Ray POV
"You are a strange man, Ray."
Claudia's words actually bothered me so much because I realized that she had misunderstood my point back then.
I didn't kiss her not because I didn't want to, but because the Gatlin men vowed to kiss only three women in their lives:
Their mother;
Their beloved;
The mother of their child, which meant the woman they would marry.
Once the vow had been broken, Gatlin men would spiral out of control due to their inherently lustful nature.
Just like how my father was heartbroken after his beloved left him. He couldn't love his wife and ended up with one wrong woman after another.
Or like my grandfather, whose senior years were fueled by guilt because my grandmother hated him to the point that she died in her forties out of anger. She loathed my grandpa until her death. My grandpa couldn't cope with the guilt of indirectly killing his own beloved, so he drowned his sorrow by sleeping with as many women as he could.
