Tangled Fates

Tangled Fates - Chapter 5

                                                                  Chapter 5

 

I squeezed my lips together, not wanting to be the one that broke the silence. He blew out a big breath and shook his head, looking at the floor as he spoke, “This is a fucking mess.”

I laughed humourlessly at his observation. “No shit, Matthew, really?” I retorted, using his given name for emphasis. 

A scowl lined his forehead as he looked up at me, his brown eyes locking onto mine. “Can you just stop blaming me for this? This isn’t all down to me you know, you did it too,” he stated angrily.

My mouth dropped open in shock at his words. “Me? I don’t have a fiancée! You’re the cheating bastard who-”

“Shh!” he hissed, stepping forward quickly and covering my mouth with his warm hand to stop my rant. His eyes flicking to the door, waiting, and I gulped, realising that I’d just shouted that at him and that my mum could have heard. “Just shh, OK? I don’t want to hurt her so just calm down and talk to me rationally.” I nodded in confirmation and he took his hand off of my mouth. I hated myself for immediately missing the contact with him - I really was a terrible person.

He turned and headed to the liquor cupboard we had, pulling out a bottle of Jack Daniels. His shoulders were tense, his posture tight and alert as he poured himself a large measure of the amber liquid. “Can I have one of those?” I asked, looking at it longingly as he picked up the glass about to drink it. He nodded and passed me the one in his hand, grabbing another glass and making himself another. I sat down at the kitchen table, my fingers playing with the green table cloth that covered the little round table that I’d grown up eating on.

He plopped into the chair opposite mine and looked at me, his jaw tight as he seemed to be struggling to form the words that he wanted. “Like I said, stop looking at me like I was the only one there that night, you were just as freaking willing as I was,” he muttered, frowning.

“Because I wasn’t cheating. I’m single, I’m allowed to have a one night stand, you’re not,” I countered, scowling at him but trying to keep control of my anger so that I wouldn’t shout again.

“Kayleigh, you knew I was engaged. Sure you didn’t know it was to…. your mum,” he winced as he said the word mum, “but you willingly went back to that hotel room knowing that I was cheating on someone. Don’t be a hypocrite and tell me that I have to take all the blame.”

I frowned. I knew I was being hypocritical by letting him take the fall for it, I’d let it happen when I shouldn’t have done, I had knowingly and eagerly been the ‘other woman’, but the guilt of it was crushing me inside. It was so much easier to blame him than it was to shoulder the blame alongside him.

“How did you not even think that it was me? I mean, I know why I didn’t put it together about you because of the name and stuff, but surely you should have had some sort of inkling you were screwing your fiancée’s daughter,” I hissed, wanting to change the subject from who was to blame.

He laughed and pushed himself up from the table, heading over to the fridge and pulling photo off of it before sitting back down and tossing it across the table to me. “That’s what I thought you looked like. How the hell can I look at you, and see that?” he snapped, tapping his finger on the photo.

I looked down at the image turned my nose up at what I saw. A chubby, spotty, laughing fourteen year old girl eating ice cream, and wearing Mickey Mouse ears. My blonde hair was short, choppy and boyish; that’s what I actually looked more like, an overweight boy. I looked nothing like the person in this picture anymore; my hair was now reddish-brown, I’d grown about three inches and lost about two stone in weight. I know I looked like a different person to this picture and I’d purposefully worked hard to change that image because I hated myself back then. These pictures made me feel depressed; they reminded me of the bullying, the name calling and sadness that I grew up with at the hands of some fellow classmates. Not many photos of me as a child survived when I went on a rampage one night and cut them all up - my mum had gone crazy when I did that and had only managed to salvage a few of them. I guess I can understand why Cale wouldn’t expect me to look like I do now.