Page 75 of On the Line
“We were about a mile from the house when he just…lost control. I don’t know if I can’t remember what happened because I don’t want to, or because it all happened so fast that my mind can’t accurately recall it. But one second we were cruising along just fine, and the next we were slamming into a tree at sixty miles an hour.”
Lexie’s face blanched. “Oh my God, Mitch.”
“I still don’t know how any of us actually survived. The car was…” He shook his head, as though dispelling the memory. “It was a twisted hunk of metal.”
“Were you injured?”
He nodded. “My dad ended up with a concussion. I ended up with a broken leg and a two inch piece of glass stuck in my back, barely missing my spine. It would’ve been a lot worse if I hadn’t been wearing my seatbelt.”
Lexie was familiar with the scar, the thick, puckered line along his lower back that she had brushed with her fingers many times over the course of the last year. But she’d never asked about it, figuring it was a souvenir from his childhood, a memory too painful to recall. She had a few of those herself.
She crawled into his lap and threw her arms around him, pressing her face into his neck. “I’m so sorry, honey.”
“It’s okay,” he said, his voice thick. “We survived and, as you know, Ann Arbor called not long after.”
Lexie couldn’t stop the tears that flowed free, and though Mitch surely noticed as they dampened his shirt along the collar, he didn’t say anything, didn’t move save for rubbing his hands up and down her back.
Her upbringing wasn’t something she looked back on fondly. In fact, she’d rather erase it from her memory completely. But where her suffered brand of torment and poor parenting was general neglect and emotional detachment, Mitch had suffered physical damage at the hands of his father, injuries that he bore the proof of on his skin every day.
“What’re you thinking about?” He asked her, reaching over to lace his fingers through hers.
“You. How strong you are despite everything you’ve been through.”
“I mean, I work out regularly in order to be this strong,” he said, attempting to lighten the mood.
“I don’t mean physical strength,” she said, pulling back to look up at him. “I mean emotional. You easily could’ve ended up just like me. Terrified of commitment, of letting people close enough to hurt you after all you’d endured growing up. One good parent or not, Mitch…you could be a very different man right now. How? How are you so…perfect?”
He snorted, but cupped the back of her head to pull her in for a kiss. “I’m anything but perfect, Lexie,” he said against her mouth, then leaned away. “But you’re right, I had one good parent. My mother is a saint. You’ve met her, you know. Even the massive, unending storm cloud that was my father couldn’t dampen her shine. Even when we were struggling, she put on a brave face, tried to see the good in everything. And eventually, things got better. But I had hockey, too. The game saved my life, and hers, and has given me more than I could ever give in return.”
“I wish I’d had something like hockey growing up,” she said wistfully.
As much as she tried to deny it, and tried to ignore the wounds her parents had left on her…it was a lot like having a bruise. She completely forgot about it until she pressed her finger to it, and the pain flared up again.
“What are your parents like?” Mitch asked quietly.
“Mediocre at parenting, but great at business. They’re not bad people I don’t think. Not at their cores. They just didn’t—don’t—give a fuck about me. All they care about is money and their pristine reputation. To them, I think having a child was more about acquiring a status symbol, some sort of physical proof that they were good, solid family people.”
“You’ve never really talked about it, you know.”
Lexie looked at him with an eyebrow raised. “And I suppose that’s your way of asking me to talk about it now?”
He shrugged. “Ididjust bare my soul to you. I’m here if you want to talk about it, but I’m not going to force you.”
And that was the million dollar question, wasn’t it? Did shewantto talk about it? The short answer was a hardno. But she couldn’t deny that things with Mitch were getting more serious by the day, and holding such a big piece of her life back from him, the piece that quite literally made her who she is and shaped so much of the way she moved about the world, didn’t make sense anymore.
“Things were good early on, I guess,” she started. “We all look happy in pictures, but in those days I was too young to vividly remember anything. I get flashes. Playing in a sandbox on a warm summer day. My mom curled up beside me in a tiny bed, reading me a story. My dad holding my hand as we walked down the street. By the time I was old enough to start actively recalling things that happened, those days were long gone. They made their first big investment, the one that took off and opened a thousand doors for them, when I was five.”
“What is it they do again?” Mitch asked.
“They’re venture capitalists. Filthy rich. Heartless. You know the type.”
“I doubt they’re heartless,” he said.
“Oh they definitely are. Or if they do have hearts, there’s just a giant hole where the love for their daughter should be. We never stayed in one place for long. Sometimes it was a month, sometimes longer. I think the longest we ever stayed in one place was Chattanooga. We were there for about six months when I was ten. I had absolutely no stability. It’s why I said yes to the first job opportunity that came my way when college was wrapping up.”
“Where else have you lived?”
“Everywhere,” she said, turning her body and throwing her legs over his lap. Now that she’d cracked the box open that held all of these moments from her childhood, she figured she should get comfortable. They’d be here for a while. “But that’s not the point.”
