His hands were around me in an instant, pulling me to his chest. I could hear the thudding of his heart beneath my ear. “You already are,” he said, his voice vibrating in my head.

I pulled back slightly to look up at him. He looked grieved, as though he hated himself for what he was doing but couldn’t help it.

“What are you doing to yourself?” I asked, cupping his face with my hand, gently touching the bruised skin.

Maxx didn’t answer me. He grabbed my hand and pressed a kiss to my palm before resting it over his heart. And then we held each other tightly, neither of us willing to let go, neither wanting to upset the tenuous beauty of the moment with the ugly reality he lived in.

Because for now, we had this.

“My mother died when I was ten and Landon was five. It was cancer. I don’t remember much about her being sick. I have vague memories of her being in bed for long periods of time and going to the hospital to visit her. But other than that, my mind seemed to have blocked it out. I guess I carried on my life like nothing earth-shattering was going on.” Maxx snorted in disgust, his arms tightening around me.

We were sitting on the couch. It’s where we had been for the past two hours. We hadn’t talked much; Maxx had been mostly quiet. I was hesitant to break the silence, not knowing what would come next.

He seemed to need to hold me. He ran his fingers through my hair and softly kissed my temple. That was all. For him, right now, that appeared to be all he needed.

I couldn’t help but continue to notice the fine tremors in his body, his erratic heartbeat under my palm, the fine sheen of sweat on his face. He was still trying to climb out of his horrible withdrawal. He was unhealthily pale, dark circles ringing his eyes, their normally vibrant blue dull and listless.

I had grown accustomed to the silence, so when he spoke I started in surprise. The noise was almost obscene in the hush.

“What sort of person doesn’t remember his own mother dying?” he asked. I wasn’t sure he was looking for an answer, but I gave him one anyway.

“You were a child, Maxx. You couldn’t possibly understand what was going on.”

Maxx was quiet again. I wasn’t convinced he even heard what I said. His hold on me was as tight as ever, his fingers digging into my skin as though he was trying to fuse us together.

“My dad sort of disappeared from our lives after that. He was there, but he wasn’t. He worked a lot, and I took over taking care of Landon. I would get him breakfast and dinner, help him with his homework. I made sure he had clean clothes to wear and went to bed when he was supposed to. He became my responsibility. I became a mom and a dad at ten f**king years old.”

I wasn’t sure what I had been expecting him to tell me. I had conjured up a thousand explanations about how he may have come to be the way he was, what had pushed him into the dark world he lived in. But hearing about a boy who had lost both his parents and was forced to become an adult before he was ready wasn’t what I had expected.

I had guessed at a less-than-rosy past. Maxx hid too much away for his childhood to have been idyllic.

I had seen his protectiveness toward Landon. It had been more than obvious that he felt responsible for the younger boy. But the story Maxx began to share showed a side of him that was sad, yet it strangely gave me hope for the person he could be.

“And then my dad died of a heart attack two weeks after I started high school. I don’t think I ever really knew him. I don’t even remember the person he had been before my mom died, when he wasn’t depressed and grieving. Christ, I don’t know what the f**k I’m talking about,” he muttered, running his hand through his hair while his other arm still clung to me tightly.

I could tell he was trying to sort through everything going on in his head, trying to find the words he wanted to share with me.

“After that, I realized there were varying degrees of shit. And the shit before my dad died was nothing compared to the shit after he died,” Maxx said, his voice cracking a bit.

“My uncle David had never been in the picture. I barely even knew that he existed. He’s my mom’s younger brother. It was pretty obvious after we went to live with him why we never knew him. He’s an ass**le. Worse than that, he’s a self-serving, sadistic ass**le, a guy who gets off on treating others like shit if it makes his life easier. He got custody of Landon and me because there was no one else. Both sets of our grandparents were dead, and my dad was an only child. So that left just David. At first he refused to take us on. But when he realized we came with a hefty Social Security check every month until we turned eighteen, that changed his tune pretty damn quickly. The f**king douche bag took our money and made sure we never saw a dime. He said it’s what we owed him,” Maxx growled.

I took his hand in mine and laced our fingers together. “I’m so sorry, Maxx,” I said earnestly, hoping I didn’t sound condescending. There was something so ridiculous about the words I’m sorry. As if I could in any way empathize with what he had experienced. For all the crap I had gone through with my parents after Jayme had died, I didn’t understand what it was like to feel unloved and unwanted.

My childhood before Jayme’s death had been pretty close to perfect. I had parents who gave me everything. I couldn’t fathom the feelings of abandonment and isolation Maxx must have experienced. And to have had to take on the role of parent when he was only a child himself was unimaginable.

I had lost the relationship I once had with my parents in the last few years. But for the first time I wondered whose fault it was. Did the blame completely rest on my parents’ shoulders, as I had convinced myself? Or had I been too lost in my selfish grief to realize I was pushing away the two people who had loved me the most in my life?