Page 117 of Reckless Obsession

I frown.

She goes on, quieter, “I know you are not a child, Maksim. And I know better than to reduce you to one simply because I am your mother.” Her fingers tighten lightly around mine. “But being legal and being safe are not always the same thing.”

That one gets under my ribs.

I look away first.

“He didn’t force anything,” I mutter. “He never would.”

“That is not what I asked.”

I press my lips together because, of course, it isn’t. The room feels too white and too honest again.

“He didn’t promise me anything,” I say after a while, and that sounds smaller than I intended. “That’s kind of the problem.”

My mother is quiet.

I can feel her looking at me, but she doesn’t rush in to fill the silence. She lets it sit, lets me hear my own words.

“It just kept happening,” I admit. “We’d fight, circle each other, or not talk for weeks, and then somehow we’d end up…” I make a frustrated gesture with my free hand. “There. Again.”

“In his bed?”

“Oh, trust me, mother,” I say, managing a sly look despite everything. “You really wouldn’t want to know where else that man has fucked me.”

She pulls a face.

“That’s not what I meant, stupid.” She curses in Thai.

I manage a chuckle, and she rolls her eyes but says nothing. Instead, her hand comes back to my hair, moving slowly through it again, gentler this time.

I shut my eyes.

“I don’t know what he feels,” I say more quietly. “I only know that when he looks at me, it feels like something. And when he pulls away, it feels as if I imagined all of it.”

She doesn’t answer right away.

Then she brushes her thumb across my forehead and says, “That is not a small thing to carry alone.”

Something in my throat tightens.

“I wasn’t alone,” I say, because for some reason I need to defend myself from the charge of loneliness.

Her eyes go soft in that unbearable way mothers’ eyes do when they know you’re lying, at least a little.

“No,” she says gently. “You just suffered it privately.”

I give her a look.

She returns it without shame.

Then, gently, she asks, “Do you want me to call him in?”

My whole body tenses, and I blink.

“he’s here?”

“Yes,” she says softly. “He’s here.”