“Good. It gets easier. We run sessions most days. Come by anytime.”
“Sure,” I say. It’s not like I have much else to do until my car’s fixed.
Outside, Talon makes his excuses and heads off to work, exactly as expected.
I go looking for Luke and find him sitting on the steps with a mug of coffee.
“Hey,” I say, dropping beside him.
“Hey, yourself.” He grins. “How was mindfulness?”
“It was okay. Not really sure it’s for me.”
“Same. I fell asleep the first few times. Got told off for not being present.” He shrugs. “Guess I’m good at repressing shit. You?”
“I don’t have anything repressed.”
He raises an eyebrow. “Really?”
I cross my arms. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means you don’t share anything real about yourself. Not your past. Nothing.”
“Yeah? And you don’t either.”
His grin widens. “What do you want to know?” He tilts his head. “Want me to tell you about the first time I cut myself?”
CHAPTER 18
Luke
Her eyes widen, and her jaw falls open.
Clearly, she didn’t realize I’d noticed her staring at my wrists and forearms—but when you’re sensitive about something, you pick up on that kind of thing.
I don’t usually talk about it, and to be honest, I’m as surprised as she is to hear myself offering to discuss it. But now that I’ve started, I don’t stop.
“The first time was when I was just a kid—maybe fifteen or sixteen. I was in Paris, in a hotel with my parents.”
“In a hotel?”
“Yeah. I know, it sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? Anyway, my parents had gone out to some swanky evening event or other—God knows what—and left me in the family suite on my own. I’d ordered pizza from room service and was trying to decide whether to watch a movie when I got a text from my girlfriend back home. She said she was dumping me. Said she’d found someone else and was very sorry, that it wasn’t anything I’d done, but she hoped we could still be friends. But actually, that wasn’t really why I did it.”
“It wasn’t?” she asks, pulling her pretty knees up to her chin.
“No, not really. Not if I’m honest with myself.” I’m not sure why I’m revealing this. I’ve never told this story to anyone else. Maybe it’s because I can tell part of her wants to share her own burdens, but another part is holding her back because she’s scared of being judged, of being seen as crazy. I know what that feels like, and I want her to know she’s not alone.
“Yeah, I think it was just an excuse,” I say. “But the thought had always been there, even when I was younger. Intrusive. Constant. There was this pain in me I could never get out, no matter how much I partied or drank or did a bunch of shit I shouldn’t have been doing at that age. I’d always wondered what it would feel like to turn that mental pain outward into something physical… if it would make it stop. That night, alone in my parents’ hotel suite, it felt like the perfect time to find out.”
I chuckle, even though the memory still carries a dull edge of shame.
“But what about your parents? Couldn’t you have talked to them?”
“God, no.” I shrug. “They never showed any interest. Too busy making money and showing up at events. I rarely saw them. Not even when I was younger. I was mostly raised by a rotating carousel of nannies. Some of them were nice enough. I still keep in touch with a few of them.”
“Still,” she says, her shrewd eyes cutting straight through my attempt at levity. “They’re not supposed to be substitutes for parents.”
I shrug. “A lot of people grow up not seeing their parents. Sometimes they work too much, sometimes they’re abusive, sometimes they’re dead. At least mine didn’t beat me. They just… weren’t there for me.” I pause, thinking it over. “I don’t think it was a lack of affection. More like learned behavior. Their parents probably did the same to them. They were just following the script. But that whole poor little rich boy thing isn’t enoughto explain what I did. I think something was genuinely off in my head, and I didn’t know how to deal with it. Probably didn’t help that I kept everything bottled up.”