing forward as he rested his head on the crook of my shoulder and wrapped those ripped arms around me like he feared to let me go. “It’s amazing, isn’t it?” he spoke and the words were just enough to penetrate the fog that had slowly taken hostage of my mind. “How perceptive and evolved we could be regarding others. How profound our advice could be. Yet when it comes to our own emotions, everything we know wealready knew just fades into oblivion and you feel utterly alone and back at square one.”

I breathed deeply and let out a heavy sigh as my shoulders deflated and I rested my heavy head back against his chest as my neck began to ache.

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about how you blame yourself. About how you’re mad at your mother but refuse to admit it because you think it makes you a bad person.” He pulled back and turned me to face him but I was unable to meet his gaze as I stared emptily at his chest. “I’m talking about how you hold all of this darkness inside of you and it’s only a desire for as long as you don’t think it’s also a disappointment. You have always told the world you make no apologies for who you are, but in here, in this very room all you do is apologize to the dead.” I gulped at his words, a soft hand cupped my jaw as he tilted my head back and forced me to look at him. “I knew your mother, Lara. She would have been fucking proud of you. I want to show you something,” he whispered, but hovered above me in an intimate silence for a moment, those eyes bored into mine, before he reached into the back pocket of his jeans and pulled out his phone. He thumbed through it before my mother’s voice rang out and my heart stalled within my chest.

---