Deception by Kelly Carrero

deception that I’d been fed all those years. Everything I’d known looked to be a lie, and I would be damned if I was going to stay calm for that. My mother didn’t deserve to have this go smoothly for her. She deserved to feel hurt. She deserved to feel pain. She deserved to feel what I felt.
    My mother screamed in pain as she clutched her head between her hands.
    Not until her knees buckled and she collapsed on the floor did I understand what was going on. “Oh, my God,” I shrieked as I brought my hands to my lips. A second later, I felt Aiden’s hand on me again before I was torn away from the scene and calming endorphins flowed freely through my veins.
    The next thing I knew, Aiden and I were standing in the lounge room of his house on the Gold Coast. Aiden’s arms were wrapped around me as he guided me back towards the lounge. When his legs hit the leather, he pulled me into his lap and held me tightly as he continued to flood my system with his much-needed calming endorphins.
    Tears spilled down my cheeks as I realised what I’d just done—or almost done. I’d only ever seen something like that once before, and the person had ended up dead. What had I done? I had almost killed my mother. And for what? Because she’d kept so many secrets from me. I was pissed, but she didn’t deserve to be killed because of it. And to think of how easy it had come to me. I wondered if the same evil that lived inside my father also lived inside me. Was I destined to become like those who made me? A new bout of tears streamed down my face as I contemplated the answer to that question.
    “Shhh,” Aiden said, rubbing circles over my back.
    “I’m a monster, just like my father.”
    “No, you’re not.” He kissed the top of my head. “You’re nothing like him.”
    I turned my face up towards his. “How can you say that? I almost killed her,” I wailed.
    He wiped a tear away from my cheek with his thumb. “You couldn’t have killed her that way. She isn’t a normal human like the guy I killed.”
    “Whether I could’ve killed her or not doesn’t matter. The fact remains, I still did that to her.”
    After a few minutes of silence, he finally spoke. “Let me take the hurt away?”
    I pushed off him and stood up. “No. I deserve to feel this way.” I hurried towards the stairs, but I realised there was a quicker way out of the room, and I took it. I transported to the room Chelsea had stayed in the last time she’d slept over.
    I closed the blinds, making the room almost pitch black, then I pulled back the quilt and collapsed onto the bed. I pulled the doona over my head, curled into a fetal position, and willed myself to go to sleep. But I wasn’t that lucky. Images of my mother holding her head reeled through my mind. Was I really much better than my father? Was I destined to end up like him? Did my genes determine how I would turn out? Or did I have a choice?
    The bed moved as Aiden sat down and placed his hand on my leg. I didn’t want him to see me like that, so I kept the covers over my head. I waited for him to try to send me some of his feel-good endorphins, but they never came. I guessed he had accepted that I wanted to feel like crap. The bed creaked as he shifted positions, and I waited for him to lie down beside me. But he didn’t.
    I recognized the familiar feeling of thoughts being pushed onto me, but I froze the second I heard the voice inside my head. It wasn’t Aiden. “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree,” he whispered. The voice disappeared, as soon as the weight on the bed did.
    I needed almost a full minute to work up the courage to lift the doona off my face. Just as I began peeling it back, someone sat on the bed again. Summoning all my courage, I quickly ripped the quilt off my face and sat up, prepared to finally come face-to-face with my father.
    Relief washed over me, and I lunged into his arms. “Thank God it’s you.”
    “Who did you think it was?” He had one hand