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Elliot raked a hand through his curls. “There’s a fuck of a lot to tell.”
“Can you just know I wasn’t a Girl Scout before I moved here and leave it at that?” I was such a fucking coward. I’d known this entire time that I would have to tell Elliot the truth, but now I was chickening out.
“Nope.” Elliot’s gaze was heavy, making it clear that he wasn’t going to budge on this, wasn’t going to let me bury my head in the sand. I respected him for that. Loved him for that.
I bit my lip, still hedging, wringing out every second I could where he still looked at me like I was someone worth looking at. “It’ll make you change the way you think of me.”
His mouth tightened. “You having a scar on your face, likely put there by a violent man, isn’t going to make me think a single thing different or bad about you, Calliope.”
“The scar is a result of me willingly, knowingly getting involved with, making money for the Russian Mob. Your ire is for the nice girls who get tangled up with violent men through no fault of their own. Nice girls don’t get tangled up with the Russian Mob, Elliot.”
Elliot’s nostrils flared in obvious irritation, anger. So completely unfamiliar to me. I was triggering those parts of him. Bringing out those harsh emotions that didn’t belong on his face. “Nice girls get tangled up with monstrous men every day.”
I sucked in a deep breath. He might’ve been right, for other women, but not me. “But I’m not a nice girl. Never was. And the story of how I got this,” I pointed to my face, “is not flattering.”
I watched his jaw flex. “And I’m betting your visitor tonight is a part of that story.”
There it was. There was obvious malice in his tone toward Jasper. Even though he didn’t know him. Because he was a good judge of character. And Jasper seeped bad from his head to his toes.
Maybe there was some simple male territorialism sprinkled in there too. Elliot wasn’t outwardly possessive like my brother was, at least not in abeat my chest and grunt ‘mine’ all over the placeway. Elliot was subtler, more refined.
I rolled my lips together. This was inevitable. As much as I wanted Elliot to never know of Jasper’s existence or ourconnection, that ship had long sailed. “His name is Jasper Hayes.”
“Jasper and I are, or were…” I trailed off, trying to find an accurate description for what we were.
“You were together?” Elliot filled in for me, his words quiet, clipped.
Together.A straightforward term to describe an old relationship, an old boyfriend who maybe left the toilet seat up, had an overprotective mother, who gaslit or cheated or didn’t like Taylor Swift. Whatever the reason was that a boyfriend turned into an ex.
“To not put too fine a point on it, yes.” There was no use getting lost in the weeds, trying to explain the toxic entanglement over the years. “We’ve known each other since high school.” I kept talking, but I could not look him in the eye. “Have had an on-again, off-again relationship that isn’t healthy in the slightest.” I sucked my teeth, contemplating how much information to give Elliot about Jasper.
If I had it my way, it would be none. But we were here, and I doubted Elliot would be satisfied with the bare minimum.
“He had a rough childhood,” I continued, fidgeting with my tennis bracelet. “Not to excuse any of the many wrong turns he took into adulthood. But he wasn’t always the way he is now. He was always…” I was lost for words, my tongue feeling sticky and my body suddenly awkward, my skin too tight.
I’d never struggled to explain anything to anyone. But Jasper… Trying to explain Jasper and the reason I’d not only tolerated but welcomed him into my life for as long as I did… How did I explain that to someone like Elliot?
“He never had much,” I whispered. “Even when he came to our town for his final foster home placement with the McPhersons. They were good people, and I’m sure they offered to fund whatever he wanted them to. But he was alreadyconditioned to suspect kindness, to refuse it because he thought there would always be a price to pay.” I thought back to the boy he was then, hints of the man he might become evident in hindsight.
“He didn’t have much money when we were teenagers,” I continued. Elliot’s warmth scalding me as I retreated to my ice cold persona. “One day, we were skipping class—as we often did during senior year since we were sure that we knew more than our teachers.”
I scoffed at our teenage arrogance, but we weren’t entirely wrong. Both of us read a lot, were always in pursuit of knowledge, wanting to be the best, to never be caught unaware.
“There wasn’t much to do in our town, so we were loitering on Main Street. A little girl came out of an ice cream parlor with her mom. Her mom was pushing a stroller, the baby was crying. The mom was obviously stressed.”
I remembered briefly noticing the woman’s panic, her exhaustion, then dismissing it, even being annoyed by it. Because we weren’t conditioned to really see mothers, to give them kindness, empathy. More often than not, we treated them with an institutionalized disdain for not disciplining their children, not quieting them, and for taking up space on sidewalks instead of offering them the help they so sorely needed.
Me, a woman—granted, a budding one at that—failed to see this mother hanging by a thread. That thread snapped when her toddler dropped her ice cream cone on the sidewalk and started wailing.
I’d observed all of this with the annoyed arrogance of a teenager.
Jasper had gone quietly inside the ice cream parlor while I’d brooded, scowled and was generally a little bitch about the mother who was attempting to calm a baby and a distraughttoddler who was also, for some reason, actively trying to run into traffic.
It wasn’t until sitting on that couch with Elliot that I realized what suicidal little beings those fuckers were.
I’d toppled international companies and had addressed rooms of billionaires, yet never did I need to be more on my game than when I was babysitting my three-year-old niece.
Mothers were truly more powerful and competent than the world’s most powerful CEOs.