Page 93 of Cold Bastard
I felt Alex’s breathing against my chest, steady and quiet. She wasn’t saying anything. Wasn’t offering platitudes or sympathy. She was just... there. Listening.
“There were men,” I continued, my voice flat. “A lot of men. They would show up for a few weeks, maybe a few months. Sleep in my mother’s bed. Eat our food. Some of them were okay. Most of them were assholes. And then they would disappear, and there would be a new one.”
My jaw tightened at the memory.
“I never knew which one was my father. My mother wouldn’t tell me. Maybe she didn’t know. Maybe she did and just didn’t want to say. Either way, I grew up watching these men come and go, watching my mother bend over backward trying to make them stay.”
Alex’s fingers tightened slightly in my shirt.
“She would cook their favorite meals. Laugh at their shitty jokes. Let them treat her like garbage because she thought having a man around would make things easier. Would make us a real family.” I laughed, but there was no humor in it. “It never did. They would take what they wanted and leave. She would cry for a few days, then pull herself together and go back to work. Back to breaking her back for us.”
The silence stretched between us, heavy with things I had never said out loud before.
“Travis hated them,” I said quietly. “All of them. He would get into fights, at school, in the neighborhood, with the men who came around. He was angry all the time. Angry at them for using her. Angry at her for letting them. Angry at the world for making us live like that.”
I paused, my hand stilling in her hair.
“I wasn’t angry. I was... observant.”
Alex shifted slightly, and I felt her breath warm against my skin.
“I watched them,” I continued. “Watched how they operated. How they would charm her at first. Bring flowers, say all the right things, make promises they had no intention of keeping. And then, once they had her hooked, once she let them into her bed and her life, they would change.”
My voice dropped lower, darker.
“They stopped being nice. Stopped pretending. They would criticize her cooking, complain about the apartment, and tell her she was lucky they stuck around. And she took it. She would apologize and try harder and make herself smaller just to keep them from leaving.”
I felt something twist in my chest, something old and familiar and poisonous.
“And the fucked-up thing? It worked. The worse they treated her, the harder she tried to please them. The more she debased herself, the longer they stayed.”
Alex’s breathing had changed. Not faster, exactly. Just... different. Like she was holding herself very still, afraid that if she moved, I would stop talking.
“I was twelve when I figured it out,” I said. “The pattern. The psychology of it. Women like my mother, they didn’t want to be treated well. They wanted to be needed. They wanted to fix broken men, to be the one who could finally make them stay.”
I stared at the ceiling, seeing the past play out in the shadows.
“And the men? They knew it. They knew exactly what they were doing. They would find women who were desperate, who were lonely, who were so fucking tired of being strong that they would do anything for someone to lean on. And then they would exploit that. Use it. Take everything they could and leave nothing behind.”
My hand started moving through her hair again, slow and methodical.
“Travis tried to protect her. He would get between her and whatever asshole was living with us that month. He would tell them to leave, threaten them, fight them if he had to. And she would get mad athim. Tell him to mind his own business. Tell him he didn’t understand.”
The bitterness in my voice was impossible to hide. “But I understood. I understood perfectly. I understood that my mother was addicted to the abuse. That she would rather have a man who treated her like shit than no man at all. That she would sacrifice her dignity, her health, her sons’ respect, all of it just to avoid being alone.”
Alex’s fingers had gone very still against my chest.
“When I was fourteen, there was this guy. Carl. He was worse than the others. Meaner. He would hit her sometimes. Not often enough to leave marks, but enough that we knew. Travis wanted to kill him. Literally. He would talk about it at night when we were supposed to be sleeping. How he planned to wait until Carl was passed out drunk and bash his head in with a baseball bat.”
I felt Alex tense slightly.
“But I told him not to. Told him it wouldn’t matter. That if we got rid of Carl, there would just be another one. And another one after that. Because the problem wasn’t the men. The problem was her.”
My words felt like glass in my throat.
“Travis didn’t listen. He got into it with Carl one night. I don’t even remember what started it. And Carl beat the shit out of him. Broke his nose, cracked two ribs, and left him bleeding on the kitchen floor.”
The memory was sharp and clear in my mind. “And you know what my mother did? She apologized to Carl. Told him Travis was out of line. Told him it wouldn’t happen again.”
