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“You can’t tell me what to do, Joe,” I growled, feeling a combination of drunk and dizzy. “You don’t own me.” “Well, that’s bad fucking luck on my account, because you sure as shit own me!”
Joey had somehow managed to survive his childhood and early teens by replacing the lack of his mother’s affection with the warm, enveloping embrace of ecstasy, and his father’s constant stream of mental gaslighting and physical abuse with the mind-numbing dexterity of opioids.
“Your mother might be foolish enough to disregard you, but that will never happen from me,” I whispered,
From day one, my reluctance to commit to Molloy never had a thing to do with my ability to love her, and everything to do with the fear of loving her the wrong way.
do you want to forget everything bad you’ve ever seen, felt, and experienced? Because your conscience won’t do that for you. You know what will work, though. You can make it all go away. You don’t have to suffer like this.
“If you want money, you can make that for yourself,” Mam replied. “You don’t need a man to do that for you.”
“I want you to love yourself enough to stop destroying yourself.”
Fully aware that he was as dangerous to my mind as the drugs were to his, I broke the kiss before I fell any deeper into my feelings.
“I’m scared to be in my own head, Molloy,”
“I. Believe. In. You,” she repeated slowly. “I’m not expecting perfection from you, Joe. Hell, I don’t want it, because I’m definitely not perfect. So, all I need you to do is be honest, be faithful, and keep trying.”
“And I know being loved is a foreign concept to you, but it doesn’t come with strings or conditions. It’s unconditional, Joe.”
“I’ve loved your daughter for six years,” Joey finally broke his silence by saying. “I can easily love her for another eighteen.”
Don’t hate me. I hate me. I hate me. I hate me.
Watching you self-destruct like this is killing me.”
“I saw it in his eyes that day in the kitchen. I saw him check out. I know he’s not here anymore. Dad broke Shannon’s lungs, but he broke Joey’s mind and Mam helped him do it.”
His cruelty was home to me. It was all I knew. I could handle his attacks because I knew they were coming. I never knew what was coming with Mam.
Joey Lynch and Aoife Molloy; both full of flaws and humanly imperfect and yet so undeniably perfect for one another.
