Playing for Keeps (The Game #2)(43)
Author: Emma Hart

I tug him toward the bed, and he sits down against the wall. My knees sit either side of him as I straddle him and lock my hands behind his neck. His hands rest on my bed, his fingers drawing tiny circles against my skin.

“You. Everything. There’s more, Aston. I know there is.”

His stomach tenses. “What do you want to know?”

“Everything,” I whisper. “Everything that’s left. However long it takes, however much it hurts … I’m here.”

His chest heaves as he takes a deep breath, and his eyes fill with apprehension. Fear sparks in them. I’ve never thought of him as being scared of his past, of what he hasn’t let himself think about, but he is. He’s petrified.

“There isn’t much left to tell, not about when I was a kid. It was the same thing over and over. Mom would sell herself for money, spend a minimal amount of it on food and bills if she could be bothered, and the rest on drugs and alcohol. She’d meet a guy, he’d watch me while she ‘worked’, and I’d usually get a bruise to add to my collection for something or another. Social Services would visit, the guy would leave, and she’d meet someone else, every other night going out and f**king some poor rich guy so she could keep putting the same old shit into her veins. That was it for six years. I’m glad I can only remember two years of it, even if they were the worst years.”

His fingertips dig into my skin slightly, and I twist his hair around my fingers gently, looking at him intently.

“She couldn’t parent. She didn’t know how to. I was always an afterthought – and everything was blamed on me. She blamed it on me, the guys blamed it on me, and when you get taught everything is your fault, you start to believe it. Every cut or bruise was explained as me being a rough little boy to the social, and every cut or bruise was explained as me being a little no-good bastard to me. That was their reasoning. That I was good for nothing, no better than my mom.” He pauses for a second, breathing harshly.

I move my hands to cup his face and rest my forehead against his, letting him calm down even as my own stomach twists. He closes his eyes in pain, and I can’t begin to imagine the things that are playing out behind his eyes. All I can do is sit here with him, holding him to me, and ride it out.

“That’s what I remember most, the things they said to me,” he whispers. “It’s like they enjoyed hurting me with words as much as they did with their fists. It was all the time. All the f**king time, Megs. I remember them always telling me I’d be no better than her, that sex was all she was good for so it would be all I was good for. Sex and drugs and alcohol – they said that was my life, and it would have been true. She never sent me to school because of the bruises, so eventually I would have ended up the same way if she hadn’t died.”

“How did she die?”

“Drugs. What else?” He shrugs a shoulder, moving his arms so they wrap around my body. “The official report states it was from an overdose of a bad batch of heroine. The drug had been tampered with, making it even more dangerous, and she accidentally overdosed. They reckon she’d been going through withdrawals and in her confused and desperate state she used more than she normally would have. She was found three blocks away from our apartment at a seedy bar, and I was found at home a day later. That’s what Gramps said anyway. I remember it all as just one blur of time. Day and night were the same to me then. Mom slept during the day and left at night. I was left alone most of the time – except for a single weekly outing to the park to keep up appearances. That was the one day she cared about me.”

His voice is so broken, so small, so lost. It’s like he’s regressed back into the mind of the six-year old he was and is seeing the world through his eyes again. I look at him, look into his sad eyes, and my heart clenches as a tear spills from his eye. I’ve seen him angry. I’ve seen him fight the demons. But I’ve never seen him cry, and this breaks my heart.

Seeing him cry is worse than I ever could have imagined.

Chapter Twenty – Aston

One tear falls, and another, and another.

The pain is real. It’s old but real, always there, and it’s finally breaking through. It’s been held back for so long, but it’s finally out. I’m starting to let go of the things that have killed me for years.

Megan’s touch is warm and soft, comforting and safe, and as she pulls me into her, I let her. She doesn’t speak. She doesn’t do anything but just hold me. She reminds me I’m not alone, that I’m safe. As much as I need to hold her, I need her to hold me just as much. She grounds me and keeps me here. By focusing on her I’m reminded that I’m not six years old and afraid anymore. She stops the flashbacks consuming me. She makes that pain bearable.

“That’s why I major in psych,” I breathe out after a while of her holding me. “Because it means I can help kids like me that have all this shit in their heads. If I’d had someone to talk to when I was younger, I probably wouldn’t be this f**ked up now.”

“You’re not f**ked up.” She sits back and runs her thumbs across my cheeks, drying the tears there. “You had a hard life, Aston, but now you’re dealing with it. You’re proving, yourself, that all those men, they were wrong. By graduating school and coming here, you’re proving them wrong. You did that. No one else.”

“No. I’m always gonna be a little f**ked up, Megs. I’m still gonna wake in the night and wonder if I’m hiding under my bed or if I’m safe. I’m still gonna doubt myself every day, and I’m still gonna be a little broken, no matter what I do.”

“But you’ll also heal a little more every day,” she says softly. “We’ll find a way to help you deal with those nightmares and flashbacks, I promise. I’ll help you, Aston.”

Her blue eyes gaze into mine and her hair falls around our faces, hiding us from the rest of the world. I could lose myself in her eyes a thousand times over and still go back again. I could fall into her touch and never feel the need to get up, and I realize that’s why she’s so different to everyone else. She gives me what no one else ever has. She slowly pulled me from not caring about anything to caring about her. And she’s made me realize so many things.

No matter what Mom’s boyfriends said, I’ve proved them wrong. It was my own actions that got me to Berkeley – to meet Megan. When I went to live with Gramps he taught me everything, but it was me that pushed on through it, graduated high school and came to college.