"She was a great mom at one point, I think. Before the drinking started, her and my dad made a great team. We'd throw the football around in the backyard like a normal family, have nightly sit down dinners, I'd get hounded for my grades even in the second grade, but then one day something just...changed.

"I think it might have had something to do with my dad's job but it was so long ago and everything is so fuzzy now that looking back that far almost gives me a headache. All I know is that one day I come home from school and the diner's not in the oven, the football is in the trash, and my parents are in their room arguing. That was the day that it all started."

I took in a deep breath as Lydia held onto me from behind, our naked bodies barely touching as I spoke to the wall, her hand tracing circles on my skin. It was the only thing keeping me calm in that moment.

"Every night after that it got worse. I made my own frozen pizza dinners, packed my own lunches and stopped asking for help on my homework. Some nights my dad didn't come home at all, but the ones that he did, I hid in my room. I became focused on football. Anytime I'd hear my mom crying or screaming downstairs, I'd escape out the window since I was on the first level and go outside and throw my football as hard as I could and then I would run and pick it up and repeat the process over and over again. It was a coping mechanism for me, I think, using football as a distraction. I could pretend my dad wasn't hitting my mom as long as I had my football with me."

I didn't realize I was crying until a lone drop landed on the pillow beside me but still I carried on with my story as Lydia laid silently beside me, steadfast with her support as her hand never stopped tracing those soothing and delicate patterns across the broad area of my back.

"The nights he came home he would be so drunk that he'd forget what he did the night before and would be surprised in the morning when he saw how broken my mom was. I never stepped in between them during their fights, I was too scared, but I wished that he'd lived long enough for me to finally stand up to him, at least once. I was too weak and young back then but I hated him even more for dying too soon, kidney and liver failure. My mother was a different story.

"Once he died, she got the insurance money and went to the bottles for comfort instead of her only son. I was ten or eleven when social services was called for the first time because the neighbor found her passed out from an OD in the front yard. They didn't take me until the third call, when she really had OD'd, but this time she didn't wake up."

I heard Lydia's sharp intake of breath at my words but still I kept on, never having told this story to anyone- not even the mandated therapists that I'd been forced to see after the traumatic incident.

"I wasn't there when they found her body, I was at school and was immediately pulled out and taken to a police station where I stayed the night on a cold ass bench just wishing that someone nice from my school or a long lost relative would come and pick me up and take me away to someplace warm, I couldn't register that both of my parents were really dead. One of the officers tried to give me a baseball to play with but I was told later that I screamed at the top of my lungs at him because it wasn't a football and that they scrambled to a store and finally got me my football so I'd shut up. I still don't remember that happening to this day.

"I was shuffled from foster home to foster home, trying to get adopted, but no one wanted some almost teenaged kid with an anger problem who was obsessed with football and not so obsessed with good grades, although one set of parents helped me on the academic front. I never developed any connections with anyone, so when I found Marnie right out of high school I latched onto her and deferred my NFL dreams for a while to make her happy since she was the only person I thought of as family at that point, and that all blew up in my face when I found out she cheated on me."

Lydia shifted on the bed beside me and I knew almost exactly how she felt, being emotionally manipulated by someone then cheated on by the very person who was supposed to always have your back. It cut me even deeper because I had no one- no parents, no siblings...no one.

"When I started living with your brother and Reed, I felt like I finally found my people- guys that I could really count on and trust, and they became like family, too. And then you showed up and...well, here we are."

I turned around in the bed and found unshed tears lining the blue in Lydia's eyes and my heart wrenched open, horrified that I had caused her even an ounce of pain just out of empathy for what I was feeling.

I reached over and cupped my hand to her face, desperate to make her hurt go away, too. And then she started speaking.

"I've never had a good relationship with my mom. She always tried to make me look perfect constantly and I never could reach that level that she wanted, so when in her eyes I 'screwed up', it was like a confirmation bias for her. It confirmed that I wasn't the daughter that she had always wanted, but of course this 'mistake' wasn't even in my control. I know she apologized and said it was completely wrong, but it still hurts knowing she didn't believe her own daughter.

"We drifted apart and when I met Nate I immediately moved out and in with him after graduation and then he proposed and I was dreading having to invite my mom to the wedding. Guess he saved me from having to see her disapproving glare at the wedding, though, because you know what happened there. He manipulated and abused me for so long that I think I was almost brainwashed by him into thinking I was in love with him when in reality I was just scared of being on my own. Afterwards, I was so consumed with anger and hate for the men in my life, and the Raphael situation didn't make things better, they made them worse, actually.

"After I found out what happened with Amalia I saw red. After I confronted him and we moved out, we were in the moving truck and were stopped at a stop light and a drunk driver ran a red light and plowed right into us. I had minimal damage, just a few scars left and sometimes when it rains my wrist aches from where I had a small hairline fracture, but Amalia obviously took the brunt of the damage. Watching her adjust to the wheelchair was hard enough, but listening to her blame herself for what happened with Raphael hurt even more...I knew I had to get out of the apartment, so that's when I went out to the bars for the first time."

I listened in paralyzed silence as she described her nightly adventures trying to take down the campus creeps that she had to share space with in the city and I wanted to throw up as she described just how many guys she'd encountered that had drugged innocent girl's drinks. I tensed as she recounted a story where she'd come across a man that was a part of one of her cases for school and I knew I had murder in my eyes by the time she was finished.

"I think once my heart started acting up and you came back, something inside of me finally snapped and I realized that I could die, I could lose you and you could lose me and I would have made no difference in the world. I need to get myself through school and do things the right way, through my career, and then I can make real changes in the world, at least, that's the plan."

I nuzzled her against my neck as we spent the rest of the night talking until our throats were raw, small stories from our childhoods that we'd repressed, tear inducing stories of the times Nate had hurt her which made me want to throttle him but I held back as we kept talking and talking and it was one of those nights that made me realize that I was even more in love with her than I could have ever imagined, but there was something gnawing at the back of my mind that I intentionally kept from telling her.

It was about my 'uncle', and I didn't know if it was on purpose or not, but I had a feeling that it was going to come back and bite me sooner rather than later, but I relished the rest of that night with Lydia wrapped up in my arms as we got even closer than we'd ever been. Maybe one day I'd reach out to this person and tell her all about it but until then I'd savor the time I had with Lydia because I knew that this peace probably wasn't going to last long, and I planned to soak up every millisecond of it until that fragile peace was broken.