Our Broken Pieces

Chapter 4

Gage~

I walked into the house that was way too big for just the three of us, then immediately saw the suitcases lingering in the foyer, and that familiar pang in my chest shook my mental state like it always did. Mom was going out of town on another psychiatric convention or whatever, and that meant that Dad was going to feed his demons, and I was going to have to either watch or find somewhere else to stay for the weekend.

It was a no-brainer.

I always stayed at Chance's when I could.

"Oh, Gage, honey," my mom rushed out as she came out of the living room, then into the foyer. "I'm so glad football practice didn't run over. I was hoping to see you before I left."

I hitched my backpack up higher on my shoulder, then raked my eyes over her luggage. "What's all this?"

She shook her head slowly, and her face looked like it held the weight of the world on it. "I have an emergency in Toledo," she replied. "A patient of mine was visiting family, and I'm still not sure what's going on, but I got a call from one of their local hospitals, claiming to have her on suicide watch."

I listened to my mother, and it was hard to tap down the hate that I had for my father in this moment. Oh, the hate that I felt for him was continuous, but it was stronger than others on some days. Maureen Evans was a devoted wife, mother, and doctor, and my father ignored all of that by being a selfish prick. Yeah, I might be a coward, but my cowardice came from a good place, whereas there was nothing good about Quinten Evans.

"How long will you be gone?"

She glanced at her watch before looking at me and doing her best to place a comforting smile on her face. She knew that I got...restless whenever she went away. "I'm going to do my best to be back by Monday, Gage," she answered.

It was only Thursday.

I said the only thing that I could think of. "I'm sorry to hear about your patient."

Her tentative grin turned into a genuine smile. "Thanks, honey," she replied. "And I'm sorry I'm going to miss your game tomorrow night."

I shrugged a shoulder. "It's okay," I assured her. "The season's almost over, and you've been to all the other games, so it's all good."

Her phone chimed, and I watched as her fingers flew over the screen. Her dark blue eyes-the ones that matched mine-found me again as she said, "That's the car service. I need to get going."

I dropped my backpack on the floor, then reached for her two bags. She gave me a grateful smile before turning to open the front door, walking out with me right behind her. I followed her in silence, and a part of me wanted to beg her to stay. Not because I was in any danger, but because I was tired of lying to her. I was tired of keeping my father's secrets, and it was getting tiresome to have to hold on to his secrets as well as my own.

The driver got out of the car when he saw us, then immediately reached for my mother's bags as we approached the vehicle. I handed them over, and my mom gave me the last minutes of her time as he placed her bags in the trunk of the car.

"I'll text you when I land, okay?"

I nodded as I did my best to school my features. "Be careful, Mom," I told her.

She smiled again. "I always am, Gage."

She leaned in to kiss my cheek, and I stuck my hands in my pockets as I watched in silence as the driver ushered her inside the car. It wasn't until they were around the corner and out of sight that I finally walked back towards the house. I could feel the tension in my shoulders starting to settle in, but there was nothing that I could do about it right now.

Later.

Later, I'd be able to purge the hate, resentment, and anger. However, right now, I had to do some homework, then inform Chance that I was crashing at his place this weekend.

See, when the world looked at Quinten Evans and saw a loving husband, supportive father, and respected doctor, all I saw when I looked at Quinten Evans was a bastard of a man that hid behind his money, status, and family image. My father wasn't at all a loving husband or a supportive father where it counted. Oh, he was a respected doctor and had the skills to back up his medical reputation, but he was a farce, an empty image.

Granted, we were both cut from the same cloth as I was also a farce. I was a practiced actor and manipulator. I manipulated people into seeing what they wanted to see, very much like my father did. Of course, I had learned from the best, so there was that.

One night, when I'd been only twelve-years-old, I was supposed to have stayed the night at Chance's while my mother had gone off to a psychiatric convention in Baltimore, but I'd gotten sick, and Chance's mom had ended up driving me home. When we had pulled up to my house, we'd seen the lights on, and so feeling confident that my father was home, Mrs. McQueen hadn't walked me to the door. She'd waited patiently in the car until I had unlocked the front door, then had gone inside. When we had tried calling my father earlier, he hadn't answered, so we had assumed that he'd either been asleep or that he'd had a medical emergency of some sort. What I hadn't ever expected was what I had walked into when I'd entered the house.

I had dropped my overnight bag in the foyer of the house, then had followed the music, voices, and noises coming from my father's study. I hadn't given it much thought at the time, and all that I'd wanted to do was let him know that I was home and that I hadn't been feeling well. However, what I'd ended up walking in on was never going to leave me, and it had ruined me forever.

My father and a couple of his colleagues had been stripped down naked, and they'd been covered with women in the same state of undress. I'd been twelve-years-old, and I had walked in on an orgy in my father's study.

Now, had it been a normal orgy, I might have been able to recover. I might have been able to conjure up the guts to tell my mom and out my dad. However, it hadn't been a normal orgy.

None of them had been.

Those women had been being battered. They had looked like they'd been getting beaten up, not fucked. My twelve-year-old eyes had first thought that they'd been witnessing a fight of some sort, but when their nakedness had finally registered, I had thrown up all over the carpet.

Traumatized, I had run out of my father's office, and it'd taken him an hour to finally convince me to unlock my bedroom door; a decision that I would always regret. Instead of trying to calm me down and apologizing, my father had been so high that he had dragged me down to his office, then had given me an unwanted crash course in sex-ed. I had watched for hours as my father and his friends used and abused the women in the room. I had watched how they had degraded them and fucked them like worthless whores.

Nonetheless, what had really fucked my twelve-year-old mind up? I'd been further traumatized by how the women had seemed to like it. They had moaned and had begged for more, and they had never tried to run away.

When they'd finally been done feeding their depravity, my father had taken me aside, then had told me how important it was for me to keep his secret from Mom. He had explained how he loved and respected my mother so much that he couldn't do the stuff that he did with those women to her. He'd made it sound so reasonable when he'd gone on to guilt me into making sure that my mother was never hurt by finding out. He'd sworn to me that it would ruin her entire life, and so I had kept his secret. I'd kept his fucking secret, and I continued to keep my mouth shut every time that his friends and those women came over whenever my mom was out of town.

I also kept my mouth shut about how I had spent those first few times listening at the door for any cries of distress, ready to help those women.

However, they never came.

Those women had wanted to be in there.