K. Bromberg - Crashed

“I did …” He blows out another breath and I reach out and place a hand on his knee. He just nods his head as if he’s talking to himself and then his body tenses up again before he speaks. “I did what you said I should do.”

What? I try to figure out what exactly I told him to do.

“I did what you said and now … now my head is just so fucked up over it. I’m a goddamn mess.”

The raw grief breaking his voice has me sitting beside him and waiting for him to look up into my eyes. “What did you do?”

He reaches out and grabs my hand, lacing our fingers together and squeezing tightly. “ I found my mom .”

The breath catches in my throat because when I made that comment, never in a million years, would I have thought he’d actually do it. And now I don’t know what to say, because I’m the catalyst for all of this pain.

“Colton …” It’s all I can say, all I can offer besides lifting our hands and pressing a kiss to the back of his.

“Kelly called me while I was … Oh fuck! I missed the ceremony. I stood you up.” And I can tell by the absolute disbelief in his voice that he really, truly forgot.

“No, no, no,” I shush him, trying to tell him that it doesn’t matter. That only facing his fears is what matters. “It’s okay.” I squeeze our hands again.

“I’m so sorry, Ry … I just … I can’t even fucking think straight right now.” He breaks his eyes from mine and averts them in shame as he uses his other hand to wipe the tears from his cheeks. “You know...” he shakes his head as he looks out at the darkened track in front of us “...it’s kind of funny that this is the place I come to forget everything and tonight it’s the first place I thought to go in order to come to terms with it all.”

I follow his eyes and look out at the track, taking in the enormity of it all—the track and his actions. We sit in silence as the importance behind his words hit me. He’s trying to face things, to move on, to begin to heal. And I’ve never been more proud of him.

“I asked my dad a couple of months ago if he knew what had happened to her . He got me in touch with a PI—Kelly is his name—that he’d hired when I was younger who kept tabs on her for ten years to make sure she didn’t come back for me.” His voice is even, flat, such a contrast to the hiccupping despair from moments ago, and yet I can feel the extremity of the emotion vibrating just beneath the surface. “He called me today. He found her.” He looks over at me, and the forlorn look in his eyes—a lost little boy trying to find his way—undoes me, breaks the hold on the emotion I’m trying to hold in so I can be strong for him.

Be the rock while he crumbles.

My first tear falls as I reach out and place my hand on his cheek, a simple touch that relays so very much about what I think, how I feel, what I know he needs from me. I lean in, his jaw clenching beneath my palm, his eyes fused with mine, and place a feather soft kiss to his lips. “I’m so proud of you.” I whisper the words to him. I don’t ask him about what he found or who she is. I focus on him, on the now, because I know his head is desperately trying to reconcile the past while trying to figure out the future. So I focus on the here, the now, and hope he understands that I’ll be here for every single step of the way if he lets me.

We sit like this, the silence reinforcing the reassurance of my touch and the understanding behind my kiss. And for once, the silence is comforting, accepting of his tortured soul.

He works a swallow in his throat and blinks his eyes rapidly as if he too is trying to understand everything, and yet he has so many more pieces of the puzzle than I do, so I sit and wait patiently for him to continue. He breaks our eye contact and leans back, eyes drawn back to the track.

“My mom is dead,” he says the words without any emotion, and even though they float out into the night, I can sense them suffocating him. I stare at him, take in his moonlit profile against the night sky, and I choose to say nothing, to let him lead this conversation.

Restless, he shoves up out of his seat and paces to the end of the aisle and then stops, his figure haloed by the single light beyond him. “She never changed. I guess I shouldn’t have expected to find anything different,” he says so quietly, but I can still hear every single inflection in his tone, every break in his voice. He turns to face me and walks a few feet toward me and stops.

“I’m … I’m—my head is such a fucking mess right now I just …” He scrubs his hands over his face and through his hair before emitting a self-deprecating laugh that sends shivers up my spine. “I don’t even have any positive memories of her. None. Eight years of my fucking life and I don’t remember a single thing that makes me smile.”

I know he’s struggling and I so desperately want to cross the distance between us and touch him, hold him, comfort him, but I know he needs to get this out. Needs to rid himself of his self-proclaimed poison eating his soul.

“My mom was a drugged out whore. Lived by the sword and died by the sword …” The spite in his voice, the pain, is so powerful and raw I can’t help the tears that well in my eyes or the shudder in my breath as I inhale. “Yep,” he says, that laugh falling out of his mouth again. “A druggie. She wasn’t discriminate though. She’d take anything to get that rush because it was what was important. Fucking more important than her little boy sitting scared as fuck in the corner.” He rolls his shoulder and clears his throat as if he’s trying to choke back the emotion. “So I just don’t get it …” His voice fades and I try to follow what he is saying but I can’t.

“Don’t get what, Colton?”

“I don’t get why I fucking care that she’s dead!” he shouts, his voice echoing through the empty stadium. “Why does it bug me? Why am I fucking upset over it? Why does it make me feel anything other than relief?” His voice cracks again, his words ricocheting off the concrete.

My stomach knots up over the fact that he’s hurting because I can’t do a goddamn thing about it. I can’t fix or mend or resolve, so I reassure. “She was your mom, Colton. It’s normal to be upset because deep down I’m sure in her own way she loved you—”

“Loved me?” he screams, startling me with the sudden change from confused grief to unfettered rage. “Loved me?” he yells again, walking toward me and pounding on his chest with his words before walking five feet and stopping. “Do you want to know what love was to her? Love was trading her six year old son for fucking drugs, Rylee!”

“Love was letting her drug dealing pimp rape her son, fuck her little boy while he had to repeat out loud how much he loved it, loved him , so she could get her next fucking fix! Treat him worse than a fucking dog so she could score enough drugs to ensure her next high! It was knowing the fucker is giving her the smallest fucking quantities possible because he can’t wait to come back and do it all over again. Love was sitting on the other side of the closed bedroom door and hearing her little boy scream in the worst motherfucking pain as he’s ripped apart physically and emotionally and not doing a goddamn thing to stop it because she’s so fucking selfish.”

He cringes at the words, his body strung so tight I fear his next words will snap the tension, relieve the boy but break the man within. I look at him, my own heart shattering, my own faith dissolved imagining the horror his small body endured, and I force myself to stem the physical revulsion his words evoke because I fear he’ll think it’s for him, not the monsters who abused him.

I can hear him struggling to catch his breath, can see him physically revolt against his own words with a forceful swallow. When he starts speaking again, his voice is more controlled but the eerily quiet tone chills my skin.