Page 5 of Make Me Scream (Visceral #2)

ABEL

Peris’s words have been echoing in my mind all day. Nothing’s going to change.

I scoff. He’s so fucking na?ve. He has no idea what it’s like. To bounce from house to house, to never have a say when you stay and when you go. To never know who is safe and who isn’t—news flash, no one ever fucking is.

And now, I have to go from finally feeling… well, secure, to unguarded and unprotected. Because as much as Elise may try, she can’t do anything to stop Lucy.

I’ll have to give it all up.

I’ll have to go back to it all.

“Where the fuck have you been?” Peris’s grating voice is music to my ears. I smile instinctually as his feet hammer the rest of the way up the stairs. Never mind his mom is just inside in the kitchen, he steps over the threshold and slams me back into the wall with his forearm across my throat.

Pressing his front to mine, our chests heave and touch with every heat-induced breath. I look up into his golden-green eyes, and fuck, he’s hot when he’s mad.

“Been b-busy,” I croak through his hold, relishing in the way his eyes darken when he notices how bloodshot my eyes are.

“Yeah, getting fucking high, ” he spits in my face—literally. I grin. This is exactly what I needed. His hate, his venom.

I pull my bottom lip between my crooked teeth.

“What else was I supposed to do, Peris?” I ask, genuinely curious.

“Lucy’s here.” Saying it aloud is sobering—for both of us.

Peris seems to lose some of his heat, and he drops his arm, but he doesn’t step back, so we remain touching from our chests down to our groins.

“She’s fucking here. After all these years and I don’t know why. They’re going to take me away—” His grip tightens on my hip, so unyielding, my breath catches.

“Don’t say that,” he mutters against my cheek.

“It’s true. The courts always side with the birth mother, especially when she’s sober. And she is.”

“You don’t know that.” He tries to reason, which is so beyond insane, but I appreciate the effort, and I only laugh softly but dryly.

“I do, Peris. When you’ve been around addicts as much as I have, you learn when someone’s high, or has been, and when someone’s sober.

She’s been sober for a minute, at the very least.” I frown at the thought, brows pinching together.

“Which only means she probably has an ulterior motive.” My head falls back against the wall with a soft sigh.

I’m so damn tired, but I know the exhaustion is only the beginning.

The real fun is only about to begin. “But I don’t know what that could be. ”

Peris takes a step back, giving me the space I think I should want, but I hate all the same.

“She doesn’t even know who you are,” he says quietly.

“No one does,” I say just as softly. Our eyes meet for a brief flash, and the moment is so quick but so intense, I feel my stomach flip and bile shoot up my throat. I swallow it down and rush the conversation along, desperate to forget it ever happened because fuck that.

“I have no clue who she is either, apart from a worn, yellowed Polaroid, but that doesn’t seem to matter, does it?”

Two solid knocks rap against the door, startling us both. We pull apart just moments before Elise walks into the entryway. Her eyes bounce between us, a small frown pulling at her lips.

“Is everything all right, you two?” she asks, directing her question solely at me.

I give her a small smile but not before flicking my gaze to Peris and giving him a smartass grin all of his own. “Yeah, actually. We were just talking. He just got home.”

Elise processes my answer for a minute before nodding with a small smile. “Bout time, you were almost late.”

“Yeah. Practice,” Peris mutters. We’re all ignoring the knocking that’s just sounded again. I’m afraid of what it means. Who the hell knows what they’re afraid of—if they’re even afraid at all.

“Well.” Elise pulls in a big breath and lets it out slowly and noisily.

She clasps her hands in front of her outfit.

She’s dressed nicely in a pair of khakis and a white blouse, her hair pulled into a clip close to her nape with some tendrils hanging down around her face.

I glance over at Peris, still in his practice clothes and stinking of sweat, and then down at myself in my two-sizes-too-big-jeans-and-shirt and my ugly ass shoes. We make quite the picture.

“Let’s get the shit over with, I guess,” I mutter and step forward, taking the lead and pulling the door open.

“Abel, baby.” Lucy beams as the door swings open, her wrinkled, weathered face crinkling unpleasantly in the harsh, yellow light.

I frown and glance behind me. “Off to a great start,” I mutter.

Elise steps forward, but before her back is in front of me, I catch her lips twitching, fighting a smile, which in turn makes my chest feel the slightest bit of warmth.

Who knows, maybe when this is all said and done, if I can still talk to Elise, I’ll survive…

“Please, come in.”

“Please, don’t, ” Peris bites out through gritted teeth.

“Peris,” Elise hisses, and I snicker.

Lucy’s eyes narrow as she steps over the threshold, but she quickly fixes her face as she walks inside, Bill following right behind her. We make eye contact, and I arch my brow, not saying a word. His big, bald head shines under the artificial light above.

“Sup, Bill.”

“Abel.”

“I would say it’s good to see you, but I was kinda hoping to never fuckin’ see you again.” While everyone makes their way into the house, Bill and I hang back a ways.

“Yeah, kid. I was hoping for the same,” he says quietly, hand gripping the back of his neck.

My stomach turns, acid burning through me. “So, what the hell is she doing here, Bill?” I stop, arms crossed over my chest. I can feel eyes on me—several pairs—but none of them matter.

“Well, I think it might be best if we all go sit and talk about what’s going on…” He avoids my eyes, and I know what that means.

“I don’t want to sit at a fucking table with her. I don’t want to see her at all.”

Bill sighs and drops his large hand to my shoulder. I flinch and pull away. He withdraws, and Peris is beside me in the next moment, pushing me toward the table with an arm around my shoulder.

He drops his face near mine, and just as I think he’s about to say something, all I feel is the quickest graze of teeth, and then, they’re gone, and I’m being shoved down into the chair beside him.

“So, what the hell is going on?” he asks loudly, the legs of his chair scraping obnoxiously across the floor as he pulls it out slowly. Gooseflesh prickles across my skin, but I welcome it over the acrid churning in my gut.

“Peris,” Elise murmurs softly, eyes narrowed but in a protective way, like she’s trying to stave off her own anger and not add to his.

“Well, I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one completely confused about what’s going on here.

I didn’t think…” he trails off and cocks his head to the side.

I glance over and watch his golden-green eyes narrow, calculating Lucy sitting diagonal from him.

“I didn’t think egg donors were allowed to just show up and try to take children away from their homes. ”

“ Excuse me?!” Lucy squawks, her sunken in, light gray eyes widening comically.

“Woah, hold on. Let’s all take a minute…” Bill tries to placate the situation.

“No, it’s a good question,” I interject, pushing my chair back and kicking my feet on the table. My eyes flicker toward Elise, noting her fleeting smile, which tells me it’s okay. My stomach settles marginally, giving me just enough courage to continue. “I’d like to know.”

Lucy keeps balking and making random annoying noises, but no one pays her any mind. Bill sighs loudly. “Lucy, please just be quiet a moment. This is a lot for them to take in, and it would be best if you let us speak first. It’s a sensitive situation.”

Lucy’s eyes narrow, her thick, spider-like eyelashes swallowing her irises. “He’s my son, Bill.”

“The fuck I am!” I shout, shooting upward and knocking my chair back. Elise and Peris are beside me in the next moment. Peris’s hand is on my lower back, and Elise has her hand wrapped around mine, her thumb rubbing incessant circles across the back of my hand absentmindedly.

“Perhaps having her here when the conversation is so sensitive might not be the best idea,” Elise says, directing her statement at Bill and Bill alone. Her tone is cold and sharp, and her posture is stiff, but her hold on me is softer than ever.

My skin is burning and crawling with their touch.

I’m repulsed by it and want nothing more than to burn their skin cells off of mine, but the longer they hold on to me, the more I realize I think I need it.

Because without it, I might leave. And if I leave, I’ll never know, and I think some part of me—a part buried so deep I forgot it even existed—needs to know why she’s here.

Why now… when I’m almost eighteen and she won’t have a say-so anymore?

It just doesn’t make any fucking sense.

“Lucy… would you mind stepping into the other room for a few minutes so we can talk first?”

I can’t look at her. I won’t. I don’t want to…

My eyes move of their own volition to find mirrored silver staring back at me. The replica perusing me is so similar, close enough to a mirrored image twenty years down the road if I ever take on the life of an addict, and that thought is so fucking terrifying—to know that I could look like that…

I swallow the bile pushing its way up my esophagus and turn my back to her. Both Elise and Peris drop their arms, and the burning in my nose returns.

This can’t be happening. Not so close to the end. Not when I’m so goddamn close.

“Yeah, of course,” she says, never taking her eyes off me, which I know because I can fucking feel it—the way her gaze burrows into my flesh like maggots on a week-old corpse.

Her retreating footsteps reverberate in the kitchen, slowly fading out into nothing. We know the conversation won’t be private, but not having to look at her fucking face … a weird, weathered version of my own, makes a difference.

“Well,” I say, turning back around and facing everyone again. I sink my teeth into my bottom lip until I taste blood, needing the anchor of something familiar. “When are you taking me out of the house?” I ask, keeping to the point because what’s the sense in dragging it out?

Bill winces, and I just fucking know.

“Two weeks,” he answers plainly.

“ Two weeks?! ” Peris shouts, slamming his hands down on the table with a resounding crack. “Are you fucking kidding me!”

“Bill, what is going on? Why wasn’t I informed of this sooner? It seems… a bit rushed, doesn’t it?”

“Well, yes. But Lucy’s been sober for months.

She was in a three-month inpatient rehab program, and after she got out of that, she’s been going to NA meeting’s five days a week for six months.

She’s been sober nearly a year and has proof—proof she brought directly to the judge after she talked to Child Protective Services.

She didn’t come to me—not that she would’ve known to since I didn’t meet her until the other day.

But it all happened very quickly, from what I’ve been told. ”

Everyone’s so tense, I can feel the strain crackling like electricity in the room. “Abel.” He turns toward me. I swallow and close my eyes briefly, but the second my lashes graze my cheek bones, the burning is back, and I can’t blink it away, and I can’t fucking hide it.

Water floods my eyes and spills over behind my closed lids. It burns hot with my shame. Humiliation because this is yet another thing out of my control. Chagrin for letting myself fall for the scam.

Guilt. Because no matter how hard I try, I’m not meant to fucking change.

I’m Abel Silver. Child of an addict. A whore. A nobody. And I’ve grown up to be just the fucking same.