Page 65 of Glitterland
“What? When? Can’t you like do it in the morning?”
“See,” I said, somewhat hysterically. “I’ve already started. I’m waking you up in the middle of the night.”
“S’okay,” he mumbled, also sitting up. “I ’aven’t got nuffin planned for tomorrow. Next shoot is next week, I fink.”
“I can’t do this.” I wrapped my arms tightly around my knees and huddled at the top of the bed. “I can’t be with someone. I ruin everything.”
“But I like being wif you, babes. You’re not gonna ruin nuffin.”
“You don’t understand.” He touched my arm and I shook him off. “I know Stephen Fry has you up to speed, but I’m not charmingly quirky. I’m clinically insane. I’ve been in hospital. Involuntarily. Because I was too nuts to know I was nuts.”
“We’ve all got flaws, babes.”
I glared at him. “You’re not taking me seriously.”
“Well, you just said you was mental.”
“Darian.”
“Babes.”
He wasn’t getting it. I was a muddle of longing, frustration, and pain, my mind scattering like seabirds. “I’m not a fucking plural,” I snapped.
“What?”
I pointed at myself. “Item: one babe.”
“Ahwight,” he said. “Mister A.A. Winters, Esquire.”
I folded my hands across the tops of my knees and pressed my face into them. “Please don’t laugh at me.”
“No,” he said, so gently it made me want to weep.
“You see,” I mumbled. “This is what I’m like. Niall was right about me; everything he said was true. You’ll end up hating me like he does. I don’t want to do that to you.”
“So, you don’t ’ave to.”
“I might not have a choice. And if you say we always have a choice, I’ll kill you with a pillow.”
There was a long silence. I sensed, rather than saw, Darian moving in the gloom. His smooth, naked shoulder brushed lightly against mine, sending a flare of response through the twisted labyrinth of my scars. I flinched. He kept making me feel things in ruined places.
“Look,” he whispered. “I’m not clever like you, but I fink it’s going to be ahwight. I’m wif you because I like being wif you and that’s…y’know…ahwight. And when it ain’t ahwight…then I won’t be wif you. I’m not gonna let you treat me bad, babes.”
“Oh great, so you’re just going to walk out on the mentally ill guy when the going gets tough?”
“Babes, I’m confused. Are you sad cos you fink I’m going to be wif you or sad because you fink I’m not?”
“I don’t know.” All my doubts and all my fears were snarled up into a matted ball like hair fished out of the bathroom sink, and I couldn’t tell which were real and which were baseless, how much I was protecting myself, or if I was—in my twisted, useless way—trying to protect him. Some distant dead end in my mind was just about capable of recognising that I did not want a martyr to my depression, but I couldn’t link my thoughts into a path that would take me there. I was a rat in the maze of my own thinking, and all the floors were electric, and all the exits were locked. “I don’t know.”
“We ’aven’t ’ardly started,” said Darian soothingly.
“But what if I go mad again? What if I get depressed?”
He shrugged. “You could get hit by a bus or summin tomorrow.”
“Thanks, that’s really consoling.”
“I’m just saying.”
