Afterglow

shatter

Sometime between the late warning alarm on Lachlan's phone that pierced through our calm like a tidal wave of 'oh shit' and the cresting of the sun on the horizon, Lachlan had grabbed one of his books on the side table and began reading with me still plastered to the front of his chest like a leech.

I wasn't going anywhere, though, not when he'd put me there, so that was where I stayed.

One hand in front of us holding up the old hardback and the other tracing delectable patterns on my thigh close to the hemline of my skirt, he read each word of the mystery thriller out loud so I could lose myself in the journey of the heroine who had to protect her lover from her stalker. 

In the grand scheme of things, despite myself not having a lover, the concept wasn't all too unfamiliar.

Shivers erupted along the column of my spine as he reached the second act of the novel, where the heroine pushed away her love interest to save him from the evils punishing and following her.  I couldn't have done that.  I was far too selfish to try and face something like that alone...

But wasn't that exactly what I was doing?  Keeping secrets from everyone in my life, not a single other soul knowing the truth about what I was going through, was I so different from this fictional character that I felt was ridiculous for hiding her trauma, her reality? 

"'...stunned, she turned around, and then he was there, forcing her to give up and tell him the truth.  She-'" Lachlan cut himself off as he peered down at me, his eyes searching to meet mine though I kept them trained firmly ahead of me, the truth of everything coming crashing down upon me in a heap of denial and unwilling exposure.

"You still reading?  I can pick another book, or-"

"Why are we here, hanging out like this?  I thought we didn't like each other.  When did that change?  Why does everything change?"

My voice was detached, haunted and filled with demons that he couldn't see.

Sighing out, the book closed deftly and attention now firmly placed on me, I squirmed in his hold until I was sitting up and staring directly at him, no matter how hard it was to keep from trailing my eyes down to his lips.  This was not the time for distractions.

"What do you want me to say, Kat?  I thought...I thought you were the same as everyone else, as my parents and yours.  But you seem to hate this life almost as much as I do, and it was just like, finally, finally, someone else gets it, someone else gets that this isn't normal, what they're doing to people isn't right and they need to know that not everyone is going to take it lying down."

"Wait.  What they're doing to people?  And my parents too?  I'm not sure I'm following where this is going..."

"Kat.  You're seriously going to sit here and try to tell me you don't know what's going on?  The layoffs and money funneling and destroying people's livelihoods, stealing money from their workers to fuel their own greed.  It's disgusting."

I had only known my father to be the most up and up businessman, and my mother?  The only thing she dipped her fingers into was nail polish, not nefarious activity.

The confusion must have been apt on my face, because he snarled out a few curses and reached up to grab my head and neck in the same hand, thumb brushing along my jawline as he did so.

I ignored the shudders that elicited as he asked me the question I'd been dreading, but I was so damn tired of hiding.

"If this isn't why you're so mad at your family then what is it?  What could they have done that's worse than that, because everything I just listed didn't make you angry, just confused.  Like you knew they were capable of that anyway, because they've done something worse."