Page 131 of Yearn
“Why?”
“I wanted to please you.”
“You would have done so regardless.”
“Maybe, but now there’s no doubt.” The smile that spread across my face wasn’t about the piercing at all—it was about what it meant: the lengths I’d go to make her feel wanted, the quiet madness that devotion had turned into.
The hours without her had been sterile and frozen. Empty plates on the table where her kids should have been. A silence in the house that didn’t heal but decayed. Each room upstairshad carried the sound of a man who didn’t belong there—Scott pacing, coughing, opening the fridge like he owned it.
The kids played and he yelled at them to be quiet.
They ended up rushing to their rooms and watching television by themselves.
That was the part that tore at me—the fucking toxic dysfunction he had brought with him.
I heard it through the floorboards, the sharp bark of his voice, the way it cut through their laughter. J had been reading out loud, their voice shaky but proud, and Scott snapped at them—“Stop mumbling like a girl. You’re a boy. Act like one!”
The words hit harder than a fist. I knew it from the way J went quiet, from the pause before the soft pad of his footsteps retreated down the hall.
I wanted to go upstairs right then, pull Scott off the couch, and drive his teeth down his throat.
But I couldn’t—not with the kids there, not with their eyes on me. I couldn’t let them see what it would look like if I gave in to the need boiling under my skin.
So I went upstairs and stayed in the backyard, hands clenched, staring through the window like a starving man. Watching J curl in on their self, shoulders rounded again after weeks of me teaching them to square them, to be proud of their shape, their breath, their right to take space.
Scott had undone it in one sentence.
One stupid, careless sentence.
It wasn’t fair.
J deserved better.
Oliver deserved better.
Teyonah for sure deserved better.
And they deserved quiet nights, not the stink of beer bottles rolling on the table.
The kids deserved a wholesome dinner and a bedtime routine, not fast food grease spread across paper bags and an order to go up to their rooms and be quiet.
Out in the backyard, I pressed my palms against the glass until they ached, until I could feel the ghost of their laughter filling my bones.
Not traumatizing the kids was the only leash I had left.
That was the only thing that kept me outside.
I could wait until they were asleep. I could wait until Scott was alone with his beer bottles.
Then I was able to diagnose and figure out the best treatment. I thought of it like a clinical symptom: the house running a fever. High. Dangerous. A sickness that would worsen if untreated.
Medicine was about dosage and timing.
Too much and the body seized.
Too little and the infection spread.
So I left the house, went back to the hospital, ducked into the supply room, where no one looked twice at a man in scrubs. In there, I grabbed several sedatives in liquid form and tucked them into my bag.
