Bar Red's Redemption ✔

c h a p t e r. 45

"Tell me if you told her! Tell me what the fuck you told her!" Talmai demanded.

"I didn't tell her anything!" Bar yelled back, feeling the edge of a panic attack riding up on him.

"Goddamn liar!"

"I'm not lying!"

"Yes, you are, you worthless boy!" Talmai yelled. "She probably got you wrapped around her finger, said 'I love you' and the stupid ass that you are told her everything, well guess what? You're not capable of being loved."

Worthless.

Stupid.

Not capable of love.

That's what his father said. Not a single damn thing about it was true.

"The first time I tried to commit suicide I was fourteen and it took me twenty-three days to decide how to do it. I wrote letters to my two idiots, to Gwen, to Maddie, to you. I apologized, do you remember that?" Bar blurted out, sick and tired of his father calling him names. Of his father always thinking he was right. Of his father not even realizing how bad he treated his own son.

He shoved his father back a step when he got too close to the little goddess.

Talmai glared and pushed his son's hands away from him.

"I told them that even if I couldn't love myself enough to stay, I loved them enough to not burden them anymore." Bar glared back, knowing he didn't put that in his father's letter. Knowing people could hear him but he simply didn't care. "And then I downed two bottles of pills."

"Fuck y—"

"Shut up! Listen, you piece of shit. Okay?" Bar succeeded in shushing his father-- but only because Talmai got too angry to speak-- and then continued, voice quiet enough that only Talmai and Clementine could hear him. "The second time I was sixteen and you just beat the shit out of me for accidentally closing the door too hard. You weren't even drunk."

The worst part about the abuse wasn't the pain.

It was that Talmai did a lot of it just because. Just because he thought Bar was worthless. Just because he was angry. Just because.

"I wrote letters then too, I told everyone I loved that every moment they were alive, I'd be there with them too. That I'd watch over them, protect them. Even if they couldn't protect me from myself." Bar said. "Afterward, I went downtown to the abandoned warehouse and was minutes away from jumping off the fifth-floor ledge when Gwen called me. Your daughter saved my life because she wanted to know where I put her stuffed animal. Your daughter saved the life you made me want to end."

Talmai didn't look like he could give a single fuck.

He just looked angry.

A couple of months ago, Bar would've been angry too. But now? Now he was just sad.

"The third and fourth time I was seventeen, just a year ago, and I slit my wrists as deep as I could." Bar still remembers the pain, the blood all over his clothes and hands and face and wrists, and the cold feeling that sunk into him as if death was giving him a chilling hug. "Once in the middle of an alleyway because I thought that would be the best place for someone to leave a dying man dead. The second surrounded by butterflies because I thought that if I was going to die, I wanted to be surrounded by innocent beings when I did so."

All Bar ever wanted to be was innocent and loved and safe.

Not a monster.

Not a beast.