Saving 6 (Boys of Tommen, #3)

by Chloe Walsh

My gaze drifted to my unopened schoolbag that contained a mountain of homework. I hadn’t the slightest intention of completing shit given by teachers whose opinions of me were the least of my worries.

“I’m not afraid of loving a boy,” I told her honestly. “I’m afraid of losing myself in one.” “I hate to tell you this, but more often than not, the two go hand in hand.” “I know.” That’s what scares me.

I had plenty of flaws myself. I was loud and outspoken, could entice an argument from a silent monk—as my father liked to remind me—and I was especially slow to get intimate.

“Loyal, kind, forgiving, fearless, nurturer, protector.” He smiled up at me. “Joseph acted… He took on a role.… He was the father of the lost.”

“Don’t give in to them,” he rasped, holding onto my hand with strength I was surprised he was capable of. “Promise me that you’ll…never…give in to them.” “Give in to who, Granda?”

Gasping and wheezing for air, he looked me right in the eyes, green eyes on green and whispered, “The demons your father put in your head.”

Comfortable isn’t as good as it gets,” Joey challenged, narrowing his eyes. “You shouldn’t settle for comfortable, Molloy. You shouldn’t settle for anything less than being in love to the point of madness. The only person that you should be settling for is the person who unsettles you the most. The person who drives you to the brink of suicide because he or she makes you feel so fucking much that you can’t catch your breath or remotely function without them. “And what’s more is you won’t want to. You won’t want to breathe, or feel, or fucking function without them. That’s how you’ll know that it’s a real relationship, Molloy. Only when you’re feeling the most discomfort you’ve ever felt in your entire life should you even consider settling. Because that’s when you’ll know you’re in love, which sounds to me like a hell of a lot nicer way to live than settling for someone you have nothing in common with because it’s comfortable.”

“Excuse my flanker,” he told us as he led the blond lad back toward the lounge. “He’s like a bleeding Labrador. Completely harmless, with zero awareness of social cues and etiquette.”

“Yes, you are.” Blowing out a pained breath, I added, “I don’t want to be the way I am. I don’t fucking love what I do. I despise it.” “Then why do it?” she begged, trembling in my arms. “Why?” She was asking me to give her the answer to something I couldn’t explain. How could I justify addiction to someone who had never lived through it? How was I supposed to make her understand that for most of my life I had been desperate to escape? That the only solace I’d ever been able to find had been in the soothing drag of a joint or a mind-altering line of coke, in the numbing effect of benzos or the thrilling buzz of uppers? How could I forget the euphoric fucking feeling of heroin? Because Molloy didn’t know what it felt like to wake up every morning with a strong inclination to attempt suicide. She didn’t know how it felt to be a helpless child, half-starved from hunger, and even more starved for a way out of a home he wasn’t wanted in. She didn’t know what it felt like to be that hopeless kid who finally found something that helped him through the pain and sheer fucking misery that was his life. And she had no idea how quickly the shift in balance had happened for that kid, how it had snuck up on him so unexpectedly.

She could never understand the excruciating self-loathing that came with realization that the one vice that had once helped that kid make it through the day had silently morphed into something he couldn’t make it through a day without. She would never understand how it felt to transition from controlling your life with something you once enjoyed to becoming controlled by the very thing you now despised. I didn’t tell her any of that, though. Because I couldn’t. Because it wasn’t fucking good enough.

If you are reading this and I reached you, connected with something inside of these characters, then know that I am with you, and I shoulder your pain daily.