Total pages in book: 22
Estimated words: 20435 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 102(@200wpm)___ 82(@250wpm)___ 68(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 20435 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 102(@200wpm)___ 82(@250wpm)___ 68(@300wpm)
Her phone beeps from the living room where she must have left it when we were stripping naked. She stirs beside me, but I squeeze her shoulder. “Let me get it.”
It only takes me a second to grab her device but when I return, my nightstand drawer isn’t closed right. She’s also staring at her hand and frowning. “I didn’t mean to snoop. I just wanted a charger for my phone.”
“What do you have there?” I ask with a chuckle, my heart in my throat. She couldn’t have found anything all that bad. I have almost no secrets from her.
She puts the bottle of medication in the drawer without saying anything.
“Don’t you want to ask about it?”
She settles on the bed and burrows under the covers, her back resting against the headboard. “We’ve been friends ten years and you haven’t gotten around to it. I think if you wanted to tell me, you would have by now.”
“Look, I talked to Cash about this. He said the antidepressant wouldn’t cause any birth defects. It’ll slow my sperm but not necessarily stop it.”
I run a hand through my hair and fight a wave of frustration. I’ve never mentioned it to her. She’s the last person I’d ever want to look weak in front of. Yeah, depression and eating disorders don’t make a person weak. I just couldn’t risk that she might think those things. That she might one day look at me with disgust in her eyes. Fuck, she’s the one person whose opinion matters most in the world.
“Maybe the medication has something to do with the eating disorder?”
“You know about that?” I swallow hard and take a seat beside her on the bed. If I’m thinking about marriage, then there are things about my past that I should tell her. “Why didn’t you bring it up?”
She shrugs. “You’re Ledger to me. You’re not an eating disorder. You’re just you.”
The familiar shame twists in my gut. “My mom died when I was a baby, and my dad remarried. He passed away about a year later, so my stepmom raised me. She always helped me with my homework and listened to my stories and bandaged my scrapes.”
Even to this day, I can’t help but miss Violet. She was the prettiest lady I’d ever seen, and she treated me like a son.
“She wanted me to become an actor and go into modeling, commercials, that kind of stuff. I thought it sounded like fun, being on stage.”
“But it stopped being fun,” Peyton guesses.
“N-not exactly. She put me on my first diet at four. She weighed me daily from then on and if she wasn’t happy with the number, she’d berate me. Wasn’t like she hit me or anything dramatic like that.” I blow out a breath and rush through the next part. “One of my teachers realized I was severely malnourished. I got taken away from her and she went to prison where she eventually died.”
She puts her head on my shoulder. “I’m sorry, Ledger.”
“I got taken away when I was ten and I’ve tried…fuck, I’ve tried to be normal since then. But sometimes, I still do the same stuff. It’s better the past couple years. I don’t purge as much.”
When I was a teenager, Mr. Kringle paid a crazy amount of money to put me in an outpatient treatment center two hours away from Courage County. He drove four hours everyday round trip so I could get the treatment I needed. It didn’t cure me. Nothing has. But it did get me on the road to recovery. It made me want to get better which was a hell of a step in the right direction.
“I don’t know that I’ll ever beat this, not fully. But I wake up and fight it every day. Fight the lies that are in my mind.” I think the therapist who helped me see that Violet put a lot of false beliefs in my head helped me the most.
“There’s a reason people say they’re in recovery and not recovered,” Peyton points out, her tone gentle. “It’s OK if you have to fight every day. Just don’t fight alone.”
Her understanding is more than I expected and yet I shouldn’t be surprised. She’s always been my biggest cheerleader, the person who supports me fiercely no matter what. “I talked to Cash about it. He says this can run in families, but I promise you, I won’t be like Violet was. I won’t do that to our child.”
She takes my hand in hers and squeezes it tight. “I know you’ll be an amazing father, and we’ll figure this parenting thing out together.”
Her words soothe a part of me that’s ached for a long time. Maybe I’m not doomed to repeat my past. Maybe she isn’t either. Together, we can build a bright future.