Page 70 of Honey Sugar
“No, Titan. It’s fine.”
“Why did you pick up the pills? You don’t need them.”
“I know. It was so tempting though. I told myself I wouldn’t take any but then I got back to Honey Sugar and I started thinking about Mama and…” My throat thickened with sadness. It ate away at my sentence until I was a sobbing mess. Titan sighed heavily and rubbed my shoulder. Even though he was mad at me, he still comforted me. I’d never experienced anything like that before.
Usually, when Mama or Daddy were mad they didn’t speak to me. They cut me off. Whenever one of my boyfriends or anyone else got mad, I apologized it away until things were right. I didn’t know how to handle someone being angry but still caring and listening.
“I took four to take the edge off the grief. Then when I closed I took a couple more.”
“Why the fuck did you take more?” Titan snapped.
“I wanted the sadness to stop. The four I took before didn’t help to take the edge off of anything. I was stuck in sorrow, Titan. I didn’t have anyone to talk to. Even if I could have talked to someone I wouldn’t have known what to say. Everything made me want to cry. I couldn’t concentrate and I wanted the feeling to go away. That’s all I remember.
By the time I got home, I was tired but I couldn’t sleep. I knew I needed to make candies and flavor the moonshine but I was stuck. I sat in my car for ten minutes staring out of the window.” I wiped my nose and lifted my hand to my ear. Titan pushed it away and glared at me. I’d never seen that look in his eyes. I didn’t know how to describe it but it made my fingers curl into my palm.
“So you took pills at lunchtime, then right before you closed then when you got home?”
“I took some while I was in the car because at that point…I didn’t care about drowning anymore. I didn’t care about how I looked to anyone or if I was being an addict. I just wanted to go the fuck to sleep. Whenever I’m asleep, the pain doesn’t hurt. I went in the house after a while and tried to stash the rest of the pills in the Tylenol bottle so you wouldn’t find them but…” I broke down into a sea of salty tears thinking about how low I felt. How useless and tired I was of everything. I truly wanted to go to sleep and never wake up again.
“But what?” Titan said quietly.
“I realized I wanted to sink into the blackness. I realized that in the blackness, I couldn’t feel anything. That meant my heart wouldn’t hurt anymore. It seemed so easy.”
“Easy?” Titan laughed and covered his mouth with his fist. I stared at the tattoos across his knuckles because I couldn’t bear to look into his eyes. It was too painful.
Even though the burning in my throat from the stomach pump was fresh, I still wanted pills. I wanted them to make the pain go away. I wanted them to make me sleep. To make me forget.
What the hell was wrong with me?
“You think because you decide to slip into blackness that suddenly everything becomes easy?” He moved away from me because the need to pace was stronger than the need to hold my hand. “The world still goes on, Ivy. Nothing is easy about not being able to breathe because I don’t know if I’ll ever see you again. That’s not easy. It’s not easy sitting in a waiting room without any information about how you’re doing. It’s not easy praying to God to keep you alive when I feel he’s turned his back on me for being a fucking abomination. It’s even harder to admit that I don’t care about being an abomination because I care more about you than anything in the world. The only person things were easy for was you.” Tears made his eyes look like glittering jet stones.
It tore my heart into shreds.
Titan cried when Aunt Sarah died but that was it. He only cried when he saw her body. He never let tears out. He held everything in because that was how he operated.
To see him cry over my stupid ass decision, it did something to me.
“I’m sorry, Titan.”
“Don’t apologize to me, Ivy. As much as I love you…I can’t stop you from doing something fucking stupid like killing yourself. You have to do that. You have to love yourself more than I love you. I can’t want you to stick around more than you want to stick around.” He paused and pulled in a few deep breaths. His shoulders looked stiff and veins stood out on his neck. I watched them wondering how hard and fast his heart was beating. “I love you, Ivy. I love you in a way that nobody else will or can love you. We’ve been through things meant to break us. We’re still here though. You’re still here even though you tried to pull your fucking ear off your head. Even after you downed a bottle of Xanax. That means you have something to live for. I just wish you could see that.” Titan fell into a chair across the room and stared at me.
I felt horrible for taking all those pills. I didn’t even know if my goal was to kill myself. I didn’t know much of anything lying in that bed but I knew I hated the look in Titan’s eyes. I was special to him and I was letting him down tremendously. I was letting myself down. I’d come so far only to fall to rock bottom.
I didn’t say anything else in response because I needed to think. I needed to wrap my mind around what the hell was so broken deep inside of me. TV filled in the quiet gaps between Titan and I while I drifted in and out of sleep.
When I woke up, I’d been moved to a room. Two nurses worked around my bed, hooking up IV’s and getting ready to take my vitals. I scanned the room for Titan because all I wanted to see was his face. I didn’t care about anything else.
“Where’s my…” I paused not knowing what to call him. Had he told them he was my cousin or my boyfriend? Confusion burned scarlet onto my cheeks.
“Your boyfriend? We asked him to step out. He’s in the hall.” One of the nurses smiled at me. “He’s handsome, girl.” She clicked her tongue and patted my shoulder. I returned her smile and stared at the door until they were done with me. When they told Titan he could come in, I finally took a normal breath. “The psychiatrist will be in shortly to evaluate you. We’ll take your vitals every hour but in between those times, try to get some rest.”
How the hell was I supposed to get rest when I was having my vitals taken every hour? It didn’t matter. I’d gotten myself into the predicament now I had to deal with everything from the pain I’d caused Titan to the annoyance of being in the hospital.
“I hate being angry at her and sad that she’s gone at the same time,” I told Titan as soon as the door closed softly behind the nurses. I had to get all the thoughts eating away at me out of my head or something like this was going to happen again.
“She decided to leave because she didn’t think she had a choice, Ivy. It didn’t have anything to do with you. You couldn’t make her stay just like you could make her go. It was her choice. I can’t tell you not to be mad at her but don’t stay mad at her.” He pulled up a chair and sat right beside me.
I picked at the thin white blanket they draped over my body. I kept my gaze trained on it because Titan’s eyes were still too much to take in. “What about missing her even though she wasn’t the best mother?”
