“I promise,” I said. “I chose you, and I will always choose you. You never have to worry about losing me.”
He kissed me, and I felt the tension melt from both of our bodies.
After I stood there for a few more minute in Michael’s arms, I realized that it was my turn to take a shift at guarding my Aunt Naomi. I really wasn’t in the mood for it, to be honest, but this whole thing was my idea, and it would be really awful of me not to contribute my equal share at the very least. I looked down the hallway and sighed.
“Do you want me to take your shift?” Michael asked. “I’d be glad to do it. You need rest.”
“No,” I said. “I need to pull my own weight. Besides, I do still owe Adam an explanation. Maybe he’ll let me talk to him for a minute when I go to take over his shift.”
“I’m sorry about that,” Michael said in a calm and much more rational temperament than he had showcased earlier. “I was just really upset.”
“I know,” I said. “It’s okay. I would have been upset too. But I need you to know that I want to make love to you every bit as badly as I wanted to make love to Adam in that storage room.”
“You mean that you want to make love to me even more,” he teased.
“Yes,” I said. “I do.”
Michael’s smile turned serious as he stared at me.
“That’s not something to tease about,” he said.
“I’m not teasing. I do want to make love to you more than anyone else in the world, Michael. Stop thinking that it is so hard to believe that I love you the most. If you truly knew how deeply I felt about you, and how desperately I want you every minute of every fucking day, then you wouldn’t be jealous anymore because you would know that there was no need to be.”
He looked stunned. “But in the storage room you—”
I sighed. “Yes, I know. It just happened. It doesn’t mean that I don’t still want them. It just means that I want you the most. Can we get rid of this traditional way of looking at things and accept what’s happening, whether or not it fits into a damn box, please?”
The grin on his face grew so wide that his cheeks stretched.
And it made me giggle. “And before you even try it, don’t you dare go telling the other two that. It would just hurt their feelings and I already have enough to apologize for as it is.”
Michael laughed. “I won’t tell them, I swear. But I’m glad that you told me.”
I kissed him once more and then slid out of his arms to go take over Adam’s shift. I wasn’t sure who I was more nervous about seeing, Adam or Naomi.
They both hated me about the same right now.
“Hey,” I said as I walked up to Adam in the hallway.
He was sitting just outside of the open doorway where Naomi was being kept. Rob had put one of the mattresses inside the room which she was now lying on while staring out the doorway at us. The cords around her ankles had been untied so that she could walk and move around her room, but the cords which bound her wrists were still tightly fastened. Her stare was empty and cold, and I couldn’t tell if it was because she was disinterested or because she was calculating.
I went with calculating.
Adam stood up and started to walk past me, knocking his shoulder against mine as he tried to quickly leave.
“Wait,” I said. “I think we should talk.”
He stopped and looked over his shoulder at me without fully turning around. “About what? About fact that you lied to Rob and me?”
“I didn’t lie to you,” I said, knowing that it was a weak excuse. “I just didn’t tell you something.”
He blinked. “Come on, Lisette. Omission is frequently a lie and you know it.”
“I just didn’t want to hurt you,” I said as I took a step toward him.
“Really? And did that work out?” he asked, his voice dripping with sarcasm.
I knew that if I had any hope of trying to mend this wound, I needed to be honest to the point of it hurting. So here came the truth. “And I also didn’t want to lose you,” I said. “Any of you. I want all three of you.”
“You had all three of us,” he retorted.
He was right. I did.
“What made you go ahead and choose? Why didn’t you just wait a while so that we could all still be with you?” he asked.
“I don’t know what made me voice my choice,” I said honestly. “It just happened when it was meant to happen, I guess. But we are all still together, and just because I chose Michael doesn’t change anything for right now.”
“See, now that’s where you’re wrong,” Adam said.
And without another word or glance, he walked away.
9
I didn’t go after him or even call after him because there was no point.
He wasn’t going to listen to me, and at this point I wasn’t even sure if anything that I was saying was making any sense anyway.
I plopped down against the doorframe and let out a big sigh as I stared down the hall with everything and nothing simultaneously on my mind.
“Trouble in paradise?” Naomi hissed as she got up from her mattress and walked closer to me.
She had a tendency to make my skin crawl and I wasn’t very fond of having her in close proximity to me. But I also didn’t want to show fear, not to her. So I sat still and glared at her as she came to sit beside me on the other side of the doorframe.
“You take after you mother in that regard too,” she said as if she were taunting me. “Paula always found herself in the midst of boy trouble. It was like she was a magnet for that shit.”
I wanted to ask her about my mother, but I didn’t want to give Naomi the satisfaction of knowing that I was curious and that she was the only one who knew the things that I wanted to know about my mother.
“Boys are only trouble,” she said. She actually sounded a little normal and motherly now. “All boys are only trouble. You’d do better to let them all loose and go after what you want on your own.”
I shook my head and smiled. “Now see Naomi, this is the same kind of stunt you tried to pull before. You aren’t going to be able to separate me and the guys. You can’t control anything right now. I don’t need to be headmistress, and I don’t need to listen to you. I have all the inheritance money, all the help that I need, and all the power. There’s nothing you can do from inside that room with your hands tied together. So, go ahead and taunt me all you like; it won’t work.”
Naomi laughed. “If you acted like this all the time, then I would think you to be more my daughter than Paula’s. Why don’t you act like that all the time? It’s a much better look on you.”
“Act like what? Pissed-off?” I asked.
She snickered. “No. Act like you have all the power, because you do. Women have all the power that they need, we are just conditioned to think that we don’t. We’re raised to feel like we need someone to take care of us and protect us, like we can’t make it on our own and need to apologize for the times when we erroneously think that we can. It’s not a good look on anyone. It wasn’t even a good look on your mother.”
Okay, now that needed to be asked about.
“My mother?” I asked. “I can’t see my mother ever acting as submissive as you just described.”
“Oh, you’d be surprised,” Naomi said.
But this time, she wasn’t being sarcastic or condescending. This time she seemed to be sad and regretful. And so, I took the bait.
“Tell me about my mother,” I said as I turned to look at her in the doorway.
Her striking resemblance to my mother still unnerved me. I expected her to try to strike some sort of bargain with me, to tell me that she would agree to give me answers about my mother if I agreed to let her out, or give her some of the inheritance money, or something that would benefit her current situation. But she didn’t.
“What do you want to know?” she said.
“Anything,” I answered.
I was so desperate to know about all the
things my mother would never have the chance to tell me that I didn’t even care how trivial it seemed. I didn’t care if Naomi told me which flavor of soup was her favorite, or what her nickname was in grade school, or even if she told me something big like what my mother’s greatest fear was. They were sisters, so surely they shared things like these.
“Paula was brave,” she said.
I knew that already.
“And stupid,” Naomi continued.
I was about to verbally leap to my mother’s defense, but she kept talking.
“Your mother was the bravest stupid person I have ever met. She let herself get into so much trouble. At first, I used to think that Paula really was stupid. But then, I realized that she wasn’t. And that was even worse. She wasn’t stupid at all. She always knew exactly what she was doing and exactly what price she would have to pay for it. That’s why I always just preferred to think of her as stupid. It was easier than thinking of her as being so bravely selfless.”
“Aunt Naomi, what are you talking about?” I asked, feeling even more desperate to know what she had to say about my mother.
“Did your mother ever tell you about our father?” she asked.
“No,” I answered.
Come to think of it, she never had. I always just figured that they had a strained relationship, as many fathers and daughters do.
“Good,” she said as if the discussion was over.
I wasn’t about to let it be over.
“What about your father?” I asked. “Was he mean?”
Naomi burst out into a fit of laughter that made her sound every bit as crazy as everyone thought she was.
“Oh honey,” she said as she shook her head slowly. “Mean doesn’t even get us started with him.”
Mom had never told me anything about my grandfather, neither good nor bad. It was almost as if he didn’t exist to me, and I knew and trusted my mother enough to realize that there would have been a good reason for that.
“Our father was a monster. And I don’t use that word lightly either,” she said. “I’ve known many awful and evil men. But I’ve never known one that was a true monster, aside from our father.”
“What did he do?” I asked.
“Oh, he wouldn’t do anything,” she said with a far-off look as if she needed to distance herself from the story she was telling. “He would just make you think about all the things that he could do. He would twist your mind around itself so many times that you couldn’t tell up from down, truth from lie, or hero from villain. Paula and I would watch him chip away at our mother, too. It wasn’t anything drastic at first; little things like making a comment and then immediately pretending like he didn’t say it and like we were all crazy, even though we all heard him clear as day. We had a dog back then; I think his name was Sam. I remember watching my father stuff the dog in a trash can and close the lid. I can’t even remember what the dog did, only that it got into something or chewed something that it shouldn’t have. I remember standing there and watching him do it. He looked at me and smiled, the creepy kind of way that those clowns in horror movies do. Eventually he left the room to go do something else. I stood there and watched the trash can shake back and forth as Sam tried to get out. I should have helped him get out, but I didn’t. I knew what would happen if I tried. After a few hours, he came back into the room and pulled Sam out. Of course, the dog was dead by then. He threw it at my feet and then yelled at me for not letting the dog out of the trash can as if it had all been my fault. But I knew what would have happened if I had let the dog out.”
I cringed at the visual image that was playing out in my mind.
“Your mother came into the room at that moment. She saw our dead dog at my feet. She knew exactly what had happened and she started to yell at our father.”
Naomi stopped talking.
“What happened to her?” I asked.
When she didn’t answer for a few minutes, I asked again. “Naomi, what happened to my mother?”
She looked as if she was going to be sick. Even the coloring of her face started to turn a blanched shade of green. “Did you ever know why your mother wore scarves all the time?” she asked me. “Even in the summer, Paula would wear scarves, or bandanas, or sometimes pretty choker necklaces.”
“Yes,” I said. “Because she had a scar from when she was little and accidentally got her head wedged between the bars of her crib. She told me that story. She told me that she didn’t remember it, but that her mother told her that was what happened.”
“Of course that’s what she would say,” Naomi said with a knowing nod. “Like I said, your mother was stupidly brave.”
“Wasn’t that what happened?” I asked. “Did something different happen instead?”
“Your mother remembered exactly how she got those scars around her neck, and it had nothing to do with being a toddler and getting her head stuck between the bars of a crib. Those scars came from being forced to wear a dog collar around her neck for a whole year. Sam’s collar.”
I felt sick to my stomach. “Are you telling me that my grandfather made her wear your dead dog’s collar around her neck for a year because she stood up to him when he killed your dog?”
She nodded mindlessly. “Yep. And I have a hundred more examples just like that one.”
All of a sudden, things became clearer to me. My mother and Naomi suffered an abusive childhood, and it affected them both in drastically different ways. My mother became strong and defiant, and she also became compassionate and the desire to help others that suffered at the end of abusive hands, grew as her purpose. Naomi wasn’t as strong, or as lucky.
I heard her sigh, and for a split second it almost sounded as if she had pulled her head out of the crazy clouds she snorted on a daily basis. “Our father never did those things to me, because I was always too weak to challenge him. I stood by and watched and let him get away with everything that he did. Not that it mattered if we spoke up, it didn’t. He would do whatever he wanted anyway, and our mother was powerless to stop him. She just tried to clean up the mess he made and did damage control after the fact. But your mother, she stepped in each and every time. She was like my sword and shield on every battlefront. I watched her take the fall for everything. I watched our father torment her both mentally and physically; mostly mentally though. That was what he got off on. He knew that Paula could take the physical pain. The incident with the dog collar showed him that. So, he focused on causing her as much mental anguish as possible. I have no idea how she was able to protect her mind from him for so long. I know I wasn’t.”
It all made sense now. Naomi’s mental illness wasn’t something she was born with. It was a result of years and years of trauma; years of watching my mother being abused just to spare her younger sister. Somehow, my mother had emerged from it stronger and more fortified, even though she was the one who was made to suffer the most.
But Naomi didn’t have the mental fortitude to withstand it.
When she emerged, she was damaged; broken.
And that is why my mother wanted to help her.
That is why she wanted Naomi brought here, in this sanctuary that we would build. Finally, my question had been answered completely. The true purpose of my mother’s personality and why she did everything she had done became clear to me with one long, gut-wrenching story from my estranged—and batshit crazy—aunt.
That was why my mother always tried to fix broken people.
Because she understood that brokenness was rarely ever innate.
10
“Naomi,” I said after we had both sat in silence for a while.
I was leaning up against the doorframe out of both physical and mental fatigue, and she was picking at the cords on her wrists and trying to get them apart, unsuccessfully, because her fingers weren’t long enough.
“Is this why you hate men so much?” I asked.
It would make sense that if she had an abusive father that her view toward all men might be skewed.
“I have always hated boys,” she said. “Even before I saw the monster that my father truly was.”
“Yes, I remember,” I said. “I remember when we would play dolls and you would pull the boys’ heads off. I remember when you would read stories and you would always change the endings.”
Naomi smiled.
“You remember those things?” she asked. “That makes me feel good. My favorite endings were the ones with dragons.”
Oh yes, I remembered those storiesvery clearly. The princess or maiden would always befriend the dragon that the prince or warrior was sent to kill. Then she would command the dragon to eat the man, and the dragon and princess would live happily ever after.
“Yes, but why did you do that?” I asked. “I was only a small child. I had no reason to be jaded against boys.”
“That’s precisely why I did it,” she answered. “You were so naïve and innocent, and you still are.”
I huffed. If only she knew how not innocent I was now. I had killed people, I had multiple lovers; I don’t think I was quite as virtuous as my aunt thought me to be.
“You needed to know how men really are. Your mother certainly wasn’t going to teach you, although she should have. I may not have been able to save her from our father or from her awful husband who was ten times worse even, but I was determined to save you from ending up in a similar situation.”
Suddenly a thought occurred to me, one that I would never have even dreamed of entertaining before. “Everything that you did to me and to the men that I care about; did you do them because you wanted the money? Or because you were trying to keep me alone and away from them?” I asked.
Naomi’s face froze as if she had taken a bite of something too cold that had shot up into her face.
“Both,” she answered.
“But you nearly killed Michael,” I said angrily. “You nearly killed all of three of them. And you nearly killed me, too.”
“I didn’t lay a hand on you,” she said, taken aback.
My voice swelled with anger. “Yes, that’s true. But your actions caused me to do something reckless and I nearly died in a car crash.”
Vicious: A Dark Bully Reverse Harem Romance (Beautiful Tyrants Book 3) Page 7
