Chapter 35
I wasn't exactly sure what I was supposed to do now.
It felt like I couldn't just leave Josh like this.
For the first time, I was finally realizing how truly alone Josh was, and what he had actually lost when Jayden had died.
I felt like such a bad friend, having him always taking care of me, when I should have been there for him too.
He'd given me the opportunity to share my grief with him. But he'd never truly share his grief with me. I'd seen him mourn a brother, but never someone he'd been in love with.
How could he have moved on and been okay when he wasn't processing what he had actually lost?
I thought Josh was the one person that could literally tell me anything on his mind.
I'd missed such a big part of him by not knowing about his feelings for Jayden.
It was time to rectify that.
We were both sitting on the carpet in the living room in front of his couch, while I kept rummaging through Jay's drawings.
"What was it? What made you love him?" I asked Josh softly.
"God, it's been so long..." Josh replied, and kind of leaned back against the couch, staring at the ceiling. "It was everything."
"So, soft skin?" I said teasingly, trying to get him to open up more.
"He did have a very soft back." I chuckled at his comment and let him continue. "When my mother died, I lost my anchors. My father abandoned me and my mother was gone. But Jayden was there. He was always there for me. Jayden made me feel safe. He was home. He made me want to wake up every morning. He just made everything better."
I sighed, staring the at drawing in my hands. A black cat that looked like Miss Puss. "This feels wild to me. Like, to me you two were always like brothers. You even looked the same."
Josh chuckled softly, shaking his head. "We didn't look alike."
"You did."
"Not really no. We had similar facial expressions, the way people that are always together do. But all our traits were different. We had he same sense of humour and spoke similarly because I was obsessed with him."
"Obsessed?" I chuckled.
Josh nodded. "I loved him more than he loved me."
So, all along, when I had been complaining about loving Lexi and her not loving me back, Josh had known exactly how I was feeling? And in a much more heartbreaking way?
I really felt like a bad friend again.
Had no one actually known? I thought back to other conversations. "Did Adaline know? When she was playing wedding planner?" I asked, thinking back to my conversation with my cousin.
Josh shrugged. "I never told her outright."
"But she suspected?"
Josh narrowed his eyes, thinking about it. "I don't think so."
I sighed. "I just don't understand how you could have kept this from me for so long. You have zero filter. You say everything on your mind. You never keep anything to yourself. Just the things that matter apparently."
"Just the things that hurt me," Josh corrected me. "I'm very good a ignoring my pain. I have years of practice."
"Are you keeping anything else from me? Was this it?"
Josh nodded. "This was it."
I suddenly sat up, thinking about something he had said earlier. "Wait. Wait, wait, wait. When you said Jayden never slept with Kendall, and that night... Did you..."
Josh chuckled, shaking his head. "I don't kiss and tell."
I gapped. No. No way. "You absolutely kiss and tell. What the fuck? I thought your whole thing was just unrequited love on both sides. What the actual fuck?"
"It was just some tipsy tomfoolery," Josh replied offhandedly.
"Yeah. I know what you consider tomfoolery," I ran a hand over my face, a little overwhelmed with everything I was learning. "Jesus fuck." I shook my head. Okay, so they definitely kissed at least. "Did he know? That you loved him then?"
"Yeah, he definitely knew. I gave a very sappy love confession in a letter. But he died before I ever got an answer."
I leaned back against the couch too, trying to process all of this. "Why was he even dating Kendall then? If he loved you, and you loved him?"
"I think he was exactly sure of his feelings yet. And also, you know, two guys liking each other, you might be fine with it, but not everyone is."
Oh, right. I was so used to Josh being attracted to basically everyone, that I hadn't really thought about that. I was freaking out about the weren't-they-like-brothers thing, not the gay thing. "He was always so fearless, I couldn't imagine him being scared of what people thought."
Josh took a deep breath, staring at the ceiling again like he was deep in his thoughts. "We'll never really know what he was thinking."
And that was the really hard part in all of this.
We would never truly know.
I stayed longer with Josh, talking more about Jayden, looking through the drawings.
I could see how much Josh was fighting off tears so eventually, we packed everything back up.
When it was close to dinner time, he kicked me out. He had a dinner with his sister and his step-mother, and he assured me he was okay and didn't need me to babysit him.
I reluctantly left him, still feeling like I needed to stick around.
But it wasn't like Jayden had just died. This was not a new wound. If Josh told me he was okay, I wanted to believe he was telling the truth.
So, I went home.
The problem was that now that the Jayden and Josh thing had mostly been processed and dealt with, I was back on the Kendall thing.
I'd admitted out loud to Josh that what Kendall had done was abuse. But now that I had admitted that, I didn't know how I was supposed to deal with that.
Once I finally got home, I kinda just wanted to hide away in my room, but my parents called me over for dinner.
I joined them in the dinning room, sitting in my usual spot at the table, while they just smiled at me like everything was alright.
Everything was definitely not alright.
I suddenly felt a ball of anger build in the middle of my chest. I was hit by it out of nowhere. I hadn't been specifically angry at my parents before when thinking about everything that had happened in the last twenty-four hours, but now that I was in the same room as them while they just smiled like nothing had happened, things changed.
"How was therapy? We didn't see you yesterday. And how's the headache?" my mother asked, like she trying to make small talk, her tone lighthearted.
I'd texted her earlier today to have her call school to notify of my absence, so she knew about the headache.
"Fine," I just replied, not wanting to say anything more because I felt like I was on the verge of exploding if I said anything else.
I could see from the corner of my eyes, my parents exchanging a look, like they didn't understand my mood.
My eyes were filling up with tears, and there was a weight in my throat, while I just stuffed more food in my mouth, kinda hunched over my plate, trying to hide my eyes from them.
I felt suffocated in the room. I kept sniffing to stop the crying, and I just wanted to be done, so I could run away.
Anytime something was overwhelming, I was always running away.
I guessed I got this from them. When Jayden died, they just ran away from home instead of dealing with the pain.
They ran away, yet they let Kendall in our lives, over and over again.
How was any of this fair?
I wanted to shout. But instead, I just shoved more food in my mouth, fighting off the tears.
"Is something wrong?" my mother asked, and for some reason her soft tone set something off inside of me
I looked up form my plate and glared at her. "A lot of things are wrong, Mom."
"Blake," my father said, like he was reprimanding me for my tone of voice. Both of my parents looked at me surprised, clearly not ready for my outburst.
It was a long time coming though.
I tried to remember to breath, while my whole face was flushed with anger and controlled tears. "Were you ever going to tell me? That Jayden loved art? Or were you just going to keep me in the dark and let me hate myself for always forcing him to go to art galleries with me when he probably actually enjoyed it."
My mother blinked, her face blanching. "What?"
"I found his drawings, okay? Josh told me," I said, a sob almost escaping my lips. Almost.
It wasn't just crying from sadness, it was from anger too. I was feeling too many mixed feelings at the moment.
"He kept his stuff..." she trailed, like this was a surprise.
I gasped in disbelieving surprise. "What? Are you implying that you threw away some of his stuff?"
"What?" my mother frowned, "No, of course not."
"Don't look at me like I said something awful, you're the ones that have been lying to me for all these years!" I said, raising my voice.
We were making quite a scene now. It was a good thing Anita wasn't in the room today.
"We're sorry Blake, we just thought it would be better if you didn't know," my mother said with saddened eyes.
Like she was allowed to feel bad, like it excused any of it.
"It was definitely not better," I replied between gritted teeth.
"We made a mistake Blake, we can make mistakes," my father added, trying to support my mother.
I wanted to shake both of them and scream in their faces.
"And letting Kendall into our lives all these years, even after what she did to me? Was that a mistake too?" I snapped.
I could have tip toed around this. I could have eased them into it slowly, but I felt like I was going to shake from my rage. I needed it out now, all of it.
"What?" my mother asked, a little frozen.
"I'm kind of fucking tired that you two act clueless all the time," I said, my voice icy.
Shouldn't they have protected me? They were my parents. They should have known.
"Blake," my father said my name again, like he was warning me to be careful.
He should be the one to be fucking careful! They let my abuser in our lies over and over again.
"Why did you let Kendall stay in our lives? After... after what happened, with me. How could you let it happen? Why did you let it happen?"
"What are you asking Blake?" my mother said.
"You couldn't know everything, but you must have known enough. You must have known what she did. And you must have known it wasn't right. I didn't see it because I was too hurt and focused on making myself even more miserable. But, shouldn't you have seen it? You're my parents for fuck sakes," I asked between gritted teeth, feeling fire in my veins.
I wanted to break something now.
If my therapist had picked up on it, shouldn't my parents have known?
"I thought you needed each other to help move on from Jayden," my mother explained, like it excused it.
"I didn't need that Mom, I really didn't," I said, my voice catching in my throat.
My mother pressed her lips together, tearing up too.
Normally, this would probably have stopped me from arguing more, but I was just so mad.
Why did it have to be my therapist to tell me this shit? Why couldn't my parents have stepped up and did what parents were supposed to do and protect me?
And how dare she be the one crying now? I was the one that had been abused. Not her.
"I'm sorry Blake," she said, her voice low. "I never knew how to deal with Kendall. She lost Jayden too, and I didn't want to hurt her. Losing him had hurt her enough, and her parents were always telling me about all these therapy sessions and how broken up she was over Jayden that I thought cutting her out of our lives would send her over the edge."
So to protect Kendall, she'd sacrificed me? Was this what she was implying? She let Kendall use me because she didn't want her to what? Kill herself? Kendall was never going to kill herself. She was too egocentric for that.
"But, shouldn't you have thought about protecting me first?" I asked them, feeling like I needed to shake some sense into them.
They were just sitting in their chairs, looking ashamed. How could they just sit there? When they knew what Kendall had done?
"Yes, you're right. I made a mistake. But I lost my son too, and... and sometimes I don't know what the right thing is, for all of us to heal," she admitted.
I clenched my jaws, the anger not subduing. "The right thing was to not let her in our lives."
How many times could they play the card of not knowing what to do because they'd lost Jayden too? Even if Jayden was dead, I was still their son. They still had a son to protect, regardless of their elder not being here anymore.
And shouldn't they have protected me even more fiercely since they'd lost Jayden?
They could have told Kendall and her family that we didn't want to see them anymore. They could have said that in order to heal, we needed time away from Kendall. We could have been selfish in our grieving. We didn't need to grieve for Kendall. That was for her to deal with on her own.
"We thought you wanted this, and we didn't want to tell you what to do, to tell you how to grieve," my father suddenly said, being more vocal for the first time.
They were the parents though. Parents should know better than their kids, and see when something was wrong. "Even if being with Kendall was something I wanted at the moment, you should have put your foot down and protected me from her. Children shouldn't always be in charge of their own lives for their own good sometimes. Sometimes their parents need to protect them."
"We did the best we could, okay Blake?" my mother said, crying now.
"Well, your best clearly wasn't enough, because I'm completely fucked up. All of me, just a fucking mess, and not all of it is your fault, but a lot of it is your fault."
"Blake," my father said again. I wanted to punch him now.
I got up from my seat, almost kicking the chair back. "I'm done here."
I walked out of the room, while they both called out my name again.
I ignored them.
I knew I had to take responsibility for my own decisions and actions. And putting the blame on everyone didn't change the facts, or helped processing anything, I knew this.
It was not my fault. And not my parents' fault ultimately either.
It was Kendall's fault.
But right now, I was mad. And sad. But mostly mad.
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Happy Monday my little Pumpkins! :D
This was a particularly hard chapter to write. I actually completely changed the second part with Blake's parents. At first it was just with his mom, and then I was kind of planning on having his dad go talk to him to sort of resolve it, but it just didn't feel right.
Usually it's really easy for me to write what Blake wants to do. So I'm assuming this was a more challenging chapter to write because Blake didn't actually wanted to argue with his parents. In the first version, he was a lot more reasonable. I guess with all the progress he's been making, part of me didn't want him to have this kind of outburst anymore. But this makes sense.
So, I definitely want to know what you think about this chapter. After all, the beauty of uploading chapters online like this is that I can modify them! ;P
Anyway! How is everyone doing? I hope you guys are safe and happy and healthy. And I hope this story still brings you joy and comfort, even if the last few chapters might have been a little bit more heavy.
Alrighty. I have more writing to do. I love y'all! See you guys next week! <3