Total pages in book: 97
Estimated words: 91635 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 458(@200wpm)___ 367(@250wpm)___ 305(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 91635 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 458(@200wpm)___ 367(@250wpm)___ 305(@300wpm)
“Oh, baby,” she murmured sympathetically, almost crooning as she stroked his hand, her skin fine and thin and weathered against his. “Does he love you?”
“I don’t know.” He shook his head. “He said something that…that really hurt me, and I don’t know how you can say something like that if you love someone, if you’re not just…using them.”
“Because no one is perfect. You can love someone with all your heart and still say terrible things because you had a bad day, or out of ignorance, or because of a misunderstanding. And sometimes love? It hurts as much as it heals.” She shifted closer to him, wrapping her arm around his shoulders and pulling him into her softness, her familiarity and the warmth that would always mean family, to him. “The reason someone you love can hurt you so much is because loving them opens all those places inside you where you’re fragile. A tap won’t dent steel…but it can shatter glass.”
“Mmph.” He mumbled and buried his face against her shoulder. “I don’t like feeling like glass.”
“But it happens, when you feel so much for someone. And it means trusting them to try not to shatter you, even if they don’t always succeed. And you won’t always succeed, either.” She rubbed his arm, squeezing him tighter. “When two imperfect people love each other, you’re going to fight, you’re going to hurt each other, and at the end of the day you have to decide if you want to forgive or walk away, because there’s no such thing as a perfect relationship. There’s only a right one. If it’s a right one, you stay. If it’s a wrong one, you go.”
“But…you and Dad were always so happy…”
“Oh, of course we were—but we also fought sometimes.” She chuckled, voice warm, fond with sweet, soft memory. “We’d wake the neighbors shouting over the silliest things. He had a temper, I had a temper, and sometimes that fire kept us warm, but sometimes it just scorched our fingers when we tried to reach for each other.”
“Wasn’t that bad? Fighting all the time?”
“No. Because it wasn’t all the time. It was just the little things here and there, but we always met in the end as equals. And if we were wrong, we apologized.” She leaned in close, her soft voice falling over him like the most soothing rain, easing away the worst of that jagged, shattered feeling inside him. “What did you fight about with this man?”
“If he was using me. If he just…saw me as an object.”
“Was he? Does he?”
“I don’t know. I was angry and hurt, and I couldn’t listen to anything else he had to say, so I just…I left.”
“Well.” She patted his shoulder, then the side of his head matter-of-factly. “You don’t have to listen to him if you don’t want to. You don’t owe anyone that. But if you want to know how he feels…”
With a frustrated groan, Amani thudded his head against his mother’s shoulder. “What if I can’t forgive him, even if he apologizes?”
“Then he’s not the right one.” She kissed his brow. “The only way you can know is to talk to him.”
“I’ll try, Mama. I’ll try.”
But if he did, he had no idea what he would say.
l
SHE LEFT HIM ALONE, THEN, to clean up the abrasion on his fingertip and then sprawl out on his bed to let his nerves calm down and just drift. He should…do homework, something. Life didn’t want to wait for him to pull an Ophelia and pine himself to bits. Rolling over onto his stomach with a groan, he shoved his hand into his messenger bag—and brushed up against the slick plastic jacketing of library book binding.
He pulled out the copy of Mossflower Vic had lent him. He’d never gotten around to reading it, too caught up in Vic himself, but he should probably give it back. Maybe when he did, he’d take the chance to hear Vic out and at least lay things to rest more cleanly. He wouldn’t get his hopes up. Vic belonged in his ivory tower.
Amani didn’t.
But he fingered the cover of the book, worrying at his lower lip, then settled to curl up against the headboard with the book propped on his thighs, and opened to page one. Opened to a story at once grim and bright, bloody and beautiful, whimsical and arrestingly poignant, caught in turning page after page, caught in reading these words and knowing inside Vic was the boy who’d grown up loving these stories because they were simple. Because they were something better, something warmer, than the complications and gray areas and unwanted choices of real life.
He felt like in these pages he saw the Vic he’d thought he’d known.
The Vic he missed, if he would just stop lying to himself.
He read until the direction of the light crossed from one side of the room to the other, slanting toward sunset; until a rap at his bedroom door pulled him from his reverie. He blinked as the room resolved around him, colors shifting as his eyes adjusted from black text on white paper. His mother leaned in the doorway again, carrying a flat rectangular box bound closed with twine, a folded note card slipped under the string…and, its stem knotted and braided with the cord, a white vanilla orchid resting atop the box, the fresh wet-dewed twin to the browned, withered one resting on the top tier of his desk.