too much. “I thought you’d moved on,” I pointed out, “to bigger and better things.”
Named Charlie. Sigh.
Silence.
“No one was better than you.”
“Lie.” A beat, probably because she was reeling from the fact that my tone had gone sharp. I didn’t use sharp with Lorna. I tiptoed, went easy, tried to placate her as much as possible so I’d keep Nice Lorna around and Raging Bitch Lorna safely stowed. Well, fuck it. I was done with tiptoeing, done with catering to her ever-changing moods and motivations. I kept my tone sharp. “If you really thought I was so great, you wouldn’t have tried to fuck anyone in the vicinity. Now, I’m hanging up—”
“I was messed up.” A sob. Oh, great. She’d skipped Raging Bitch for the moment and had gone to Sad and Troubled. “My mom—”
“I know all about your mom,” I said. “And I’m sorry your childhood sucked. But I did everything I could to make you happy—”
“You did not!” she screeched, and as was typical Lorna, the Raging Bitch switch had flipped. Of course, she’d gone from sweet to crazy so many times in our relationship that I wasn’t fazed. Once I would have tried to draw out the sweet, keep going with that placating and tiptoeing, but today . . . no more.
“You were always like ‘Lorna, you shouldn’t do that. Lorna, you should change jobs—'”
“You said your job made you miserable,” I pointed out.
“You made me miserable,” she snapped then began crying. Ah. Now here was Sob-Story Lorna, using her tears to get her way. Except, my will didn’t melt, like it used to against her attempts to manipulate me.
“You always make me say these horrible things. You bring out the w-worst in people, Garret Thompson. All I ever wanted was to make it work between us, but you were like a toxin, poisoning everything you touched.”
And yet, why didn’t I hang up?
Why was I still listening to this?
It didn’t make any sense, but there was a part of me that wanted to hear this. Maybe it was self-punishing. Maybe it was a desire to understand why something I’d thought had been so perfect in the beginning had morphed into something so horrible.
Maybe I finally was cluing into the fact that Lorna was fucked up and trying to drag me down with her.
Maybe, I had finally realized I’d had enough.
“You know that I’m right, Garret,” Lorna continued, spitting vitriol. “You know you’re bad.”
My finger started to descend.
“You know that because not even your family wants anything to do with you.”
That wasn’t the hit that knocked me for a loop, though it did ding that protective shell. I’d almost imploded my family because I’d trusted someone else over them, over myself, and I still felt guilty and idiotic for not having put my trust in the right person. I should have known better.
“You know that you’re toxic because as soon as you were on this planet, your dad knew he’d had enough of you.” Her voice was cold now, calculating and slicing. “He couldn’t even wait until you were done sucking at your mother’s tit.”
Lorna and I had been together for a long time, since middle school.
Long enough for her to know that me not having my dad around had seriously hurt, that I’d always wondered why and if his leaving was my fault, and when I’d discovered the truth, had all my fears confirmed . . .
And that was when I realized this was about more than a woman.
This was about me.
I was the youngest child, the surprise, and the harbinger of all the clichés—the straw who broke the camel’s back, the final nail in the coffin, the knock-out punch. I’d been the one to bring that all about. I was the child they’d never wanted, and I was the one to break everything apart.
I was the toxin.
Me.
My finger finished falling. It collided with that red circle, ending the call, cutting off those sharp words.
But though the noise stopped, the sentiment continued to bounce around in my head.
Toxic.
Me.
I’d thought that Charlie needed the healing. Now, I thought that maybe she’d dodged a bullet when she’d run away.
“No,” I muttered, hitting the reject button when my cell immediately began ringing again and then tossing it to the side. “This is more Lorna poison, more fucking gaslighting, making me think it was all my fault,” I said, stronger now, pushing the words to the side. “This is not you, so stop with the bullshit.”
It was almost a mantra for