Page 119 of Sweet Caroline
My words hang between us for a long moment. Maybe I do need to hear him say it back.
Moonlight catches on a tear slipping down his cheek. “Love you, too, fancy girl.”
24
MILES
There’s this thing with ADHD where you can forget people.People.Not some old can of beans at the back of a cupboard—actual human beings. People you care about. People you love. And, if you don’t see or talk to them often enough for them to occupy your thoughts, they can just… fall out of the sieve that is your brain. It’s basically the most guilt-inducing version ofout of sight, out of mindimaginable.
Of course, it’s not that youliterallyforget they exist. There’d be freedom in that. This is worse. I’ll remember I haven’t talked to my cousin in a few years and should probably email him but, inevitably, the thought is so fleeting that it’s gone before I can do anything about it. I’ll be hauling rebar or taking out the trash, and then… distraction. Or, more likely, seventeen different distractions and…poof.
It’s awful. It’s humiliating.
And I’ve never wished harder for it to happen.
Everything reminds me of her. Fuckingeverything.
It’s not like she’d spent that much time at my place but, still, traces of her live in every room, squeezing the life out of me ateach turn. The couch she’d sat on in her stunning gold dress, the bed she’d slept in, curled against me… Hell, even opening a drawer to find the hoodie I wrapped around her the night of the fundraiser takes me out. It’s been like living with a ghost for the past two weeks.
My phone chirps beside me.
Gus
Gym time.
Me
No
Gus
Be there in 10.
Gus had let me off the hook all of twice before he started showing up at my apartment and muscling me out the door to go work out. Increasingly concerned about my state of mind, he’d dragged me to the beach last week for a change of scenery. Thebeach. Inmid-November. It was fucking miserable and wasnotmade any better by being surrounded by seashells that reminded me of… Well, I hadn’t really told him that part. When he’d caught me turning one over and sniffling to myself, I’d started to make up some excuse about Caroline loving the beach, then tearfully confessed the truth. I didn’t get too far before he stopped me, looking horrified. Pretty sure he was considering throwing me in the ocean. He probably should’ve.
Not that it would’ve helped.
Getting up to answer the buzzer feels like walking neck-deep in tar, every movement taking so much mental and physical energy that I collapse onto the nearest chair, sure I could fall into a coma.
“Get dressed,” Gus says when he comes in.
“I told you no,” I mumble into my hands.
“It’s for your own good. Come on.”
I groan and slump lower in my chair. “Fuck off.”
“I’llfuck off when you don’t look like the guy in the adbeforehe takes the flu meds. Get the fuck up.”
I’ve tried everything in my toolbox. Water, diet, therapy, exercise. Hell, I was even desperate enough to try meditation once. Nearly threw my phone three minutes in.Imagine filling my body with shimmering, golden light?Been there, lost her, miserable. Thanks for the fucking reminder.
Somehow, Gus bullies me into gym clothes, his SUV, and, finally, into the gym itself. I wince under the fluorescent lights like a vampire thrust into sunlight, the prospect of lifting anything heavier than my head filling me with catatonic dread.
I’m an orphan and an addict. I’ve been through grief and withdrawal. This feels like both—compressed, folded, and compounded together in inextricable layers like butter in a croissant. Only instead of light and delicious, it’s dark and bitter.
It’s possible I haven’t eaten much today.
“Do I have to?”
