Only you

Chapter 20 | Faded

    ⚠️ Some topics may be disturbing ⚠️

Love had always felt like such a betrayal in my life. All the love my mother gave me vanished once they took her life away from her. My father didn't understand the word and my brothers tried, I know they did, but all the hate and blood that was set in between made love look ugly for me.

I knew the way my father treated my mom wasn't love. It was the reason why she always looked for more. I always looked for more too until someone took so much from me, I forgot that it existed.

I had completely forgotten that life wasn't always so dark until I looked at Layla and the love that poured from her mother when we went to go see her or the look that Luca gave her often, the look that said he was trying. For her.

That was what pain could do to a person.

Make them forget everything good.

I spent twelve years with my family and only six with Aldrik yet it seemed like he was all I could remember. The memories of my family were slowly fading. They faded every time he hit me and told me how worthless I was. Every time he had me do something that I didn't want to do.

It all faded. At first, whenever it got really bad I would try to think of my mother's smile and her loving hazel eyes or my brothers' laughs. I would even think about my dad coming home mad and exhausted from work, whatever would help me make the pain go away, but slowly these memories were burning out. Some days they would be so blurry that I forgot they were once a part of my life at all. The more the days went by, the further I was from who I once was.

Those eventually became someone else's memories, not mine.

The physical pain I could tolerate better than the mental pain, because for some reason that just hurt ten times worse. I'd rather have had a few broken ribs than the pain of missing all the people I couldn't see.

I sat in my car for about an hour, leaning my head against the headrest looking out the windshield. The loud rain filled the silence in the car as it hit roughly against my windows making the outside look like a blur.

I was parked outside my restaurant, not ready to go in. I didn't care how long I was letting those fuckers wait, they would have to just deal with it because I needed a moment.

The pain in my thighs didn't go away thanks to fucking Julian. I couldn't help the feeling in my chest as I remembered his beautiful brown eyes, which held so much warmth and comfort as he looked at me, and his goddamn smell that made me feel safe.

My head was all over the place. I looked put together but on the inside I was going fucking crazy so I just needed a moment. Or a whole hour.

I had made arrangements with the workers to meet today instead of tomorrow because one, I just really needed to get out of that house and two, I wanted to get started on this shit because I was actually excited ─ for once ─ to pick out new tile for the kitchen and put in some new designs. I loved creating new things with the ideas in my head. Because I was controlled for half my life by people always telling me what to do, I channeled my newfound independence in decorating and designing things because that was all me; no one else's opinions mattered once I took control.