“Well,” Ella whispered gently. Her eyelashes batted anxiously in quick succession. “I guess maybe we should talk.”
“Yeah,” Scott sighed as he perched on both of her hands, his feet resting on her thighs as he gazed up at her face. Her blonde tresses hung low and long enough that they occasionally brushed against his knee, and he desperately wanted to reach out and touch it, but he already felt on thinner ice than he cared to stand on.
When his girlfriend had arrived at the door, Maggie had said hello, still in her stunted haze from earlier in the afternoon, and handed over her brother without another word and returned to her bedroom, giving the couple the freedom to find a quiet place to chat.
Given how much this meeting had been built up in Scott’s head, in a cruelly miraculous twist, he found himself actually more nervous about leaving his sister’s hands and being transferred to his girlfriend’s.
“I’m… sorry I took so long,” Ella said with a hesitant swallow as she leaned back in the living room couch that served as Scott’s bed. “It’s just been…”
“Tough,” Scott finished with an understanding nod, though he couldn’t bring himself to keep eye contact when he answered out of embarrassment. Certainly she had tried to make contact before a lot of people he might’ve once called his closest friends. “I get it, really. You’re not the one who should be apologizing for anything. But I’m sorry too.”
“I know.”
“How’ve you been?”
Ella frowned, apparently surprised by the question. “I’ve… been good? I mean, besides everything that’s happened.”
“Right.”
“School didn’t even let out for us until a week ago. Being home, though, it… it just made me think. About a lot of things. Made me reconsider them, I guess.”
“Which is when you called,” Scott offered feebly.
“Yes. I… look, Scott, I… I do know… this wasn’t all your fault.”
At this, the young man’s ears perked up a little, and he felt the urge to slap himself across the face to ensure he wasn’t just living out the insane mirror universe version of this conversation.
“What do you… I mean, how?”
“Because,” Ella shrugged, biting her lip. “You’ve been getting things like this your whole life. Your mom and your sister and… everybody they know. They never gave you a break.”
“Yeah. But they weren’t the ones driving my car,” Scott guiltily groaned. He forced himself to look her in the eye again. “Me getting slapped around a lot when I was younger doesn’t answer for that.”
“I know it doesn’t all the way, but… well, I guess I didn’t think this until a few days ago when I called. I admit that. But I think I’m starting to see it now. You never really got a chance to understand for yourself what was wrong and what wasn’t, not like the rest of us, because every single thing you did, your mom would…”
“Yeah,” Scott relented. “I guess I can see that.”
“You got caught up in all that time to yourself. Being… free. You hadn’t had the chance before. And you made a mistake, just like anyone might, except…”
“Mine almost killed two people.”
“Yeah,” Ella managed weakly with another hard gulp, then seemed to recompose herself. “I know this’ll probably sound stupid, because I saw that news report on your mom before I came over, but… how are you doing, or… you know.”
“I’ve been better,” Scott choked out, glad that he was sitting down on his girlfriend’s hands for fear of his knees wobbling too hard.
“And even better wasn’t always that great.”
“No, it wasn’t,” he said, sniffling but sucking it up immediately.
“You can relax now, Scott. It’s okay,” she cooed understandingly.
Clearly already on the brink from earlier, Scott let fresh tears roll down his cheeks, but he held his head high this time and kept his beet-red scleras locked to Ella’s gaze.
“I don’t know how to do this,” Scott huffed awkwardly through the moisture.
“I know,” Ella whispered. She drew her hands closer to her shirt until Scott’s head was leaning against her abdomen a couple inches below her chest.
“It felt like I was out. Like… I could be my own person finally, without someone breathing down my neck and making me pay for everything I ever screwed up. And then I go and throw myself right back in because I made the worst mistake of my whole life,” Scott rambled, his voice somewhat muffled as he buried his face in the comforting warmth of his girlfriend’s shirt, though she made out enough of the words to follow.
With most of his weight now leaned against her torso, one of Ella’s hands pulled away and she began to stroke her fingers up and down Scott’s back.
“I… I don’t even remember getting into my car, or even deciding to get in. That’s the fucked up part. I was so… so far gone, I didn’t even think about what I was doing. I couldn’t even be bothered to remember it,” Scott grunted, getting angrier with himself the longer he expounded on this point, though he was kept in check by Ella’s soothing touch.
“It wasn’t something you planned. It just happened,” she murmured. “Nobody thinks those things through. Nobody decides to do it.”
“Ella, I started drinking when I was seventeen. I wrecked a few things in the house and threw a few parties, yeah, but I never… never got behind a wheel when I was like that. And I’d never blacked out. Not like this. Not where everything was totally, completely gone, like some kind of nightmare.”
“I know,” she repeated back. By now, her palm was clasped to Scott’s back and keeping him supported against her stomach in a snug embrace, while her other hand traced in tiny circles on the back of his head with her index finger.
“So maybe… it’s not wrong that I’m back here. Maybe I was going to end up here again all along.”
“Don’t talk like that. You know that’s not true.”
“What else can I do, then?”
“You can beat this thing, Scott. I know you can. You got out of here once. You can do it again,” Ella encouraged, and he could feel her stomach practically vibrating with the enthusiasm of it through her shirt.
“No I can’t. You heard what my mom said,” Scott sighed forlornly.
“Yes, I did. But she’s not Queen of America. Maybe she can force you to do what she wants, but she can’t make everybody go along with it. All you have to do is stay on your best behavior until you go up for review, and you can get out,” Ella explained seriously. “That’s all.”
“I don’t think she’ll make it that easy. She’ll find a way,” Scott protested, and in this moment, he thought back again to the realization he’d made in the presence of the emotionally shell-shocked Maggie only a couple hours before.
Walking away from Judy’s far-reaching legal grasp wouldn’t just be a near-herculean task on its own; right now, for him, with his two siblings invisibly tied up the web of their mother’s oppressive parentage, it was a personal impossibility, no matter how much he wanted it.
He had a responsibility for them, because if he didn’t act on their behalf, he knew no one else would.
He couldn’t free himself from the binds of his family. Not yet.
“Maybe she’ll try. She’s smart, and she’s becoming more important now. But she’s still not God, Scott. You need to stop thinking of your mom like an immovable wall, because she’s not.”
Scott blinked as the tears at last began to dry up. He twisted his face against the moist patch of Ella’s shirt he had dampened with his anguish, and looked upward toward the soft crook of her neck.
As much as he was enraged by his mother’s very being, and as much of his youth had been spent rebelling against her dictatorial parenting style, Scott had to admit he had never really thought of Judy Stevens as anything but that.
“I’ll try,” Scott said as he finally allowed himself to lean away from Ella’s shirt. Now feeling confident enough that his girlfriend wasn’t afraid to touch him without tongs, he let a few strands of her golden hair slide between his fingertips, and he felt oddly at home, despite the tribulations of the day.
“I know you will, babe,” she said reassuringly, tilting her chin down to look at him again as she cradled him down to her legs and laid him down. A smile crossed her lips.
“What?” Scott asked.
“The suit is nice. You look good.”
“Thanks,” he said, and couldn’t help but crack a little grin himself, against the odds.
“You were always really crappy at tying your tie. It looks like you finally got better,” she commented, lifting the tiny fabric flap with a thumb to ensure it wasn’t a clip-on.
“Yeah, um… not exactly,” Scott mumbled with embarrassment. “I still suck.”
Ella raised an eyebrow and allowed herself a gentle chortle. “Oh. Then…”
“Maggie did it,” Scott said, surprising himself again at stating this fact aloud. “And the rest of it.”
“Maggie,” Ella repeated back, as though the name was in a foreign language, and wrinkled her nose with the same warranted surprise.
“Yeah…”
“Well, that’s… um...” Ella muttered. “Why?”
Scott shrugged. “She… said I looked nice and she wanted you to see me in it.”
“Well, she was right.”
“Thanks,” Scott grimaced. “And thanks for… you know.”
“Sure,” she responded. “Who else is going to do it?”
“How long are you going to stay?” Scott asked, hoping his desperation to soak up every second in her presence didn’t come through too pathetically.
“Well, I don’t know, how long until your mom comes back?” Ella said. “Nice as this is, you might want to lowball it. It hasn’t always worked out so great when you’ve tried to guess before.”
“Yeah, no shit,” Scott uttered with a bittersweet chuckle that Ella shared somewhat apologetically. “But I don’t think she’ll be back for two hours.”
“Sounds like plenty,” Ella whispered, and reclaiming her twelve-inch boyfriend beneath her palms, she scooped him upward toward her lips, planting a messily wet smooch onto the lower half of his face before he could even begin to react.
She drew him back to happily gauge his entertainingly surprised gaping mouth and bugged eyes, but now with the warning in place, she brought him in again for a more mutual exchange, and Scott’s fists tightened passionately around those strands of hair as he allowed himself to disappear into the moment, savoring the safety he felt and the plush moisture of Ella’s sweet-smelling skin.
Maybe he could do this.
Maybe the fight wasn’t over just yet.