by I. A. Dice
He pressed me closer to his chest. “Now four things you can touch.”
“Your face, your hands, my coat, the tiles.”
I knew the next step. I used that technique before, and although it always worked to some extent, Thomas’s presence pulled me out of the panic attack faster than any grounding technique out there.
“Three things you can hear.”
I kept my eyes glued on my brother’s ashen face when I listened for sounds other than the fastened heartbeats… mine and Thomas’s.
“Your voice. A kettle. The TV.”
“You’re okay, baby doll,” Thomas said, his voice calmer. “You’re safe. I’ve got you.”
I closed my eyes for five more breaths.
“I’m sorry.”
Thomas didn’t let me wriggle out of his embrace, his hold on me tightened when I tried to move.
“Not yet. Not until you stop shaking.”
Amelia crouched in front of me with a cup of steaming tea.
“Peppermint,” she said. “Are you feeling better?”
“No.”
I tore my hands out of Thomas’s grip at a sudden onset of nausea when I got another whiff of Nick’s cologne—the same one Adrian used for the past four months. The same one he wore the night he relapsed. Amelia bought a bottle of cologne for Nick when we went out shopping on Sunday, but I had no idea it was that cologne. Otherwise I would have told her to choose something else.
Smell was the worst one of my triggers.
“I feel sick.” I looked at Nick, covering my mouth. “Can you please change? You smell like Adrian.”
His eyes grew wide. He opened his mouth to speak, but another wave of nausea hit me hard. I scrambled to my feet and rushed upstairs, as fast as my feeble legs allowed. The memories sucked me in too deep and blurred the line that distinguished them from reality, throwing my body off track.
A coffee and two toasts I had for breakfast came back the moment I leaned over the toilet. Thomas entered the room right behind me. He gathered my hair, holding it back.
“Get her a glass of water,” he told Nick or Mel.
Mel, probably, since I couldn’t smell Adrian anymore. I flushed the toilet, and hoisted myself up, holding onto the sink to wash my face. Thomas turned on the shower, messing with the water temperature setting for a moment. He gripped the hem of my sweater to help me undress, but I stopped him before he could pull it over my head.
“Leave, Thomas, I’ll help her.” Amelia came back with water.
Thomas’s jaw clenched, his eyes not leaving my face while mine looked everywhere but his face.
“Shout me if you need me.”
“I think I can manage,” I said, and urged both of them to leave.
Turns out I was wrong. Thomas closed the door behind them, and I almost collapsed to the floor when I tried to undress. My legs felt like jelly, so instead of standing under the shower head, I sat down in the bath, letting the water run down my back.
Negative emotions faded, but no positive ones took their place. Emptiness was all that remained.
CHAPTER 14
THOMAS
Tranquiliser
A cloud of smoke hung in the air. Wind was absent, the dark sky starless and the lake like a giant mirror. The calm, quiet night didn’t fit the picture. It mocked the tension and chaos of the last twenty minutes.
In the movies, the weather corresponds to the main characters’ emotions, highlighting their struggle—it rains when people are sad; sun shines when they are happy.
Tonight was nothing like that. The weather was the opposite of what Nadia lived through and what I lived through watching her frenzy.
The moment I took my phone out in the middle of dinner with Chrissy and saw Amelia on the screen, my body went into combat mode.
Mel never called unless something bad was happening. I just knew that everything Nadia was holding in had found a way out.
“Thomas, please, please come over,” she said. “We can’t calm her down; she’s hysterical. Please, can you come?”
What could be heard in the background was like nothing I had ever heard before. Nadia wasn’t sobbing. She wasn’t crying. She was begging: begging for it to stop; begging him to stop, to leave her alone; then begging him not to go, not to give up.
I jumped to my feet, spilling a glass of water all over Chrissy’s dress, threw a fifty on the table to cover the bill and marched outside.
“I need to go,” was all I said.
Once out the door, I sprinted to my car. The tires squealed, the engine revved and my heart tried to climb out of my chest through my throat. The drive to Nick’s house took half the time it should have. Ten minutes, and I hit the brakes, making a long line in the white gravel outside of the cottage.
Nadia’s and Nick’s voices filled the quiet night. She cried and begged. Nick tried to snap her out of the panic attack. I expected to see a scene similar to when Nadia found out Adrian tried to kill himself the first time. It was the worst thing I had witnessed. I couldn’t imagine seeing her in a worse state until I burst inside the house.
Nick kneeled on the floor, holding Nadia’s arms to stop her from scratching her neck. She rocked back and forth, yelled, whispered and cried on repeat. My mind was blank. I had no fucking idea what to do, but my body was on autopilot, acting before my brain formed a plan.
“Move!” I shoved Nick out of the way, falling to my knees, cupping Nadia’s face. “I need ice.”
Amelia ran into the kitchen. I pulled Nadia away from the wall, turned her around and pressed her back to my chest. Mel handed me a bag of ice cubes and backed away, as if she was afraid that she would make things worse.
Things couldn’t get any worse. Nadia was lost in her head, frantically trying to find a way out of a labyrinth with no exit.
I placed an ice cube in each of her palms, closed her fingers, and drew her closer, implementing the grounding techniques that worked before. On the outside, I was focused. My brain caught up and knew what the next step was, but on the inside, I was a mess. A fucking wreck, because there was no guarantee anything would work.
Then, Nadia’s breathing hitched. She stopped fighting. She gave in, letting me guide her out of the nightmare.
I sucked in another cloud of smoke. My heart rate was still on the too-fast side, but it slowed down a lot since Amelia’s phone call threw my mind into overdrive. Time did nothing to diminish the effect I had on Nadia. Fuck, the effect she had on me was still as powerful as the day I kissed her in the back seat of a taxi.
Nicholas slid the patio door open and came closer to sit beside me on the fallen bough, a glass of whiskey in hand.
“How do you know what to do?” he asked, staring at the ground. “How do you calm her down? I couldn’t even get her to look at me.”
I squeezed the bridge of my nose, shaking my head. “I have no idea how. I think she lets me in because she knows I’ll take the fear away.”
She was like that around me from the start. She trusted me to bear the weight of her torment and keep the demons at bay. She believed I would do everything in my power to help, and it drew me to her because no one else believed there was a decent bone in my body.
Nadia treated me as her salvation. She gave me a reason to aim higher, to do better and meet her expectations. She was the same for me—a chance for salvation. A chance for redemption.
“What do I do now?” Nick dug his fingers into the back of his neck. “Should I find a mental health facility? Do you think it would help if she stayed with professionals for a while?”
“You want to lock her up in a mental institution?” I scoffed, pinching the ash onto the ground. “She’s not crazy.”
“I’m not saying she’s crazy. I just… I don’t know how to help her.”
I threw the cigarette butt into an ashtray and rose to my feet. “Give her time. Listen when she wants to talk and keep your mouth shut when all she needs is silence.”
Nick nodded; his face blanched with
shame.
“I’ll go and check up on her,” I said.
The main problem with mental health was that someone who never experienced trauma or depression couldn’t possibly understand what it felt like to drown while still breathing.
Nadia laid on the bed, curled in a ball under a white blanket. Her eyes were wide open, and she hugged a pillow to her chest so hard that if it were a pet, it would be dead.
There were no tears, just dread in her brown eyes.
Prescription meds stood on the nightstand next to a half-empty glass of water. The label on the pills read Alprazolam, and I cursed inside. She was back on Xanax after all the time and effort she put into reducing the number of meds she took.
I climbed onto the bed, rested my head on one of the many pillows, and drew her to my side. She fisted my shirt, clinging to me the way she did many times before—as if I were her security blanket. I ran my fingers through her wet hair, brushing them back behind her ear.
“Close your eyes.”
She pulled the blanket over us, inhaling deep breaths through her nose buried in the crook of my neck. She was exhausted. Dark circles around her eyes got darker each day.
According to Nick she stayed up during the nights, and slept for an hour max during the day, with her head on his lap as if she needed someone to watch over her.
“Do you remember when you asked what made me a blonde-loving playboy?” I didn’t expect an answer, but I could tell that she was listening. “On my first day in the army, I met a guy, Adam. He was a bit like your brother—too grown-up for his age. He was younger than me, but his life had meaning. Not a day went by without him talking about his girlfriend, Claudia. They were so in love that it made me sick at times, similar to Nick and Mel.”
This conversation wasn’t on the agenda for today. Re-living the worst day of my life was never on the agenda but telling her about Adam could help her accept that some things were out of our control.
She tried not to let Adrian get to her, but deep inside, she worried and blamed herself for every suicide attempt and every mental breakdown he experienced when she wasn’t around.
She held it in, doing more damage than good. At some point, the repressed emotions had to resurface. “Many months later, we went out with the whole squad bright and early, not even half an hour after Adam received a letter from Claudia. He got her pregnant when he went back home a few weeks earlier. He was the happiest I saw him. The happiest I ever saw anyone.”
I took a deep breath, certain that any moment now, my voice would break, but the feeling of emptiness and loss that plagued me whenever Adam entered my mind was absent. It felt natural to tell Nadia about that day; it felt like something I should’ve done a long time ago.
“We arrived in this small village that was taken by the enemy overnight. We were sent to round up the civilians and get them to safety. Gunfire started the moment we jumped out of the truck to take cover. A bullet went straight through James’s head the second his feet touched the ground.”
Nadia laced our fingers, pressing her body closer to mine. The warmth of her skin and the familiarity of her touch calmed me down.
“I caught him, but Adam grabbed my arm and pulled me out from the open, yelling that James was gone and there was nothing I could do for him. I pressed my back to the wall of a building we hid behind, staring at James’s lifeless body lying on the field… I had no time to process that James was gone before Adam peeked around the corner and a bullet went through his neck. The war raged around us while I held his head on my lap and watched my best friend die.”
Nadia squeezed my hand, which in turn squeezed my heart, and for the first time in months calmness washed over me. The chain around my chest loosened.
“I’m sorry,” she uttered, tightening the hold she had on me.
I pressed my lips to her temple without thinking and left them there to brush against her skin while I spoke.
“It took days before I accepted that he was gone. I tried to push the truth away as if my denial meant he wasn’t dead, but when it finally hit me, it hit me hard. For the longest time, I was convinced that he was dead because of me,” I continued, much quieter. “It wasn’t until I met you that I understood there was nothing I could’ve done to save him. Don’t repeat my mistakes, baby doll. Don’t blame yourself for something that’s out of your control. You have to accept that fate has a plan, even if you think it’s wrong.”
She gave me a small nod, pushed her face further into my neck, and her hot lips brushed against my skin, igniting my senses.
“Can you stay until I fall asleep?” she uttered.
Her warm breath made the hair on my neck stand on end.
“I’ll be here when you wake up, baby doll.” I pressed my lips to the crown of her head, gritting my teeth to stop from doing something I would regret in the morning.
Or not.
“Thank you.”
There was no better tranquiliser than having her close, locked in my arms, safe and calm. I stroked her back in a repetitive motion and her breathing stabilised within minutes.
The door cracked open not long later. Nick entered the room.
“Is she asleep?” he whispered, tiptoeing closer. “You want to go? I can take over.”
Instinctively, the grip I had on Nadia tightened.
“No, I’m staying.”
There was a good chance she could wake up in the middle of the night in tears. I wanted to be there to calm her down and help her get back to sleep. She needed the rest.
Nick turned the light off on his way out, and I closed my eyes, expecting Nadia to wake up any minute. It wasn’t like the first night we spent together when she hardly moved a muscle until the morning. This time she tossed and turned, pressing her delicate body closer to me until she was wrapped around me like ivy. Every time she moved, my eyes popped open. I readjusted the blanket, the hold I had on her, and pressed a kiss to her forehead, temple or hair. It had a soothing effect—as if my lips were enough to banish the nightmares.
Sometime around eight thirty in the morning, the silence that filled the house throughout the night was broken by the sound of water boiling in a kettle. Nadia was sound asleep with her hand draped over my chest, leg sprawled across my middle and cheek resting against my shoulder.
Not waking her up with soft kisses across her collarbones proved a struggle. It was a goddamn bitter-sweet torture having her so close. I was the only thing standing between us. I was on a verge of giving in to the feelings that inflated my chest when she was close. Nadia tried to act as if she was all Egyptian plagues in one, always saying I should steer clear, but she couldn’t fool me. She wouldn’t push me away if I wanted to rebuild what she tore apart.
Waking up next to her was the best part of falling asleep, but as much as I loved it, and as much as I wanted to wipe our slate clean, the reason why we weren’t together flashed before my eyes, and my mind rebelled against forgiveness.
I lasted twenty more minutes. Having laid in the same position for almost twelve hours, I pressed my lips to her forehead, and slid out of bed, careful not to wake her. My pants and shirt looked as if a dog chewed them up and spat them out, but before I swore under my breath, I noticed a pile of fresh clothes on the nightstand.
Amelia must have left them there after I fell asleep. I took a shower, put on Nick’s long jersey and black tracksuit bottoms and made my way downstairs. The owner of my clothes-for-the-day sat in the kitchen with two cups of coffee in front of him.
“I thought you might get up early,” he said, pushing one cup my way. “Did she sleep at all?”
At all? Who did he have me for? Of course, she slept. And she slept well, too. Not as well as she used to, but she didn’t wake up once. Considering the melt-down we witnessed last night, it was a big victory.
“All night,” I replied, aiming at casual, but there was no denying that I was proud like a peacock, and my voice hinted it a little.
Nick raised an eyebrow, surprised and scep
tical at once. I almost heard his brain cells strain to work so early in the morning, but a moment later a tight-lipped smile took over.
“Don’t say a word,” I snapped, expecting stupid comments about how good Nadia and I were together.
We were. That was the problem—past tense.
He chuckled, shaking his head. “I wasn’t going to say anything.”
“Yes, you were. Drop it, Nick. You were on my side for four months. Stay there.” I sipped on the coffee when Amelia entered the kitchen, a pink robe tied around her middle. “Thanks for the clothes.”
“No problem.” She looked me up and down, eyebrow raised as if she was surprised that they fit me. “How is Nadia? Did she sleep okay?”
Just then we heard Nadia get out of bed. She took a few hasty steps, and the door to the bathroom closed upstairs. I expected her to stay in bed for at least a couple more hours, but it looked like lack of my proximity was enough to wake her up.
Not helping, baby doll.
“She’s up, I guess.”
I made her a cup of coffee, and five minutes later, I was back upstairs. The doors to her room were open just as I left them. Nadia stood with her back to me, fidgeting to clasp her bra. My brain short-circuited just for a moment when the images of her naked body writhing underneath me hit me first. But then, desire turned to rage.
Two bruises the size of my hands marked her back. One on her ribs, the other disappeared under the belt of her black jeans. She had a new tattoo in-between her shoulder blades, but I was too preoccupied with the bruises to pay attention.
I entered the bedroom, and placed the coffees aside, spilling some on the nightstand. The sound of Adrian’s fists connecting with her body filled my head once again.
Nadia turned around, pressing the jumper to her chest.
“Hey,” she uttered, as if nothing was wrong.
I spun her around, pressing my fingers to the bruises, bile in my throat. More things broke inside me, more of the humanity evaporated.
“I should kill him,” I seethed, barely controlling my temper.
Nadia turned around again and pulled the sweater over her head.
