Total pages in book: 184
Estimated words: 186756 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 934(@200wpm)___ 747(@250wpm)___ 623(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 186756 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 934(@200wpm)___ 747(@250wpm)___ 623(@300wpm)
His eyes roam over my face. “What’d she say to you?”
“I need to leave,” I tell him instead.
“She said something to you. What’d she say?” he insists.
“People are waiting for me.”
“What the fuck did she say, Dora?”
That’s when I snap.
That is when I fucking snap and yell, “Stop calling me that!”
In response, his jaw clenches again, and for the third fucking time I wish to God, I wish to all that’s holy, that it hurts him. That it hurts the fuck out of him because it hurts me.
It hurts me to see him this way.
It hurts me—the fool here—to think about how much it must’ve hurt him to get beaten up like that. Even after every fucking thing he’s done, it hurts me because he’s hurt.
“I will if you tell me,” he replies with all the calm in the world.
Which pisses me off even more. “You want to know what she said to me? Fine. She said that I’m a slut. That I’m an attention whore and that I’ve always been this way. Since the day I was born. Because the day I was born, my father was more occupied and attentive to me than to her. Instead of showing all his devotion and love to her, the mother of his child, he chose to shower me, the child, with it. She also told me that she was the one who convinced him to stop wasting his love on me and instead love her and only her. Which is great to hear really because I’ve always wondered why my father ignores me. I’ve always wondered why my mother ignores me too. Now the mystery’s solved. Now I know. Now I can live my life in peace. Oh, and she also said if I pull the same shit and come between two brothers, like I tried to come between her and my dad—two brothers being you and your twin—then she’s going to make you regret it. Which I can only assume means that she’ll have both of you fired and ruin your careers. So I better watch out.”
And since I’m on a roll, I keep going even though I think, I think, I see his features hardening. I see his eyes narrowing and shining with a harsh light. But I don’t give a fuck if he’s angry. He can go to hell and burn there for eternity for all I care.
“Do you want to know what else she did, though? She cut me.” I show him my ring finger and since it’s my fuck you finger, it all works out. “She scratched me with her long talon-like nails and squeezed the ring into my finger so hard that she broke skin. But that’s not the best part. The best part is that this isn’t the first time she’s done something like this, no. She’s been doing it for years now. It started with a little pinching here and there, little instances where she’d grab me so hard that she’d leave marks. Then they escalated. She’d smack me, mostly on the back of my head so whatever mark she left was hidden by my hair. She’d shove me and I’d hit wall and then days after that, she’d make me wear long sleeves and long skirts to hide any bruises.
“Even though these incidents got severe, they were still rare. They’d happen usually when I’d been a little rebellious. Like the time I snuck out to a party when I was thirteen and my mother found out. She shoved me into a bush of roses. Then this one time she caught me running lines up in my bedroom, so she tore up the script and smacked me so hard that for a few seconds I saw stars. Then this other time she caught me slipping my bra to the driver because I wanted to go to the movies but I was grounded. She shoved me into my closet and locked me in for over sixteen hours without food or water or bathroom breaks. My dad had thought I’d run away.”
I throw him a tight smile but keep going, “In any case, they happened maybe once a month. But then that changed too. Last year. Because I started hanging around the team more and given my track record of seducing men and getting them to do bad things, she never wanted that. She wanted me to stay away from you guys. And now I’m guessing from my father too because I’m thinking about it and I’ve seen him more this last year than I have any year while I was living under his roof. So instead of once a month, my mother started physically abusing me once a week. So this”—I flip him the bird again—“is what she did this week.”
He’s breathing harshly now, his chest moving up and down, punching the crisp white shirt. And punching so badly that I think he’s going to tear it right in the middle. He’s going to tear his shirt from the force of his breathing, from the force of his bulging muscles, his little white buttons popping out and flying.