Page 48 of Until You Found Me

Shit. Shit, shit, shit. His throat is closing up and his eyes prickle hot. The urge to escape this moment by jumping off the cliff into the ocean is strong. He can’t accept what she’s saying. He refuses to accept any explanation other than the one he already convinced himself of.

She shakes her head and nudges his knee with hers. “But we don’t have to keep talking about this now. There’s no rush. Just don’t leave, okay?”

She’s referring to him leaving the trailer, but it sounds a lot like she’s begging him not to leave her. “I should be saying that to you.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

“Still got the same problem, though. Only told you because I didn’t want you to think it was you if it happened. Don’t even know if I can. Not that you still want to.”

“I do. I still do.”

She’ll regret that choice when he tries to get inside her and his dick starts withering. When he can’t make her come. When he makes her feel like she isn’t enough.

“I’ll take a pill first next time,” he says calmly. “Better odds.”

She leans her shoulder against his, her voice gentle. “Do you want to take them?”

He sighs, dropping the cigarette in the snow, rememberinghow the drugs made his cock feel raw like the shaft was on fire. “No. I don’t like how they make me feel.”

“Then we won’t use them.”

“But…”

“Hey, I don’t even know who the hell I am. I don’t know if I can be with anyone in a normal way. If the only thing my body knows is how to do is what’s in my nightmares. I’m not afraid to be with you, though, and maybe that’s strange considering all the terrible things I see when I close my eyes, but so many of them feel like I’m watching it happen in a movie. Maybe I’ll be afraid later, maybe I never will. I don’t know.” She pauses, reaching up to do that thing he likes so much and brush the hair off his forehead. “I’ll be patient with you and you be patient with me, okay?”

He leans his face into her palm with a quick nod. “Okay.”

She smiles. “Good, now can we go back inside because it’s cold as fuck out here?”

He huffs out a laugh. “Yeah, come on, and we should both go back to quittin’ those cancer sticks.”

“Agreed.”

They don’t talk about the flinch from earlier, don’t need to. He only wishes everything else was as simple to understand as the lingering after-effects that one too many hits leave behind.

The mood is gone. That makes it easy to go about the rest of the evening without feeling any sort of awkward pull, but when they climb into bed to watch a movie a couple of hours later, everything changes quickly as she strips off her pants and fails to replace them.

She’s in nothing but her underwear and another of his t-shirts, right beside him, looking soft enough to touch.

“Just wanna be comfortable,” she says. “Is this okay? I canput something on.”

“No. I mean yes, it’s good.”

He’s dressed as if he might run errands, not to keep her away, but to avoid expectations after their earlier disaster. He reminds himself that he’s already had two fingers deep between her legs and that should mean he’s allowed to be comfortable in bed, too. So he kicks off his own pants, leaving his boxers on, nervous before they even touch each other.

“It’s okay,” she whispers with a sweet smile, snuggling in against his chest and hiking her knee over his thigh. “We’re just watching a movie.”

These are things he should be saying to her, but he likes hearing them and wishes he didn’t. Wishes he wasn’t so fucked up and so goddamn confused that he needs the reassurance she’s offering like he needs his next breath.

“You remember I have that therapy appointment this week? The referral from Audrey,” she begins, drawing an absent shape on his chest.

“I remember. How are you feeling about that?”

“Scared that it’ll help and scared that it won’t. Do you think they’ll hypnotize me?”

“Pfft no. That only happens on TV.”

“I bet they’ll have those little balls on a string tapping in the background and tell me to count backward from ten in a monotone voice and then all of a sudden my whole shitty life will play out.”

---