Always A Pleasure [Book 2]

Forty-Six

"Tell me about your mother," Harrison heard Katherine ask as she laid in his arms in bed that night.

His whole entire body went rigid at the mention of the woman who gave birth to him.

"Wh-why?" He stammered, afraid to dredge up those memories.

He spent years forgetting. Years forgetting how he would wake up every night for a year after his mother left with nightmares about something terrible happening to her. Years forgetting how he held out hope that she would return until he was nearly sixteen-years-old. Years forgetting how long it had been since she abandoned him.

He was twelve-years-old when she disappeared from his life. He honestly didn't know what happened to her, other than what his father told him. And he couldn't be certain if any of what his father said was the truth. He just knew that his mother abandoned her children and never looked back— not in the nearly seventeen years since.

Sometimes he wondered if she was dead. Maybe she had been dead all this time. Maybe his father had someone kill her. Maybe his father killed her himself. He was certain he would never know for sure and he spent years learning not to care.

As fucked up as it sounded, he sometimes liked to believe she was dead — that she didn't make the conscious decision to leave her children to fend for themselves against an absolute monster. At least then she would have an excuse worthy of the situation.

"She left when I was twelve," he said quietly.

"Oh, baby, I'm so sorry," Katherine whispered, sounding instantly saddened.

"I haven't seen her since."

"What? Not at all?" Katherine asked as she propped up onto her elbow to look over at him.

"Not a letter or phone call. Nothing," he told her.

"She just... she just left? She abandoned you and your sisters? Left you with your father?" Katherine asked, looking and sounding appalled.

"Yes," Harrison said evenly.

"Did she know? Did she know what kind of man your father was?" Katherine asked before amending the last word in her question to 'is'.

"I'm entirely certain she knew and just didn't care," he told her, his tone apathetic.

"Oh, Harrison," Katherine cooed, sadness plaguing all her features.

He hated when she looked at him like that. Besides the fact that he didn't want anyone's pity, the sadness he knew she felt in her heart when she looked at him like that was very painful to him.

"It was a long time ago," he told her evenly, doing all he could to push back his suppressed feelings over it.

Silence fell over them and Harrison was left thinking about what life was like before his mother was gone. It wasn't terrible. There was no love between his parents and neither of them showed much affection for their children, but his life just seemed... warmer before she left. Everything felt cold and dark afterward, like he would spend the rest of his life mourning the loss of his adolescence, of the feelings of stability his mother used to bring him.

As he grew up in the absence of his mother, that cold feeling turned into detachment and indifference. His father's abuse on top of it made him into a very angry teenager. He often got into fights— bloody, brawling fights. Sometimes they were fights he sought out solely to feel like he was still alive. The drugs and alcohol helped briefly to drown out the detrimental feelings, until he found ways to bury his angst.

As an adult, that was usually done by burying himself into work and women. And now... Katherine. Except with Katherine, everything was different. Everything was brighter. His life felt warm again with her in it. She brought a light into his life that he had never known and he was so grateful to her.