Page 56 of My Best Friend Is Broken
But I can’t trust myself. Can’t be sure that the feral thing inside me won’t take over again the moment I see him vulnerable and hurting.
So I sit in the hallway like the piece of shit I am, holding pills I stole from someone who’s probably contemplatingways to finish what he started, and try to figure out how to love someone without destroying them.
Try to figure out how to save someone from everyone, including myself.
The water stops running, and the silence that follows feels like the end of the world.
Chapter eighteen
Liam
I’m back in my own bed for the first time in what feels like weeks.
The sheets smell like fabric softener instead of sandalwood and Nicky’s particular scent that I’ve grown addicted to. The mattress feels too hard, too cold, too empty. Everything about this room feels foreign now, like I’m a guest in someone else’s space instead of lying in what’s supposed to be my sanctuary.
But I can’t go back to Nicky’s room. Not after what happened. Not after what I almost made him do.
I stare at the ceiling and listen to the sounds of him moving around the apartment. Footsteps in the kitchen, the clink of a glass, the soft thud of cabinet doors closing. Normal sounds from a normal evening, except nothing about this feels normal anymore.
The silence between us is deafening. We haven’t spoken since I emerged from the bathroom to find him gone, the front door unlocked like an accusation. When he came back an hour later, he looked at me with something I’d never seen before. Not anger, not disappointment, buthorror. Like he was seeing me clearly for the first time and didn’t like what he found.
Or maybe like he was seeing himself clearly and was appalled by the reflection.
I pull the comforter over my head, trying to block out the world, but it doesn’t help. I can’t escape the crushing weight of knowing that I’ve destroyed the one good thing in my life through my own desperation and stupidity.
I thought I knew what I wanted. Thought I had it all figured out. Nicky’s insistence that we take things slow had seemed so sweet, so endearing, but also unnecessary. I was ready, wasn’t I? I wanted him to touch me, to claim me, to make me his in every way that mattered.
But the moment he barely touched me, just pinned me against the wall in a moment of panic and fear, I fell apart completely. Became something pathetic and broken, begging for things I didn’t really understand, pushing him toward a line neither of us should have crossed.
What does that say about me? About my chances of ever being normal, ever being the kind of person who can have a healthy relationship with someone I love?
The pills seemed like such a simple solution in that moment. Not a cry for help, not manipulation, just... an end to the constant noise in my head. An end to being the person who destroys everything good through the sheer force of being too damaged to deserve love.
But I didn’t think about what it would do to Nicky. Didn’t consider how finding me with those pills would affect him, how it would feel like another abandonment, another betrayal of his trust.
I’m selfish. That’s what this comes down to. I’m so consumed by my own pain that I can’t see past it to the damage I’m causing to the people who try to help me.
The thought of Nicky’s face when he kicked down that bathroom door, the terror, the desperation, the way his hands shook as he forced me to throw up the pills I’d swallowed, makes my stomach clench with shame.
He saved my life today. Again. And instead of being grateful, instead of recognizing the gift he was trying to give me, I twisted it into something ugly and demanding.
Make me yours. Make me feel...
What was I even asking for? Make me feel better? Make me feel something? Make me feel safe? Make me feel like I matter?
All of the above, probably. All the things that can’t be fixed with sex or ownership or any of the twisted solutions my broken mind conjures up when the pain gets too overwhelming.
I want to make love to Nicky. God, I want that so badly it’s like a physical ache in my chest. I want to know what it feels like to be touched with gentleness instead of violence, to be desired instead of used, to give myself to someone because I choose to instead of because I have no other option.
But what if I can’t? What if I’m even more broken than I realized? What if the moment things get intimate, really intimate, I fall apart the way I did tonight?
What if prison didn’t just steal years of my life, but stole my ability to be physically close to another person without trauma taking over?
The thought terrifies me more than death, more than going back to Brixton, more than any of the nightmares that usually haunt my sleep.
Because if I can’t be intimate with Nicky, if I can’t give him that part of myself, can’t share that connection with him, then what am I to him? A charity case? A broken thing he’s too kind to abandon?
He says he loves me, and I believe him. But love without the possibility of a real relationship, without the hope of building something whole together... that’s not love. That’s pity dressed up in prettier clothes.
