Page 43 of Carry On
“I’m sorry,” I whispered.
“You’re not sorry,” he snapped. “You’re uncomfortable with realizing every time you’ll inadvertently question the victim and never the abuser. The narrative we’re fed isn’t that there must be something wrong with the abuser for doing what they did. No, it’s that there has to be something wrong with the victim for letting it happen, right? For staying? For not fighting back?”
I held my tongue because what could I say to that?
Maybe if you learned to shut up, you wouldn’t hurt people so much,the voice commented.
“I’ll be back,” Lincoln announced as he pushed away from the table. Without waiting for my response, he left the room.
See, you fucked up,the voice continued.You couldn’t even comfort him.
Yeah, I couldn’t disagree with that. Lincoln needed more out of me than just silence and questioning accusations in the face of awfulness.
CHAPTER 32
LINCOLN
Helpme,”Iwhisperedinto the phone. Like the living room, my bedroom had a balcony. I stood on it, pulling in unsteady breaths and trying to use the cool air to ground me. It wasn’t working, but at least I attempted to.
I hadn’t meant to tell Nash about my first marriage. I hated talking about Chris and did my best to avoid discussing him. There were feelings there that I’d learned how to detach from. They were things I didn’t need to feel and didn’t want to. There was no point. Our relationship may have been the foundation for all my fucked up ways of handling shit, but I didn’t dwell on my feelings.
Okay, maybe I just refused to deal with my emotions. It felt pointless. There wasn’t a damn thing I could do about any of it.
And I was fine—I was. At least, I had been. The combination of seeing him for the first time in years and telling Nash about my marriage had fucked me up in the head.
“Please,” I practically begged of Dean, the one guy I knew who was as fucked up as I was. He was the one who didn’t run away or judge me for it. We weren’t the kind of friends who went for a beer and watched the game. We’d met in a domestic violence support group for men. For a long time, we were the only two in the group besides the woman who ranit. Eventually, we quit the group and decided to keep up with each other instead. We helped each other through things that no one else knew about. We both intimately understood shit that most others couldn’t begin to understand.
“Talk to me, bud,” Dean said. I didn’t know where he was from—that was one of the many personal things we didn’t talk about—but the slight twang in his voice brought me comfort after hundreds of conversations. “What’s going on?”
“Fuck,” I muttered. I hated feeling like this. I hated the rush of crappy, unsteady emotions I worked so hard not to feel. “I saw him again, and I just…”
“Shit. Hold on.” There was a loud clang and swearing that made me frown. Dean was a paramedic. If there was banging and swearing, it probably wasn’t a good thing.
“I can let you go,” I offered.
“Nah, it’s all good,” he replied. “I’m just cleaning shit. That’s all. Think of it as you’re saving me from treacherous hours of scrubbing blood and vomit.”
“That sounds…” How the fuck was I supposed to respond to that?
“All right, tell me what happened, Lincoln? Are you safe? I’ll steal a goddamn fire truck to come fuck some shit up. Say the word, and I swear I will.”
“No, no.” I chuckled slightly, the sound heavy in my chest. I was immensely grateful for his slightly feral nature. He struggled with protecting himself, but he’d go to war for me if I said I needed it. I couldn’t understand that notion. I wasn’t deserving of that. I wasn’t any better than him. “I, uh… I had to go to pick up a client at his precinct. I’d hoped I could get in and out without running into him.”
“What’d he say?”
“It doesn’t matter. I just… it just got in my head, and I just… I need a distraction, Dean,” I admitted. I didn’t want to sit around and talk out the same bullshit I hadn’t been able to talk about for years. I wanted to pack it all back in the right boxes, not deal with it, and get out of my head. “Distract me? Please?”
“I held my very first set of live intestines today,” Dean told me. Yeah, that would certainly do the trick.
“I’m sorry… youwhat?” I demanded.
“I held my first set of live intestines today,” he repeated. “It was actually a really rough call. It’s been a hell of a day, but there were no casualties, and we saved them.”
“You saved them.”
“Nah, I just held the intestines in place.”
“I feel like you’re underselling just how important of a job that is,” I retorted. Also, disgusting. I wasn’t sure I could do something like that, even if a situation arose and I had to. I was no one’s hero. Not like Dean. “I couldn’t touch anyone’s intestines. I’d make some awkward fucking joke about not having the guts to do it.”
