Part Three: The End

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Chapter Eighteen:

Esau – the bully

He was wedged into a blue plastic chair and his girlfriend was gone.

Gone. He shrunk from the word. His line of vision sloped over his fingers; the broken nails; closed into a fist. Blood beat heavy against his skin, a throbbing sensation.

It had started with – where had it begun?

Pale blue wall. He shook his head. All he could see was that blue walls and all he could hear was the swish-swish of the nurses' scrubs and the stifled weight of his parent's grief. Bone-dry eyes, tearless, numb.

It had begun at the old Victorian. Mirrin had told him that when she thought of sixteen when she thought of Key. She had said it sitting against him, her hair sponge-cake blonde, her neck and the back of her ears and even her sobs smelling like the Indian tea she drank in the morning. Socks scrubbing over the floor. Beseeching – I'm sorry, Esau.

And after that, he had told her it was fine, but it wasn't.

And as she had weeks before, she had gone back to him and tried to make it up, rectify herself by binding their souls so closely together, so that they were emotionally tangled and torn. His cuticles bled guilt. His heartbeat felt dead in his chest.

Because he hadn't said no. He should have said no. But he hadn't.

Esau Dabney turned his hand to a fist.

Unfixable, he thought. And then: Taken advantage. Worse: I surrendered.

***

His mother took him to out for pancakes. Her eyes were red from crying. She needed to leave the hospital, she said, needed a break from her siblings.

It didn't surprise him. When they got going, his aunts and uncles could be suffocating – loud, argumentative, each squarely in their own corner.

Now he sat on cracked pleather with orange juice droplets against his palm. Staring down a laminated menu, picking up on the vacant stains, the too-bright advertisements all proclaiming food he had no interested in eating. His belt buckle dug into his stomach. Nausea pounded, noisy and demanding, on his temples.

"You're so quiet," his mother said.

Lifting his head, he looked at her. Just looked. Her cheekbones were hollow and circles overlapped wrinkles beneath her eyes. Grey color wove spider webs in her hair. At least she was eating – picking at a dish of grapes, apples, and strawberries that had been brought of the kitchen ahead of their meal.

"I'm fine," he said.

"I didn't ask you if you were fine. I said you were quiet. Is something..." she rubbed her forehead. "Is something wrong? In your life?"

He glanced over her shoulder, at the diner wall, and all he could see – milk-pale skin and incessant need. Blonde head bent against blonde head. Foreheads jutting together. Pain – her soft exhalation, his overwhelming, frightening rush of clarity. The way bloodlust felt once it cooled, in his blood, and it wasn't lust any more but something else, something far more tangible and dark and rotten. An enticing piece of emptiness that had held up his standards and drained them, poison-black, from his future.

"Nothing's wrong," he said again.

"I'm your mother." she reached over the table and took his hand. Her skin was cold and her gaze was sympathetic and his jaw worked in protest to the emotions that hammered on his shoulders.

"Beloved," she said, "I carried you for nine months and raised you for nineteen years. Tell me: are you all right?"

He shook his head. Their food arrived. She let go of his hand.French toast syrup-sweet in his mouth, he almost gagged. He had eaten bacon and hash browns and downed two cups of coffee but this – his stomach turned in revolt. Pursing his mouth, his spit into a napkin. Looking back up at his mother, string of saliva hanging from his chin, humiliation speared deep and spread.

To his horror – he was a grown man and he had survived high school, college, an arrest, and multiple suspensions – tears balled in the corners of his eyes.

"Mirrin," he said.

"She was at the reunion, wasn't she? But – Daniel coming back." His mother tapped the prongs of her fork against the table. "We were all surprised, none more than she. Had to be hardest on her."

"Yes," Esau said, thinking only Key, she said Key.

"Did you fight?"

"I – I guess. We..." he wasn't going to tell his mother that he had slept with his girlfriend. She had raised him differently. He was – he had – been living differently. Code of moral conduct and all of that, which, when it came down to the barest wire, had proved so easy to put aside. It shouldn't have been. This meant he had failed, in more ways than one.And – it was his mother. He couldn't. He couldn't.

"...yeah, we had a...disagreement. She left," he said, intending to say more, but that was all he got out. Just that: she left. He leaned forward. Pleather creaked beneath him. Dear God, he was thinking, I've had this life and...I've been in love, which is weird, for almost two years and Mirrin just – left.

"Told me I couldn't come back to her apartment, nothing. Doesn't want me to call her. Nothing."

"Esau." His mother had hold of his hand again. "What happened?"

Exasperated, he said: "I told you!"

"No, you didn't. Esau – you don't have to tell me the whole story. But just know: I know it isn't the whole story."

His nose burned. His eyes burned. He curled his hands into two fists against his thighs.

"The End," he said. "Not much of a story."

"Don't be bitter."

"You don't understand."

"If you would just –"

"You don't understand!"

He knocked his coffee cup over on accident. Shoulders heaving, breath short, he watched the still-steaming liquid stream off the lip of the table. Now his legs were burning, and his wrists were burning, and his lungs were burning, and – Mirrin was gone. His grandfather was in the hospital. Nothing was all right.

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