The Right Moves (The Game #3)(43)
Author: Emma Hart

“Did it help?”

“No.” She laughs sadly. “I felt like an idiot every single night because it didn’t help me in the slightest, but it wasn’t supposed to help me. Not then. I didn’t realize it until I started reading this morning.”

“Call me stupid, but I’m really not following.”

Abbi brings her eyes to mine. “It was never to help me get better. Dr. Hausen made me write in it in the hopes I’d look back on it one day and realize how far I’d come.”

“Have you?”

“Look for yourself.” She tosses me the book and it lands in my lap.

I pick up the red, hard-backed book and glance at her. “Are you sure? I looked in my sister’s diary once, and she chased me with my brother’s baseball bat when she caught me.”

Abbi’s lips twitch into a smile. “I’m sure. You’ve already seen me at my worst and there’s nothing in that book I won’t eventually tell you.”

“Well, okay.” I open it to the first page and start to read, flicking through the pages.

April 6th

I don’t know why I have to write in this. It won’t help. I can’t use words to describe “how I feel” every day. I don’t even feel anything. I’m just numb. Numb to everything.

April 12th

The last pages here are blank. Why? Because I still feel nothing. How can you write when you have no feelings?

April 18th

Mom and Dad keep coming. Maddie keeps coming. Pearce hasn’t come. I don’t know why it bothers me. Maybe it doesn’t. I don’t know.

I just want everyone to leave me alone. I wish Maddie had never found me.

April 22nd

Maddie is going. To California. Our crazy dream from our childhood. She’s doing it, and I’m stuck in here. I feel. Finally. I feel angry. Angry because I should be going with her. At least Dr. Hausen will be glad to hear I can finally feel something.

April 30th

Group therapy. It’s crap. None of them know what I go through, what I remember. None of them are like me. They’re all crazy – screaming crazy. I’m not. I’m just quiet, happy to be left alone. I wish they would leave me alone.

“You didn’t exactly get on board with the everyday thing, huh?” I smirk.

“Um… No. I got better towards the end, but at first I wasn’t interested. I wasn’t interested in much of anything, to be honest. I was too wrapped up in a world of pain and haunted by memories. They were still too fresh… Too real to think about anything else.” She waves at the book. “Read as much as you want.”

I don’t miss the way her voice dips, lowering until it’s almost a whisper, or the way she picks at the skin around her nails. I look at the open diary in my hands and shut it, dropping it on the floor next to me.

“I don’t need to read it.”

Abbi’s head snaps up.

“As much as I want to know, you’ll tell me when you’re ready. I won’t push you into it.”

She looks at me earnestly for a moment before getting up and climbing onto the sofa next to me. I put my arm out, and she snuggles into my side, laying her head against my chest.

“Thank you,” she whispers. “For not judging me because of the scars.”

“I would never judge you for marks of your strength.”

“We see them very differently.”

I take her hand in mine, linking our fingers together, and stroke my thumb across the back of her hand. “One day I hope you’ll look in the mirror and see what I see.”

“I’ll be happy if one day I can look in the mirror and not see a broken girl,” she says sadly and tilts her head back to look at me. “What if it’s too much, Blake? What if everything in my past and yours is too much? What if you see Tori whenever you look at me, or if what I’m dealing with is too close to what she did? What if…” She swallows. “What if we both have so much pain inside of us we end up breaking each other’s hearts?”

“Hey.” I lean my head back on the sofa, taking her with me, and squeeze her. “That’s a lot of what ifs right there, Abs. You don’t know any of that will happen, and if it does, then we’ll have to cross that bridge when we get to it. There’s no point in dwelling on things that might be, ‘cause they could just as easily not be. Besides, you can’t break something that’s already broken. If we both just stay a little broken, we should be just fine.”

She smiles through the hesitance in her eyes, and it’s one that lights up her whole face. “I guess that’s one way to look at it.”

I smile back at her, releasing her hand and trailing mine up her arm to cup the back of her head. “No,” I mutter, pulling her into me. “It’s the only way to look at it.”

I bring her lips to mine and kiss her gently. She curls her fingers into the blanket wrinkled at my waist, and sighs into my mouth.

“By all accounts, I should be running away from any guy that tries to touch me,” Abbi muses. “But I don’t feel like I need to. I’m not scared of us at all.”

“Were you ever scared of us?”

“Of a relationship. Not of you. I don’t think I’ve ever felt like I needed to be scared of you.”

“Well, that’s reassuring.” I laugh.

“Oh, shush.” She laughs with me.

I brush some hair from her face and think about the second time we met. “I guess I was right after all.”

“What?”

“My supposed pick-up line.”

“Oh, god.”

“Oi.” I run my thumb across her bottom lip. “You don’t argue with fate.”

She closes her eyes for a second and runs a finger along her thigh, tracing the place I’d imagine her scar is. When she opens her eyes, she looks directly into mine, emotion shining through in them.

“No. I guess you definitely don’t.”

~

Two days without my mother has been bliss. When this morning rolled around, I almost thought she wouldn’t call – for the first time ever, I hoped she wouldn’t call. Listening to her talk about Dad trying to push Jase into working with him although she knows it isn’t what he wants to do made me realize how stifling my life in London was. I never really got that until I tasted freedom. Hopefully, Jase will get the same chance.

For now, though, my freedom is on hold as Mum did call. And demanded I get my ass round to her hotel room right now.