The slap hurt, but the shock of it hurt even more, and worst of all was the vicious twist of self-criticism: you goddamn idiot, you should’ve seen this coming. It shouldn’t’ve been a shock.
Kaden covered his cheek with his hand, pressing on it to stop the stinging as she ripped into him, each sentence out of her mouth making him want to scream back at her all the louder. Talking about Tragos, dead, covered in blood - it was like she saying it deliberately to hurt him because he knew, yeah, he knew how fights like this went: you grabbed any weapon you could, you aimed right for the spot that would hurt the most to hit, cos what hurt Kaden more than that? Hurt way more than a stupid slap. He’d been hit way harder than that before. Way harder. The slap didn’t even matter. But talking about what she’d done for Tragos, like Kaden was supposed to be grateful because she hung out with his body while he was running for his life and Lil T’s on his own, that hurt way more than a pussy little slap.
And then she went and declared she had some kind of right to try and be happy, and Kaden saw red. “DON’T BULLSHIT ME! YOU’VE BEEN HAPPY SINCE WE GOT HERE!” He roared back when her voice failed her, storming past her to grab the box of tissues from the vanity, and threw it at her, as hard as he could. “I don’t know why you even need these, you haven’t cried about him ONCE! You’re the one who doesn’t wanna talk about him, apart from bitching about how MAD you are at him just cos he didn’t wanna be nineteen! You don’t get to be all angelic about sitting with his body when you NEVER EVEN CRY about him!” He grabbed a hairbrush off her bed and threw that at her, too, but it missed and smacked into the wall. Kaden cried about Tragos all the time - he’d cried so hard he felt like crying turned him inside out, he’d made himself throw up with it before. Had she? No, not fucking once! “You are SO FULL OF BULLSHIT it makes me SICK! I KNOW YOU CAME HERE TO FORGET ABOUT HIM!”