Page 27 of Colossal
“No, Fairy Tale, wecan’tleave things the way they are.”
For some reason, that causes her to gasp and stiffen. I’m so confused by her stricken expression that I don’t immediately react when she dives out of the bed, hurriedly putting on her high heels and fixing her dress. She uses some tissues to wipe the come off the insides of her legs, tosses them in the waste basket, takes one long look at me and says, “I know you’re breaking up with me, but I’ll still love you. Always.”
Then she bolts.
Wait.
What?
What the hell?
What the hell just happened? She thinks I’m breaking up with her?
“Marlow!” I bellow, rushing to get out of the bed, pulling up my pants and zipping my fly, lightheaded from the total drainage of my body, but still stumbling after her, panic turning my blood to ice in my veins, the walls of the staircase a blur around me. She thinks I broke up with her. My God, the pain on her face. It’s ruining me. “Marlow.Marlow!”
“She’s gone,” Garrett says, when I make it to the kitchen. “Went out the back door.”
I don’t even think, I simply barrel after her, my heart shattered over what I’ve inadvertently done. I need to make this right immediately or I think I could actually die.
“Wait!”
Even though my instincts are screaming at me to ignore the command and run after my Fairy Tale, the voice belongs to one of her stepsisters, and I’m praying she has valuable information to tell me. Something that will complete the puzzle that is my girlfriend.
“Wait, um…” I’m surprised to see both stepsisters coming toward me. One of them takes my arm and steers me through the back door, out into the yard. When they exchange a solemnglance, my stomach starts to pitch. “You can’t just run after her. Not all the way to the house. You’ll get her in even worse trouble.”
“Why is she in trouble to begin with?” I shout, ready to tear out my hair.
They look down at the ground guiltily. “Because our mother doesn’t like Marlow. She never has and…back when our parents first got together, Marlow rebelled and tried to run away, which got her locked in the attic on occasion. But when my stepmother found the drawings and started to think Marlow was…evil…” I jerk back at the familiar word. She tried to tell me, in her own way. Didn’t she? “Now she’s pretty much locked in the attic all the time. Any time she’s home. She’s not even allowed to eat with us…”
“Why didn’t she tell me?” I wheeze.
“I think…the ongoing punishment embarrasses her. I think my stepmother has been saying such nasty things about her for so long, she’s started to believe them.”
A broken sound tumbles out of my mouth.
I don’t stay for another word. I can’t.
This is why we can’t be a normal couple? She’s been horribly mistreated? Isolated?
Taught to be ashamed of herself and her abusive home life, when it’s her parents who should be humiliated and scorned?
Sick to my very soul, I turn on a heel and maraud through the woods with red tunnel vision, snarling and ripping down tree branches, bashing them into my chest to try and quell some of the violence that has come to life inside of me. It doesn’t work. I only amp myself up for what’s to come. A long-overdue reckoning.
God help the people who have been hurting my baby.
Chapter 12
Marlow
My arms are wrapped tightly around my middle as I stumble the final hundred yards to my house. Almost there. I don’t know how I’m going to climb to the second-story window when I’m in such tremendous pain, but what choice do I have? All I want is to faceplant on my bed and cry until my heart gives out.
He broke up with me.
Eric broke up with me.
He’s gone.
There’s a vicious voice in the back of my head sayingof course he did. After I showed up to the party—myfirstparty—and couldn’t make it two minutes without tempting him upstairs, begging him to take me. I can still hear our moans and the bed frame pounding off the wall. Everyone downstairs at the party probably heard what we were doing. He probably broke up with me out of disgust and humiliation.
