Ours To Be (All Ours, #1)

Chapter 19

Living on your own... it's definitely a wild journey. A journey you're going to have to be completely ready for.

I was pretty eager to go out on my own.

I guess it's different when you grow up in a loving household. I can imagine it being hard to leave that kind of environment.

I practically ran.

I would've been out of there way sooner if it wasn't for my brother.

I would've been a selfish bitch if I'd left him there to deal with that asshole on his own. He couldn't wait to get out of there as well, so he was already gone the day before he turned 18. I took that as my green light and moved out to the apartment my grandparents had acquired for me as a graduation gift.

I know it's kind of extreme...

Not kind of. Its very extreme. Most kids get a card or maybe some money.

But they knew I really needed it. I would've never taken it otherwise.

It had been collecting dust, not even being used up until the month before I turned 21. That's when my brother had turned 18.

I was planning on asking him to move in with me, but I think the both of us needed to be on our own for a while, after all those years under that roof...

We needed our own corner. A place to backpedal to when matters were on the verge of crashing and tumbling on top of our heads again.

I've been forced to make a lot of choices in my adult life. This may be the best one I've made this far.

It may not seem like a big step to a lot of people.

For me? It felt like a shift in nature. My world adapted into this... calmness.

Serenity.

And then I started law school, which also was a whole adjustment itself.

An adjustment I wouldn't have been able to adapt to under my fathers roof. I still wonder how I even got my JD. It's truly a miracle.

Guilt rests on my shoulders in heavy bricks every single day at the thought of my mother that's still sharing a bed with him every night.

No matter how many times she tells me the drinking has stopped, no matter how many times she tells me his hands are tucked to his sides. He's still the bipolar asshole he will always be. A breathing, ticking timebomb. One wrong move, and he will explode.

My mother is the living evidence of love is- or makes blind. The abuse was mostly verbal with her anyway. She didn't have a big mouth, didn't respond to his idiocies when it came to herself. She just let it happen. Didn't dash anything back at him.

I could never. I came back just as hard as he did- if not harder- not caring how many beatings it would cost me. As long as he didn't lay a finger on my brother or mother, I took it.

God, why do my ruminations always get so macabre when I'm in a bathtub?

Its my first free Sunday in a pretty long time and I'm taking advantage of it with lots of bubbles, a sheet mask that will absolutely not change a thing about my skin, candles in a gloomy bathroom, a glass of cheap red and Summer Walker blasting through my Alexa system. All of it meant to unwind and loosen my body, but I'm only dispiriting myself further with self-impairing reflections.

And this is exactly why I keep myself busy. Relaxation is laid out in my cards, sadly.

Kayden dropped me off around midnight last night. I was so depleted, I fell down onto my bed and zoned off into obscurity the minute I got inside. The high and epinephrine had worn off so the enervations had taken over in swells of exhaustion.