I want to scream at him or beat the fuck out of him. I don’t want to talk or even work through my anger at Beth. I need it. I need the distance.
“I know what you’re trying to do here, but…” I growl, but the bastard is not quite finished yet. He blasts me, yet again.
“She was nineteen, Skull. Nineteen. Fuck, man. Think about that, will you?” I growl an unintelligible sound and rake my hands through my hair. “Nineteen, man.”
“Fine! She was right to make her choices. Doesn’t mean she shouldn’t have tried harder to see me when she had Gabby! She wasted two years! Two years that I can never have back, Torch.”
“I get it. I do. I can’t say I fully understand that, myself. Except if you get told you’re worthless and garbage to be thrown away often enough, you start to believe it.”
The fucker is pissing me off. He’s trying to clear Beth of any wrongdoing. He’s acting like I don’t have a right to be fucking pissed. That’s easy for him to say. He isn’t me. He hasn’t lived my life since Beth left. He wasn’t betrayed by the woman he loved.
“You weren’t robbed of two fucking years with your niña, left thinking you killed the woman you loved!”
Torch sighs and gets up. He slaps me hard on the shoulder.
“True, brother,” he agrees. “But if you aren’t careful, it won’t be Beth robbing you of more time with your daughter and the woman you love. It will be the bastard staring back at you in the mirror.”
Having delivered that nice little dagger, he walks around me. He goes out into the hall and closes the door. When he’s gone, I’m left… alone. Alone as I have been for years. I tear the clock down off the wall beside me and slam it into the wall across the room. It explodes on impact and shatters into a hundred pieces. That does nothing to make me feel better. Nothing.
Time to visit Pistol.
“What did you tell him, Katie?!” I yell when Sabre leaves the meeting and I can no longer hear. I don’t want Skull to know. I don’t… I can’t… “What did you tell him?!?”
“Beth, calm down. You didn’t do anything wrong. Maybe it will be good if Skull finally knows the fucking hell you lived through. Maybe that will help him understand!”
“No! I don’t want anyone to know! That’s mine! No one gets to know what I lived through! You had no right to tell Torch!”
“I had every right! He’s my man! This shit didn’t just happen to you. It happened to me too, and it happened for a hell of a lot longer! I get to share that with Torch. I need to share that with Torch. Sometimes, it gets to me so much that it fucking chokes me at night. I can’t keep it in any longer! It’s destroying me!” she cries and I close my eyes.
“We’ll leave and let you guys talk about things. Do you want to meet later tonight? Sabre and Latch tell me we’re staying at the club for the next few days while they try and take care of any threats. So we’ll all be here,” Annie whispers.
“That’d be good. We can meet in the game room in the basement. We’ll tell them we’re planning for my bachelorette party again. About nine tonight?” Katie says, her voice broken.
When everyone has finally gone, I sink to the floor, wrapping my arms around my legs. I refuse to give in to the tears. I’ve done too much of that. I look at Katie. I know she can see the tears gathered in my eyes because I see them in hers.
“I don’t want Skull to know.”
“Maybe if he knew…”
“It would what? Magically erase all the hateful words? The fact that I kept his child from him? The fact that he sleeps with another woman now? There’s no going back, Katie. It’s much too late.”
“You’re scared,” she says and I don’t bother denying it. “Is that why you didn’t want to push when you first got the pictures of Skull in the hospital? Are you afraid to show him, Beth?”
“You’ve seen Dr. Torres and Nicole. You saw the girl in the picture, Katie.”
“So? They can’t hold a candle to you, Beth. Besides, it wouldn’t matter, not if Skull loves you. Torch didn’t even blink at my scars. Not once.”
“He might have loved the Beth he knew, but it’s been too long. And we both know we might have the same scars on the inside, but on the outside…”
“If they bother you that much, why don’t you see a surgeon?”
“Money? Time away from Gabby? Fear? Pick a reason, any reason.”
“So we’re really going to go through with this? We’re going to kill Matthew?”