Payne shook his head. “I tried to hide them. I was scared and I didn’t know what they meant. I didn’t understand them and why I had them. I tried to make them go away. I was scrubbing myself raw in the bath one day when a servant entered and saw them. She told my father.”
“What happened?” Elissa lay next to him on the bed and risked placing her hand over his right one where it rested on his stomach. He didn’t pull away. He spread his fingers and let her slip hers between them, her palm pressing against the back of his hand.
“I had never seen my father so angry. He was enraged and distraught, his anger flowing freely, disturbing the whole house. He dragged me from the bath and held me by the back of my neck. He marched me through the house in search of my mother.” Payne looked into Elissa’s eyes and she squeezed his hand, wishing she could do more, could take away his hurt and shame. “He found my mother in the entrance hall, just returned from riding. The whole house had gathered to stare. She was horrified that I was nude before everyone, my skin red raw. She argued with my father.”
“She thought he had hurt you.” What affectionate mother wouldn’t think such a thing on seeing her son being treated in such a disgusting way?
Payne nodded. “It was only when my father accused her of sleeping with another male and shouted that I wasn’t his that she truly looked at me. She saw the marks on my skin... I could sense her confusion... or perhaps it was my own.”
Elissa shuffled closer to him and kept quiet this time. The red edging his eyes, slowly eating away all the other colours, warned that he wouldn’t want her sympathy if she offered it. He wanted her to listen without interrupting, and she would. She would let him do this at his own pace because he clearly needed to tell her. She only hoped it was cathartic for him.
He shifted his gaze back to the canopy. The blue and gold in his eyes swirled, and he gained a distant, unfocused expression. His markings darkened again to obsidian and crimson.
“Mother swore to my father that she hadn’t betrayed him and she loved him with all of her heart. I can remember her voice and her pain, her fear. I remember it all as if it were yesterday. It haunts me. She told my father that she didn’t know why I bore my markings or what they meant.” He sighed and the hurt surfaced on those markings again, tinting them purple and blue in places and increasing the black. “Father wouldn’t listen to her. The whole family stared down at me and I was afraid they would turn on me and ask me what I was. I didn’t know. I was confused and scared, and unsure of myself. I felt alien... wrong... disgusting. An abomination. I ached for my father and mother to look down at me too and tell me that nothing had changed and they loved me still, and that together we would come to understand what the weird symbols meant and why I had them.”#p#分页标题#e#
He closed his eyes and a tear slipped down from the corner of his lashes. He shifted his left arm out from behind his head and threw it across his eyes, hiding them from her. Elissa tightened her grip on his hand, her heart aching for him. Her anger rose too. Payne had done nothing wrong and his parents must have felt his fear and confusion, but they had done nothing to reassure him. His father had paraded him in front of the family, shaming him and making him feel as though he was an outsider, an object to stare at with disgust. He had degraded his own son, the boy he had claimed to love.
“When my father looked at me at last, there had been only coldness in his eyes. I turned to my mother but she refused to look at me, even when I fell on my knees and begged her.”
Mother earth, what cruelty they had inflicted upon him, their boy who had looked up to them and loved them with all of his heart. He had only wanted their love in return, just as they had given it to him unconditionally before his markings had surfaced. Payne’s fingers squeezed hers, hurting her. She didn’t let her pain show. He needed to hold on to her and she wouldn’t deny him anything that would comfort him. He could break her fingers and she still wouldn’t let go of his hand. She wouldn’t let him suffer alone. Not as his parents had.
“My father ordered that I be taken out of his sight. Someone took me away. I don’t remember who. I only remember the shame that burned in me and the way everyone whispered as I passed, staring at me and my cursed markings.”
He lifted his arm and looked at her. He looked so lost and broken that she wanted to touch his cheek, needed him to know that she was here with him and that she felt for him. She managed to hold her tongue and keep still, knowing that he needed to keep going now that he had started.