Page 40 of Dotted Lines (Runaway 5)

“I’d like to know what happened with your mom. If you want to talk.”

His frame deflated. “She’s a drunk. She hides it from boyfriends so she can use them for whatever she needs. She’s got a fake face for the world but the real one comes out behind closed doors. I got the real one.”

“Did she hurt you?”

“She didn’t give a fuck about me. She’d cook me a meal and tell me I didn’t deserve to eat it. She’d see me watching TV and tell me she hated the sight of me in her house. When I was little, I did everything to please her. I’d clean. I’d get good grades. I’d help her to bed when she was piss drunk. And the whole time, she’d tell me I was dog shit.”

“Karson.” Oh my God. How could he think what he’d been through wasn’t horrific?

“You know what though, I am a screwup.”

“What are you talking about? Of course you’re not.”

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nbsp; “No, she was right about one thing. I fuck up everything I touch.”

My jaw dropped. “What are you talking about?”

“A lot of her problems are because of me.”

“How?”

He rubbed at an invisible spot on his jeans, hesitating long enough that I held my breath, worried about what he’d say. “A while back, before I ran away, I got into some trouble. Me and some friends went out one night. We’d been drinking and smoking pot. We found this old warehouse, not that far from here actually. One of the guys had a can of spray paint. He drew a dick on the wall. Me and the others found some rocks and threw them through the windows.”

I bit my tongue. I wanted so badly not to picture him there. To see him doing those things. But Karson had always had a reckless edge. There was anger in him and defiance. Most of the time he kept it hidden, especially when we were here and it was just us. But outside this chain-link fence, he rebelled by stealing food. By getting into fights.

“What happened?”

“Got caught,” he said. “Cops arrested me. I called Mom to get me out of jail. On the way to pick me up, she got pulled over. She was drunk so we both spent the night in jail. It never would have happened if I’d just stayed home.”

“She was drunk. She was driving drunk.” I gaped at him as my temper bubbled. “Drunk drivers murder innocent people, Karson.”

“I know that. Don’t you think I know that?” His voice cracked. “She could have killed someone else’s parents and it would have been my fault.”

“No, it would have been her fault.”

He shook his head. “Mine, Clara. I fucked up. And it wasn’t the first or last time.”

“What else happened?”

“Fights, mostly. Got suspended from school three times. I beat the shit out of one of her boyfriends with a baseball bat because he tried to have sex with her when she was practically unconscious. Turns out, she didn’t care. When she sobered up, it was my fault that he left her. He had money too. He’d been paying for our food. And I chased him away. We didn’t eat for a week. I never asked how she finally got money. My guess is she went out and found a new guy. I did that. I made her whore herself out because I couldn’t control my temper.”

Was he even listening to his own words? “You were trying to protect her.”

“She didn’t see it that way.”

“You can’t be serious.” His mother was a bitch. She could have gotten a job. She could have provided for her son instead of blaming him for her problems.

Karson shrugged. “After sixteen years of her reminding me every damn day that I was worthless, of her telling me that I’d ruined her life, I decided it was enough. If I was ruining her life, why stay?”

Oh, God. My heart cracked. He was so good. So incredible. How could his own mother not see that? How could he have this so wrong? “No, Karson. It’s not you.”

“She loved my father. Maybe the only person in her life that she actually loved more than herself. I don’t think she was a drunk back then. But he split two weeks after I was born.”

“That’s not your fault.” He’d been born to shitty parents.

“It is and it isn’t. That’s just my life.”