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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
J.L. Seegars
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January 29 - February 1, 2024
There’s only her. And in this lifetime and every one after it, that’s all there will ever be for me. Amber eyes that see into my soul. Lush curves I’ve made my home. Smooth mahogany skin that glitters like stardust. Long elegant fingers that one day, when she’s ready and I’m braver than I am right now, will be adorned with my rings. A symbol of our love, of the forever I won’t give to anyone but her.
“Chris,” she sniffles, her sadness almost palpable. “When are you getting here? The funeral is tomorrow, I thought you would have been here by now. We have to be at the….”
Oh no :(
That even when I feel like I have no one, I have her.
Teresa cuts her eye at me. “Please don’t be mad at him because of what RJ said. Him and Dad are weirdos, but Chris isn’t like them at all. He doesn’t subscribe to the patriarchal bullshit they do.”
“I’m glad to see you too, Van.” I pull her into another hug, this one shorter than the first. “God, I’m so fucking sorry.” “Chris, you don’t have to keep apologizing. Everybody deals with this shit differently.” “Yeah, but I didn’t deal at all. I just checked out, left you to deal with everything on your own.” She shakes her head, tucking one of her wavy locs back behind her ear. “Everything was exactly how it was supposed to be. She wouldn’t have wanted you to remember her like that anyway. She didn’t want to be another ghost living in your head.”
“I’ve been staying here,” Vanessa says as she walks over to the desk in the corner of the room and picks up a bag. “After it happened, I couldn’t stay in the house, so your dad offered to let me stay here.” “That’s….nice of him.” Too nice. Weirdly nice. I’ve never known my father to open his home to anyone except employees who needed to be on-site to execute their duties.
Is he trying t set them up or did he have a thing with Margaret ?
Because if you don’t, she’ll die with me. Celeste was my best friend and the love of my life, but I don’t want to take her memory with me. I don’t want to be the last person on this Earth to utter her name, to be moved by her words and changed by her heart. Your father has tried to erase her since the day they met. Don’t let today be the day he succeeds. I love you, my sweet boy. Margaret
Being married to someone who didn’t see you, who didn’t listen to you, who couldn’t truly love you because they refused to hold space for you.
But then I came along and the anchor grew heavier, tethering her to a man who was so different from the one she met, she had to convince herself how much she loved him.
:(
There’s no warmth in his eyes when he looks at me. I wish he would let me go….
“You’d really do that for me? Give it all up?” “Princess,” he says, using a tone that admonishes me for even asking him that kind of question. “You’re the only thing I have that’s worth keeping.”
“At any rate, I was planning on breaking the news to you after the semester ended. She was already gone, there was no use in distracting you when there was nothing you could have done. I wanted to tell you when you were back home. Here with your family and friends. Not hours away, with no one to help you through your grief but strangers.”
Hes so nasty
“The people you’re talking about are my friends, not strangers. They are my family. They’ve been my family for nearly two years.”
“No matter how many times you wake up from your nightmares, crying for your mommy, you can’t change that I’m here and she’s not. Call me a shit father if you want, but I’ve done more for you than that woman has over the course of her entire miserable existence.”
What the actual fuck
There’s nothing loving or tender in his depictions of her and their marriage. In fact, it sounds like he spent more time hating her than he did loving her.
“Go back to New Haven, son. Ace those finals. Fuck that girl out of your system and enjoy it because once you walk across that stage you’re coming back home to honor your commitments.” I shrug his hand off then hop out of my seat to look him dead in the eye. “Those are not my commitments, they’re yours, and I won’t walk away from the one good thing in my life to honor them for you. We’ve spent months going back and forth about this, which is dumb because I should have just told you I’m not doing it. Any of it. I’m not moving back to Boston. I’m not going to Harvard or studying cardiothoracics,
...more
She wanted more. A big, beautiful life where she was more than a mother, than a vessel for the next generation of Johnsons to pass through. He punished her for that, and in the end—with a final pregnancy that wasn’t planned or wanted after a series of miscarriages—it killed her. He killed her.
He lifts his brows, feigning intrigue. “Sounds like she’s having a good time.” I snap, picking the laptop up by the screen and flipping it over to snap it over my knee. The back doesn’t disconnect from the front completely, but the video stops playing and that’s all I care about.
The only thing I register before I launch myself across the table and haul my own father up to his feet by his collar, shoving him into the wall behind him. “WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU?”
I scrub my hand down my face, thankful none of my knuckles are bruised. “So what now, Reese?” He flinches when I call him by his given name, and I take an infinitesimal amount of joy in that.
“Is this the part where you tell me what happened on that tape is proof she’s not worthy of me? That she doesn’t deserve to be a part of this fucked up family you’re so hell-bent on continuing? You think that what happened on that recording says something about who she is, but you keeping it and sharing it with me as a way to finally break us up says more about you than it ever will about her.”
“I’m done, Reese. Do you hear me? Don’t you ever contact me again. Don’t you ever show your face in this city. Don’t you ever come near the woman I love, because if you do I swear to God, there won’t be enough doctors in all of the hospitals you own to save you.”
He was always a monster masquerading as a human, and that’s all he’ll ever be.
“When they see the video, I mean. Do you think Eric, Annette, Dominic, and Sloane will ever look at her the same? Or will they wonder the same things I did? Why didn’t she say no? If it was rape, why didn’t she go to the police? Why did she lay there in his arms for hours if she didn’t want it?”
Oh this is disgusting
“I wouldn’t what, Christopher? Go to extraordinary lengths to protect my son? Do everything in my power to keep him from making the biggest mistake of his life? I think we both know, I would. I think the only question to answer now is: are you going to make me?” My answer is immediate and painful, like the onset of a migraine you could have avoided if only you’d heeded the warning signs. “No.” “Good choice, son.” He slides to the edge of his seat and smiles as he picks up the small, blue box he brought over with the laptop. I watch him crack it open and place it on the table again, turning it
...more
Because they’re all staring at Chris. Watching his slow transition from standing to kneeling. Kneeling. On one knee with an open ring box in his hands and his eyes on Giselle.
Yeah i would never forgivr him for this
I don’t listen. I can’t stay here, can’t see him or talk to him after he’s just undone everything we worked for. Broken every promise he made me. Unsealed every wound he helped heal.
“You asked her to marry you?” Tears stream down my face as I scream at him and beat at his chest, trying to create a hole beneath his sternum that matches the crater under mine. “Why would you do that? Why would you do that to us? To me?” My voice cracks, all of my emotions spilling out of the split syllables, and Chris is calm. Stoic, even. The way he said I was when we had our first kiss. The thought sets a fresh wave of tears free, and I step away from him because touching him—even in the most violent sense of the word—hurts.
“Don’t tell me to breathe. Answer my fucking question! Explain to me how this is happening right now when just hours ago you were telling me that I was it for you.” “You weren’t supposed to be here.” Finally, there’s some flicker of emotion. It’s brief, a small rearranging of the muscles in his face that lasts for half a second. “You weren’t supposed to find out like that. I was going to explain—”
“You’re right. I don’t understand. I will never understand you making me fall in love with you, making me trust you, only for you to change your mind the second it looked like your brother might outrank you in the family hierarchy.”
“You don’t love her.” One tear escapes, turning me into a rain cloud, heavy and burdened with unspent grief. Chris watches it fall, whispering his reply. “No. I only love you.”
A tragedy. Masquerading as a romance.
