by Doyle, S.
Don’t Love Me
S. DOYLE
Copyright © 2020 by S. DOYLE
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
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Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Don’t Hate Me
Excerpt Don’t Hate Me
Also by S. DOYLE
1
Ashleigh
The first time I met Marc Campbell I was ten and he was twelve.
His was a sad story with a pretty happy outcome. At least I thought so.
His mom was going into rehab for drug addiction and Child Protective Services had removed him from the home. He’d been in foster care for a month until his mom had reached out to her brother, George, to step in and raise Marc until she could get better.
George, who worked for my father, was bringing him here to live on the estate. See, like I said, a happy outcome. And yes, I knew it was weird to live on an estate instead of in a regular house. It’s because my dad was rich. I didn’t think about that too often except for when I had to say things like, I live on an estate.
Ours was one of the biggest properties in Harborview, New Jersey, which was about an hour south of New York and not too far from the coast.
Anyway, today was the day George had gone to pick up Marc from his foster family.
I sat on the porch overlooking the long driveway and scratched my knee as I waited for the car to roll up.
My dad wasn’t here. He was at work, I supposed, because that’s where he usually was. So it was just me here to greet them. George, Marc’s uncle, was my only friend on the estate so it was important to me for him to know I supported him and would be nice to his nephew.
It was probably another weird thing that my only friend was a grown man in his fifties. But George not only took care of the house, my dad’s cars and all the cooking, he also took care of me.
Did I mention that Marc was only twelve! Which wasn’t even that much older than me. He might want to play and stuff. Things George didn’t do.
I remember when George heard about what had happened to his sister and his nephew. He’d gotten really quiet. Nothing I did would make him smile or laugh. I could tell he was sad. Maybe even a little guilty, too. He didn’t hesitate to ask my dad if it was okay for Marc to come live with him at the carriage house.
He asked me first, of course, and I said yes right away.
George would make it all right. George made everything all right. He was kind and super cool for an old guy. I knew eventually he would win Marc over. It was just going to take Marc time to adjust to his new home. That’s what George said. That I would have to give Marc some space and time because of what he’d been through with his mom.
I bent down to scratch the mosquito bite on my knee again, even though I knew it was only making it worse. I jumped up when I heard the engine of a car and, a second later, George was pulling up to the house in the big, black Mercedes SUV, one of five cars my dad kept on the estate.
Waving my hand, maybe a little too excitedly given this was mostly a sad day, I waited as George, then Marc, got out of the car.
“Hi, George!” I called.
“Hey there, Peanut,” he said.
Marc was wearing a suit. George had said the plan was to let him visit with his mother before coming to the estate. He must have wanted to look his best for her. Except as soon as he was out of the car, he started pulling his coat off. His tie was already loosened, and his dark blonde hair looked as if he’d been running his hand through it, as chunks of it fell into his eyes.
“Hi. I’m Ashleigh,” I said.
He rolled his eyes at me just as George walked up behind him. “Marc, we talked about this.”
I could see Marc’s face turn red and I didn’t like the way he was looking at me. Like he hated me already.
I didn’t have friends my age because I didn’t go to school. I had tutors because my father didn’t trust the public or private school systems to deal with my condition. So I was eager to make a good impression with someone close to my age who would be living on the estate. But it felt like he’d already made up his mind.
He pushed a lock of hair off his forehead and I could see his eyes were brown.
“Hey,” he said.
“Peanut, why don’t you show Marc around the grounds? I’ll take your coat and tie, son, then go fix us something to eat.”
George walked inside the main house, even as Marc glared at him the whole way. I tried to take Marc’s hand to get his attention, but he jerked it away.
“Don’t touch me,” he snapped.
“Okay. Come with me,” I said, pretending he didn’t already hate me. I started to walk around the main house, surprised he was following me. I didn’t bother to point out the main house. It was pretty big, so it was obvious. But as we followed the stone walkway around it, I did stop and point out the pool.
“That’s the pool. You can go swimming whenever you want. We keep it heated so you can even swim in the winter if you want. And over there are the tennis courts.”
“Tennis courts,” he repeated.
“Do you want to play? I can get us rackets.”
I wasn’t really supposed to play. My dad didn’t like it when I did anything too physical. I didn’t know how, either, but if Marc wanted to hit balls at me that would be okay.
He stopped following me, so I turned around. I still had to show him the carriage house where he would live with George, which was down a path from the tennis courts, deeper onto the property.
He walked up to me and got super close. He was a whole head taller than me. I was small anyway, but he made me feel like a dwarf.
“Get this straight,” he said in low, soft voice. “I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to know you. And I sure as shit don’t want to play tennis with some stuck-up baby bitch.”
It was hard to know what startled me more. The cursing or the fact he’d been so mean to me. Nobody spoke to me this way. Everyone was always so gentle around me. So careful.
I couldn’t stop the tears that rushed to my eyes, and that only made his sneering face meaner.
“Go ahead, cry baby. Go run back to daddy.”
I did exactly that. I wasn’t fast, but I ran as hard as I could to the house and to the kitchen where George was putting together sandwiches.
“George!” I took a few breaths because I was panting from both running and crying. I could feel the strain in my lungs, and I hated it. Hated that breathing should hurt this bad.
“Settle down, Peanut. Look at me.”
I did. George was easy to look at. Soft brown eyes, a round face with dimples in his cheeks. Kind of like he was always smiling. He could always relax me, no matter what.
“Easy in, and easy out. Breathe in and breathe out.”
He made me breathe with him until I felt normal again.
“Now tell me what happened.”
“He was so mean to me! He cursed and everything. He hates me already, and he just got here, and I didn’t even do anything wrong!”
George picked me up then, and set me on the kitchen island next to where he was making his sandwiches, and nodded.
“Marc doesn’t hate you, Peanut,” he said gently. George was always gentle and kind to me. I’d never heard him curse ever.
“He called me the “B” word!”
George sighed, but I could see he wasn’t going to punish his nephew for cursing.
“Marc had to be taken away from his mom and that’s about the worst pain anyone can face. So all that pain is sitting in his stomach and he doesn’t know how to get it out. Yelling at you, me, anybody around, is the only thing he knows how to do. You’ve got to let him spew for a while until the pain subsides enough for him to breathe easier.”
“He has a hard time breathing?”
“Not like you. Not because of asthma. Just because of how much he’s hurting right now. It’s filling up his whole body.”
That sounded bad. I knew what it felt like not to be able to breathe. Sometimes it made me want to curse, too. I knew the words from TV, I just wasn’t allowed to say them.
George didn’t like it. And neither did Ms. Susan, who was my tutor.
George walked to the smaller drink fridge built into the island and pulled out two cans of grape sodas.
“This isn’t going to make him feel better, but at least it will taste good. And he’ll know that no matter how mean he was to you, you understand what he’s going through and you’re there for him. You don’t have to if you don’t want to. In fact, it might be better to wait a few days…”
I hopped off the counter and took the two sodas from his hands.
“I got this.”
George smiled. “I don’t doubt it, Peanut.”
I walked through the house until I came out the back door. I circled the pool, but I didn’t see him. Finally, I spotted him on the other side of the fenced-in tennis courts. He was sitting in the grass in his good pants, which George probably wouldn’t like, but I wasn’t going to say anything about that.
He wasn’t crying but I could see streaks of dirt down his face, evidence that, at some point, he had been.
I popped open the top of one can and sat next to him, setting the soda near his hip. Then I popped mine and took a sip.
“I told you to go away,” he said, but I could tell he was tired. Bone weary, George would say.
“I know. But George says you’re hurting and that you didn’t mean it. So I wanted to bring you a soda in case you were thirsty. And if you still want to be mean to me, it’s okay. I can take it.”
He reached down to pick up the can and when he took a sip of the soda, it made me feel like I’d won something.
I didn’t say anything else. Just leaned my back against the fence and sipped my soda. I didn’t tell him that my mom had died. It didn’t seem fair because I was only three when it happened, and didn’t really remember her enough to miss her. It wasn’t like his mom was even dead, but that might have been worse. That she was still alive but he couldn’t be with her.
Eventually the sun started to go down. George would start looking for us soon. “We should go inside,” I said. “You must be hungry.”
After a second, Marc nodded. He stood and offered me his hand. I took it and he yanked hard enough to help me to my feet.
We ate sandwiches in the kitchen with George at the main house. Then George and I walked with Marc down the path to the carriage house. When we showed him to his room, he collapsed on the bed with his shoes on and everything.
I looked up at George and watched him watch his nephew. There were tears in his eyes, so I reached out to grab his hand and squeezed as hard as I could. George squeezed back.
And that was the first day I met Marc.
* * *
Six months later
Marc
I didn’t remember much about the first day I met Ashleigh. I remembered being mad at everyone. I remembered being mean to her. I remembered that my mouth had been so dry because, as much as I hadn’t wanted to cry about leaving my mom, I had.
Then there’d been the taste of grape soda. It’d always been my favorite, and, in that moment with my dry mouth and my head so filled with anger at everyone, it had been cold and sweet.
I’d been grateful. Ash was just a kid, but she’d sat next to me and given me a grape soda even though I’d been mean to her. And she said I could keep being mean to her, which, for the most part, I usually was.
It never seemed to bother her. Even now.
“Stop humming,” I snapped, looking at the back seat. She had buds in her ears, so I shouted it a little louder. “Quit it!”
“Marc, you don’t need to yell at her,” George said as he drove us from Harborview to South Jersey where I was from.
“She’s doing it on purpose,” I accused and gave her my most reviled look so she would know I was mad at her. It was then she took the buds out of her ears.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“You’re humming to the music. Off key. Cut it out.”
“Sorry. I didn’t know. I won’t hum.”
I looked forward out the fancy car window as the scenery of where I now lived flashed by. Big houses, manicured lawns, expensive cars. It was crazy that this was where I’d landed.
About as far away from the twenty-story apartment complex in Heights, New Jersey, as you could get. Ash would see my town for the first time today. She would see how different it was from everything she knew.
“I don’t even know why you came,” I muttered.
We were going to see my mother. This was the third time seeing her since I’d gone to live with George. She was already in her second round of rehab, having gotten out after the first thirty days, only to succumb a month later. Now she was back inside.
It wasn’t working. The therapy, or whatever they were doing to her inside the facility. She wasn’t getting any better. She was just detoxing, only to start using again as soon as she was released.
I knew what this cycle could do to a heroin addict. I’d read the stories about how they would get clean and their bodies would be free of the drugs, only to cave again. Problem was, they would take the amount they used to take to get high and suddenly it was too strong. Their bodies had lost the tolerance.
My mom was going to die of a heroin overdose, and I wasn’t going to be enough to save her. The worst part was, I didn’t know how much I even cared at this point. She’d made her choice.
I felt Ash’s hand on my shoulder. “You always get really sad when you go see her. I wanted to be with you.”
I shrugged my shoulder to remove her hand. I didn’t want her support. No matter what I did, I couldn’t shake her loose either. She was always just there. Always giving me cookies or sandwiches. Always wanting to play even though she wasn’t good at anything athletic.
The last time I came back from visiting my mother, Ash had brought her PlayStation—with a gaming monitor and everything—to the carriage house and set it up in my room.
She’d said she didn’t really use it ever, but then she sat with me and played Call of Duty for hours. The whole time me beating her ass and telling her how much she sucked at it.
Now even that wasn’t good enough. Now she wanted to be with me for the car ride.
“You don’t have to do this, Marc,” George said. “I can go check on Marie and let you wait in the car.”
I’d worn my good pants and sweater. I’d even put stuff in my hair to keep it in place. George said if she had a focus, something that could replace the drugs, it could turn her around.
Like a new addiction. Me.
“You know I need to see her. But you need to wait in the car with Ash. I don’t want her to see this place.”
“I don’t mind,” Ash piped up. “I can see it.”
“It’s just a treatment facility. Not a prison,” George pointed out. “Marie will be clean. She’ll be healthier. You’ll see.”
“I don’t want her to see it,” I said firmly.
Ash was a princess who lived in a castle with her father. She didn’t need to see my strung-out mom. Didn’t need to see what heroi
n did to a woman’s body. Ash didn’t need to bear witness to the fact that I hadn’t been enough for my mom to stay clean.
“I’ll wait in the car,” Ash said. “I’ll just sit here and not hum. I promise.”
Yeah. Like just having her here with me was supposed to make me feel better.
Instead it only made me feel worse.
* * *
Six months later
Ashleigh
I sat on the porch waiting for the car to pull up. Much like I’d done that first time I’d met Marc. George had taken him for another visit with his mom today. This time she was out of the rehab facility and in a halfway house.
Chewing my bottom lip, I thought about what that meant. His mom—I knew her name was Marie Campbell, like George’s last name because she hadn’t married Marc’s dad—had completed the program and her behavior was now being monitored at the halfway house.
She was going to have to get a job and show the court she could support herself and Marc before CPS would even consider letting Marc go live with her. Still, there was a chance, maybe soon, he would leave.
George was pushing for him to stay here no matter what happened with his mom. To, at least, finish out the school year. George thought it best to give his sister as much time as she needed to stand on her own two feet before taking on the challenge of raising her son again.
Both Marc and I had actually laughed at that.
Marc didn’t need anyone to raise him. He knew what he was doing all the time. He had a plan. For everything. Sometimes he told me what his plan was, and sometimes he told me to bug off, except he used the “F” word. Still, I knew he was always thinking about stuff. Like what was going to happen next month and next year.
