Total pages in book: 67
Estimated words: 67144 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 336(@200wpm)___ 269(@250wpm)___ 224(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 67144 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 336(@200wpm)___ 269(@250wpm)___ 224(@300wpm)
Tears pool in my eyes as I imagine what that must’ve been like. How scared he must have been. The thought of a baby Troy … I can’t.
Emotions clog my throat as I wait for him to continue. I can’t ask questions because, if I do, I’ll cry. And I’m pretty sure if I cry, he’ll shut down. Instead, I squeeze his arms as tightly as possible to let him know I’m here.
I don’t know what else to do.
“I took a lot of fucking beatings for that boy,” he says, chuckling angrily. “It got worse as we got older. Dad would come home high as fuck or drunk or both and just hit the first thing he saw, which was usually me. Because if it was me, it wasn’t my mom or little brother.”
“Troy …” Tears stream down my face as my heart breaks. “I’m so sorry that happened to you.”
“He tore Mom down until she was a shell of a human being. She just stayed in her room most of my childhood. We had a neighbor, Mrs. Autumn, who would leave sandwiches on her porch for me and Travis. She’d visit her sister for a couple of weeks every summer. Those were some hungry fucking weeks, let me tell you.”
My body shakes as I hiccup back sobs.
“To this day, Travis gulps his food down.” He laughs softly. “It’s incredibly disgusting. Once, our house got stormed by … hell, I don’t know who it was. But Dad owed them money. That was the first time I had a gun held to my head. I was fourteen.”
I don’t know what to say. Nothing I can say will make it better. And the feeling of helplessness is overwhelming.
“Then, one day, it was late summer and school was about to start. I had just turned seventeen.”
His words are too careful, too hollow. I brace myself for whatever’s about to come.
“Travis and I had been fishing with some friends. We pulled in the driveway and could hear them fighting. We go on in because there’s no telling when it would end. You couldn’t base your life around their fights. And it was … bad.”
He tightens his arms around me.
“Mom was bleeding from her nose. She had a cut down the side of her face. Dad had a broken beer bottle in his hand like he was going to slice her with it.” His breathing grows rapidly. “I told Travis to go … to get outside and stay there. There was a look in Dad’s eye that just … it was like he was gone. They were vacant. There was no sense of humanity or connection. It was the coldest thing I’ve ever seen.”
He swallows hard.
“I was scared that day. Mom looked at me with just … terror on her face. It was like she regretted every decision she’d ever made at that moment. And she told me to get out. To go with Trav.”
“Did you?” I whisper, my tears dripping into the water.
“I think I knew what was going to happen,” he says. “I don’t know if it had been building up to that or if it was just the look on his face. But I knew he was going to kill her.”
“Troy.”
“I jumped in front of her. He swung the bottle over me somehow and it sliced her. Blood went everywhere,” he says, his voice void of emotion. “I wrestled Dad to the ground. But he was over two hundred pounds, and I probably weighed a buck fifty. There wasn’t a lot I could do.”
I cover my mouth to keep the gasp on my tongue from escaping. He doesn’t need my dramatics right now. He needs me to be strong for him.
“Travis came in at some point and grabbed a dumbbell off the floor and smashed Dad with it.” He pauses. “It probably saved my life.”
“What happened?”
“Travis needed therapy. I got a scar and probably need therapy, too. Dad went to prison, where he sits, rotting away in a cell.” His voice cracks. “And my mother died in a pool of blood in my lap that day. And there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it.”
“Oh, my God.”
I break free of his grip and turn to face him. Tears stream down his face. I wipe them away with my thumbs.
My heart shatters into a million pieces at the sight of this strong, beautiful, amazing man crying because of something so incredibly unfair.
“I’m so sorry,” I say, through my own tears. I wrap my arms around his neck and pull him into me. “I am so sorry.”
He presses a kiss below my ear and holds me tight.
We sit that way until the water grows cold—until my teeth chatter from the chill.
“There you go,” he says, pulling away. He tries to laugh to make light of the situation, but nothing is light about it. “Now you know a lot about me you didn’t know before.”