“They were still your parents,” Elliot responded softly.
“And part of me wishes I’d been the one to kill them,” I hissed.
I didn’t know you could feel blood draining out of your own face if it went fast enough. I’d said it, but it had come out so fast that I hadn’t even had time to register the thought before it had been put into words and cast out into the air. Instinctively, I put a hand over my own mouth, horrified.
There are some things you don’t say, ever. And then there are some things that you should never, ever,everfucking say. Especially in front of certain people.
I wish I’d killed my parentsis one of them when the man you’re talking to lost his own much-loved father to murder a year and a half before.
Especially if that man is someone you love.
And I’d just said it.
I’m a monster.
It shouldn’t have been a surprise, given the people I’d been born from, I suppose.
“El—” My voice broke.
The hand on my leg rubbed softly. “Baby, it’s okay.”
“It’s not?—”
“Seth.”
I swallowed, falling silent.
“My parents loved me, and yours— Well, I don’t know how they felt, but they sure as shit didn’t act like it, from what you’ve told me.”
What little I’d told him.
I hadn’t gotten into the worst of it.
He kept talking. “I know you, and, baby, you’re one of the kindest, gentlest men I’ve ever met. Whatever they did to you to make you hate them that much… I’m not going to shed any fucking tears for them, you got me?”
The tears I shed weren’t for them, either.
The hand tightened on my thigh. “I love you. I will always love you. Homicidal rage or not.”
I put my hand over his, and he shifted to grip my fingers. “I love you,” I whispered back, emotion thick on the back of my tongue.
“Good,” he said. He picked up my hand and brought my fingers to his lips.
And then I told him the parts I hadn’t managed to tell him the night before.
Once I started, I couldn’t stop talking. So I told him everything.
About the time Noah and I tried to drown ourselves at the conversion camp where we’d been shipped off to break us of our ungodly feelings.
About the time my father had locked me in the cellar for four days with nothing but water and unleavened bread, because thatwas all the Israelites had to eat in the desert, and I should be able to manage four days if they had lived like that for forty.
About the time, when I was fourteen and a raging ball of hormones, when he’d brought in another member of the Community to ‘show’ me what it was I thought I wanted when I’d told him I liked boys instead of girls.
Elliot pulled onto the shoulder, pressing both palms into the steering wheel.
We were somewhere in rural Indiana, with wide highways glimmering in the late July sun.
“Seth… Jesus fuckingChrist.”
