Page 17 of Endless Anger
Is that the kind of thing she’s into? Extreme jealousy and overprotection?
Have I not been doing enough?
Internally, I shake my head. It’s not like it fucking matters. None of this means a damn thing, because I’ll never act on it anyway.
Not in this lifetime at least.
Some people are simply destined to watch greatness from the sidelines. I’m a man cursed by his own want, a slave to captive desire.
She’d never go for it. For me.
I wouldn’t even know how to ask.
“Yeah, yeah.” Foxe rolls his eyes, pulling me toward the door. “The fantasy’s always better anyway.”
That, at least, I can agree with.
The fantasy is all I’ve fucking got.
“What madeyou decide not to continue school?” I ask Mom a few days later, aware that she doesn’t like to be disturbed when she’s in the middle of a project deadline but willing to risk her wrath anyway.
The thing with Mom’s anger is that it burns out quickly, whereas Dad’s is a quiet flame that builds and consumes slowly.
Mine is…eternal. That’s all I know about it.
It’s this disease that pulses inside my stomach on a constant rotation, ready to push me into action no matter the circumstance. I can’t seem to ever let it go, ignore it, or move on.
It’s just there.
Itis.
Mom glances up at me from her laptop, a thoughtful expression onher angular face. Her golden-hazel eyes are soft at the corners, and she purses her pink-painted lips as if genuinely contemplating her answer.
“Well, I married your father, for one.” She leans back from her desk, folding her hands in her lap. “And I wasreallyinto him. At that point, I couldn’t imagine ever leaving him.”
My face screws up, and I close the tattered copy ofFor Whom the Bell Tollsresting on my knee. “Didn’t he force you into the marriage?”
“Force is a strong word. Your father is a man of action, and I like to think he just didn’t know how to ask back then.”
“You’d have married him if he asked?”
“Probably. I had a fiancé, and he was terrible. I’d been infatuated with Kallum for practically my whole life. The decision would’ve been an easy one.”
“But he didn’t let you make it.”
“I suppose that’s where the force comes in. Not that I minded.” She grins, seemingly at the memory, pushing some dark brown hair from her shoulder.
“Ew,” I mutter, resting my head on the back of the armchair I’m in.
The library at the Asphodel, our family home, ishuge. Dad had it renovated before I was born to accommodate his and Mom’s love for literature, and the built-in mahogany shelves stretch all the way to the ceiling, with attached ladders giving access to the books out of reach.
“A library is a place of worship,” he told me at one point, and I often wondered if that was why we didn’t go to church. If my parents found religion within the pages of these bound masterpieces.
When I was little, I’d spend my time here curled up on the floor in front of the black stone fireplace, listening to Mom read from whatever classic she chose that evening. Lucy could rarely stand to sit still long enough to join, but I used to love nothing more than the sound of my mother’s soothing voice before bed, lulling me to a place where anger felt a little less prevalent.
It seems such an infrequent sensation for me these days.
I’d hoped as I got older, that might change.
