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Ch.18-Entering Madness

I wasn't sure why I thought Emma could solve all my problems. It must have been some horribly deluded misconception I had, and I was sure she couldn't have been too happy being named my primary confidante. But still, when I rang her doorbell at two in the morning, and Rhys let me inside, she didn't even comment on what I was doing in her home. She just led me to the kitchen table and made some hot tea, and even though I'd never been a real big tea drinker I drank it anyway.

"You need to tell me what's wrong," Emma finally spoke. "And don't be feeding me any bullshit, because I know that if you're over here at two in the morning, something's wrong."

I stared down at the rippling liquid in my mug, hearing the faint noises of Rhys humming to Skyler upstairs. "I don't know."

She sighed. "Lily . . ."

"I really don't know," I cut her off, focusing my gaze on her. And I knew she could see it, by the way she winced. The desperation, the helplessness, the insanity. I was fragmented pieces of an entire being. Pieces nobody could put together right, so I ended up looking like this abstract sculpture. The one at art museums that people completely bypass because they can't explain it and they can't find anything they particularly love about it. It just sits there, gazed over, but for some reason not taken away.

Emma sipped lazily at her tea, letting me silently explode in the seat across from her.

"I seem to have this issue," I continued, because in the quiet I could hear myself falling apart and the noise was deafening. "I seem to have this problem with running, because every time something happens and I get the least bit uncomfortable I'm headed the other direction. What's wrong with me? Why can't I just work things out?"

I received no answer. Nothing but the dulled slurp of her tea.

My fist curled beneath the table. "What am I supposed to do? I don't want to feel like I have to run away all the time. In fact, I'm sick of running away. I just want to be a part of my family, even if they don't want me, and to accept the fact that my grandfather is dying, and to kiss the hell out of Alec if that's what I want to do!"

Emma choked on her tea, and my cheeks burned bright red as I realized what I said. I groaned, flopping my head on the table.

"You see? I kind of want to run away now, too. But I'm not. And it hurts. And now I'm masochistic."

Emma chuckled. "There's nothing wrong with you, Lily. You're just a teenager, and some of your circumstances kind of suck. So what? Join the club. Did you find any sense of direction on your impromptu field trip?"

I shrugged. "The only closure I got was that my mother never loved me, and doesn't consider me part of the family any longer."

"That doesn't sound like closure."

"It was something. I can't go back."

"They can't keep you from going back there, Lily. That's not their call to make. The only thing that can really keep you here, or away from there, is you."

She collected the mugs from the table and stood, depositing them in the sink. I stared at the tabletop, reviewing her words in my head.

"The only thing that can keep you here is you."

You are standing in your own way.

Of what? Happiness? Clarity? Some shred of understanding on who the hell I was?

Maybe all three.

"You're welcome to stay as long as you need to," she offered. "I'm going back to bed; Skyler's an early riser."