Total pages in book: 146
Estimated words: 141951 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 710(@200wpm)___ 568(@250wpm)___ 473(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 141951 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 710(@200wpm)___ 568(@250wpm)___ 473(@300wpm)
Nothing had stood out.
Or so Lucas thought, then.
“He’d started to wear a lot of sunglasses, and long sleeve shirts when he worked out,” Lucas said, his shitty attempt to bring Delaney into the conversation that was his thoughts.
“Hmm?” she asked around a bite.
“My brother—Jacob,” he clarified. “He’s ten years younger than me.”
Was, he corrected internally.
Lucas let out a breath that shook on the way out, and placed his half-eaten plate back on the coffee table so he could just get through his moment. “We had a big gap in age, so I always felt like I had to look after him. It couldn’t be just brother to brother. I had to be more because he didn’t have anybody else being that male figure in his life. I guess that took up a lot of my teenage years and even becoming a young man … I ended up being my brother’s second father. Basically.”
Delaney, still chewing, glanced at the wall of pictures like she wanted to put the face to the name again that he spoke of. Lucas didn’t have to look around to remember or know Jacob’s face. He’d die with his brother’s memory permanently scarred into the back of his brain, now.
“Having me didn’t really change what he knew he didn’t have, though,” Lucas added after a pause. “It didn’t change how the lack of attention and basic needs a parent should provide to their child wasn’t really offered to Jacob by our mother or father. Oh, he had what he needed in a physical way, sure.”
Until he didn’t, and Lucas had needed to fill in where Jacob’s life lacked there, as well, but that was a conversation for a different day.
“Maybe you’d understand,” Lucas said to Delaney, “seeing as how you felt love from your parents was a conditional thing.”
Her mouth free of food, Delaney asked, “What do you mean?”
“If you weren’t meeting the conditions, I suspect you didn’t have their love, right?”
“In a way. Or, the love they offered was really just abuse that they said was needed to correct or fix what was wrong with me.”
Lucas nodded, but the idea made him angry. A lot like Jacob had once felt as a kid whose parents couldn’t be bothered to even eat with him at the dinner table, but had no problem making sure his private tuition for school was paid so they wouldn’t have to see his face five days out of the week.
“Well, my brother never had any love at all,” Lucas said, shrugging. “It took me a while to figure out that was why he had so many insecurities as a young man. Why he felt like he wasn’t good enough or had to work harder than everybody else. He was overlooked and worthless to his own parents, and that made him think that’s just how love was. And for a long time, he believed that. So he found the only kind of love he really knew in a lot of bad places with not-so-great people.”
Lucas glanced down to where his hands wrung together forcefully enough that three of his knuckles crackled. “Who didn’t always do the best of things. He told me once it started with Xanax bars at parties because he couldn’t stand alcohol—our mother is an alcoholic.”
He shrugged, chuffing under his breath before adding, “No matter what I did, I couldn’t make him see that just because a doctor wrote the prescription didn’t make it okay.”
Of course, Jacob’s struggles were an easy excuse for their parents—separated by then—to throw under the bus as the reason for their distance from their youngest son later on. As if the first half of Jacob’s life had never existed in the first place which certainly led him down his chosen path, in one way or another.
Lucas didn’t have to search hard for the reasons why he couldn’t even stand the sight of his parents. He had a whole goddamn list.
“Hurt people aren’t really great at making good choices,” Delaney said, drawing Lucas’ attention back to her instead of abusing his hands. “It’s kind of like a survival thing, after a while. You know what I mean? It’s ingrained in you.”
“Sure, and he worked hard to change that in himself,” Lucas replied, massaging the pulse of pressure starting behind his forehead. “After he ran out of money from what our grandfather had left him and instead of snorting prescriptions from his doctor, he’d moved onto shit he could buy on the streets where he found something he loved even more, I guess. Needles.”
Delaney’s brow lifted high. “I’m sorry.”
Yeah, that felt like an appropriate response.
A lot of people used it.
It hadn’t been his pain, back then, though. Jacob hadn’t been chasing his next high because he was trying to numb Lucas’ pain or to fill the empty hole left in his brother’s heart from their parents’ emotional neglect.