Lethal Lust

09 | no tears emerged

Numb.

That's the only word Kylie could find to convey how she felt as she stood next to Jax at their father's funeral service.

She'd never attended a funeral before but she had always assumed that the associated aura created by the sobbing faces around her would be sufficient enough for her to struggle to suppress the tears threatening to spill. She thought she'd feel bruising within her from her insides churning away like a tornado. She thought that the words from the minister and seeing her father's wife Libby would be enough to evoke something inside her empty soul. To finally make her feel something, again.

But instead, she felt the usual tedious emptiness.

No tears emerged. Not when her fathers' casket was being lowered into his eager and waiting grave. Not even when Libby stood up to give her tearful moving eulogy, muttering words of love and family. Not even when people paid their condolences to her and Jax.

Nothing.

"Kylie, I'm so glad to have finally met you. Your dad spoke about you so often." Libby exclaimed, grabbing Kylie's hands and swiftly planting a gentle kiss on each.

Kylie sighed, avoiding meeting Libby's gaze. Instead, searching around the room for Jax and seeing him enveloped by the guests who were commenting on how much he'd grown since the last time they'd seen him. Guests, that nor he or Kylie recognised.

Libby appeared exactly as Kylie had anticipated. She recalled Jax referring to her as a Goddess. And she certainly lived up to that claim with her golden ringlets and clear blue eyes.

The only flaw Kylie could find on her perfect face was the cerise coloured puffiness around her eyes indicating that she had been crying for long periods of time, unlike Kylie.

Her ocean blue eyes emitted nothing but rays of kindness, and Kylie knew straight away that every word uttered from her mothers' mouth about Libby had been so very wrong.

Libby's name had rapidly become a curse word in the Campana household, and the two kids had grown accustomed to avoiding it like the plague if they wanted to live a peaceful life, void of their mothers' erratic behaviour.

Their father had reached out to Kylie and Jax for the first time on Kylie's sixteenth birthday. As though a few meaningless scribbles on a birthday card eight years late would suffice in making up for lost time as well as the childhood and innocence that the two had lost with it.

Jax may have forgiven their father and Libby the day that card arrived through the post-box but Kylie hadn't. And so, on her fathers' funeral reception she was finally coming face-to-face with the then nineteen-year-old teenager that he had left their mother for all those years ago.

Kylie reclaimed her stone-hearted persona, consisting of her usual resting-bitch face. She would never forgive the woman who stole her father from them and made him transgress to the levels he had.

"Hi Libby. I've heard an awful lot about you too, can't say any of it was good though." Kylie sneered back at the blonde beauty in front of her.

The hurt was evident in Libby's clear blue eyes as she realised that Kylie was referring to Valerie and what the two had been told by their mother. She noted that building a relationship with Kylie as her father would have wanted was not going to be as easy as it had been with Jax.

"I hoped maybe you'd like to come around to our home, you're always welcome. I know the kids are dying to meet their big sister." She continued hopefully. She had a tissue crunched up carefully in the palm of her hand and occasionally used it to dab at the wet patches forming around her eyes.