Anxious Love (Love Sick #1)

by Sydney Aaliyah Michelle

  "My dad started asking me if she was depressed or if something had happened to her, but I couldn't answer him. I couldn't speak or scream or cry. I shook all over and couldn't breathe. The nurse called for help, and people keep rushing in and out." I shivered as the memory of that day came back. "When I woke up the next time, I remembered everything. It came flooding into my brain like a time-lapsed video on repeat. I laid there in the dark, the images of those guys doing that to her.

  I look away from Ryan. He had tears in his eyes and I was close to losing it. He came to my side of the counter and pulled me into his arms. My tears returned in earnest. He kissed my forehead and rubbed my back.

  "I relived it, remembering the horrible things he’d said. The things he did to me, the things he and his friends did to Dana. It was my fault she died. I could have helped her. I could have saved her. I failed."

  "Oh, Leah." Ryan held me tight. I clung to him. I had told the story several times and it hurt as if it happened yesterday. When I regain some control, I stepped back.

  "A couple of days later, my parents drove me back home and checked me into a hospital in Dallas."

  "That's when you went into the hospital?" Ryan asked, urging me to continue.

  "Yeah, my doctor diagnosed me with general anxiety disorder, and for me, it manifests itself in panic attacks, blackouts and a form of agoraphobia." I shook my head. "A lot of fancy words to say I have trouble dealing with the outside world."

  "That's why you are a night owl,” Ryan said with a nod. It was like my little quirks all made a lot more sense to him now.

  It made me smile.

  "I found a sensible workaround for my disorder living here. I could still go to a restaurant but at four am and as long as I sat near an open door or window. As long as I had an escape route." I giggled, and it made Ryan smile, too for the first time. "I could wander the city at night and during the day avoid the crowds. During Mardi Gras and other busy times, or if it got to be too much, I went to the lake house. It was all working out fine... until I met you."

  Ryan returned to the table. I sat next to him. I reached out and touched his arms, ran my fingers down his forearms. He didn't pull away. He took the information better than I thought. His face showed little emotion.

  "What are you thinking?" I asked.

  "The guy you were with ..."

  "Michael."

  "Yeah, what did he think about all this?"

  "He didn't believe me. Robert had already told him some story about how I agreed to participate in an orgy with him and his brothers." I shook the thought out of my head. It made my face hot thinking about how fast Michael dismissed me.

  Ryan ran his hands over his face and through his hair. He looked out towards the balcony. "How ..." His voice trailed off. He shook it off and started again. "Over the last three years you've been dealing with this, how are you doing that?"

  I didn't mean to laugh, but I had asked myself the same questions. I always came up with the same answer. I had too.

  "Medication helps, when I'm doing it right." I squeezed his arm. "My therapist is amazing. It's one of the reasons I moved to New Orleans. He was a visiting resident at the hospital I was in and when he left, I followed him."

  Ryan narrowed his eyes.

  "I know it sounds weird, but people move for all sorts of reasons, a quality psychiatrist is hard to find."

  Thank God, Ryan smiled. I missed that smile.

  "Besides, Dr. Brady helped me find my passion again."

  "Writing?"

  "Yeah, he had me write my story. I was an English major and I remembered from my creative writing class the elements of a good story. I went through my notes and the professor had us create a beat sheet of popular stories. I followed it and created a fictitious version of the events leading up to the rape and ending with Dana's suicide. It was therapeutic to write it like that, with some distance between what happened and the words on the page.

  "You still have it?" Ryan asked.

  "Yeah." I nodded. "I actually got it published. Under another name, different from the Kinsey Cane pen name you know about."

  Ryan stared with his mouth open.

  "Dr. Brady had some contacts in publishing and he sent them my manuscripts and they made me an offer a week later."

  "Wow," Ryan said with his hand over his mouth. "That's scary."

  "Tell me about it. It happened really fast. I panicked, but then we found an agent through a friend of my families. I meet with her through FaceTime and explained my situation and she took over from there. They published it six months later."

  We sat in silence for a long moment. Ryan seemed to have questions, but he didn't ask them. I needed to know what he was thinking.

  "What do you want to ask me?"

  "What happened to the guys?"

  "Nothing."

  Ryan stood up fast and turned his back to me. He turned back around and held his hands up.

  "Doesn't it bother you that nothing happened to the guys who did this to you?"

  I stood up.

  "Yeah, it does bother me. The police did an investigation. They had no evidence and no witnesses. They said my testimony would be unreliable because of the brain injury I sustained during the incident."

  "The incident that never happened?" Ryan squeezed his eyes shut, opened them, and sat back down.

  I nodded and sat down, too.

  "Something did come out of the investigation. Robert's father, who is a state senator in California, came to visit me in Texas a few weeks after it happened. He basically offered me three million dollars to keep quiet. It was his son's trust fund. He was cutting him off. Tired of his son ruining his chances of becoming president one day."

  Ryan scoffed, but then he looked around at my place. I knew what he was thinking.

  "I told him about the book. I even let him read it. I told him if he promises not to block the publication, I would drop any claim now and in the future against his son and take the three million.

  "He agreed and paid the money."

  "And that's how you live like this?"

  "No." I shook my head. "I live like this because my novel was good. I had a unique story and am a talented writer, and my agent is a badass who sold it to the highest bidder."

  I raised my voice and didn't realize I was defending my choices when Ryan hadn't actually accused me of anything.

  Ryan nodded. It was his turn to stand up and get some distance. It was a lot to process.

  "I haven't spent the money," I explained.

  He turned around and stared at me.

  "It's been sitting in a trust for three years. I don't know what to do with it." I walked over to him. "That's not true. I do know what to do with it. But I want to do it myself, and it would require me doing a lot of stuff that I'm not ready to do yet."

  "What do you want to do with it?"

  "I want to start a foundation on my school's campus. Where women who are victims of rape can go and have people believe them. You’d think those resources are in place, but if they are, why did Dana feel like she had no options?"

  "Then you need to do it." Ryan reached for me.

  "I can't," I shook my head. He grabbed my hand and brought it to his lips.

  "Yes, you can." His eyes were full of emotion, but he blinked the tears away. "I mean look at how far you've come. You can do it."

  I wanted to believe him. After making so much progress, I had been knocked back a peg or two last night, and it was defeating. He couldn't understand. It had taken me this long to get here; it would take me longer to get to the point where I could put my vision into practice.

  Ryan pulled me up and walked us over to the couch. He sat down and pulled me onto his lap. He wrapped his arms around me and laid small kisses on my neck before whispering in my ear. "I'm sorry about what happened to you and to your friend."

  "Thank you. I'm sorry I didn't tell you sooner."

  "I wish you had, but I understand why you didn't." He kissed me on the li
ps, but it was soft and tentative like he was afraid to scare me. "I want to help you. I don't know what you're going through, but I think I understand how much of a step it was for you to let me in. If you can do that, then you can do so much more. I know you can."

  He pulled me closer. I settled in his arms. I wanted to believe him.

  "Well, work on it together." He said.

  I nodded my head. Ryan tilted my chin up and looked into my eyes. He laid another soft peck on my lips. When I tried to deepen the kiss, he pulled back and hugged me, instead.

  I tried not to read into.

  In the span of a week, I'd had an anxiety episode. Told the love of my life that I was an abuse victim and had a diagnosed psychosis, and to top it all off, the first game of his NFL career was looming at the end of the week.

  My life.

  I spent the week trying to regain my equilibrium and rebalance my meds. Ryan and I stopped talking to each other. He would offer me a daily report about his day like he was reading from a script. He would throw in a few updates regarding the weekend, the game, and his family’s visit all the while never asking me if I planned to attend. It was assumed.

  We stopped having sex, too.

  It was weird because I didn't realize it until a week later and it seemed my body missed it. That familiar soreness I enjoyed. I missed the way Ryan looked at me like he wanted to devour me. The playful, lust-filled, crass language he reserved for me was non-existent lately.

  Not that I didn't want to; I wanted him even more.

  Prior to my confession, Ryan and I couldn't get enough of each other. We were all over each other, and it didn't matter how tired he was or how much work I had to do, we always stopped for sex. Lately, neither of us even initiated it.

  Me out of fear of rejection and him, well, I didn't know why he didn't want to have sex. Maybe he just didn't want to have sex with me.

  He reacted so perfectly to my confession. He said the right things and asked the right questions. I didn't feel judged at the time, but the more he didn't look at me with the usual lust-filled eyes or grab me and hold me against him like he owned me screamed his feelings louder than if he had told me he didn't want me anymore.

  Ryan was exhausted after practice, and I tried to stay out of his way and under his radar, but it hurt. I didn't realize how much I craved his attention until he pulled away from me.

  I tried to talk to my therapist about it at our next session, but he was more concerned with other things.

  "It's good that your social circle is growing. Tell me how you feel, like having dinner with Ryan and his roommate."

  "I feel fine."

  "Fine?" He cocked his eyebrow.

  "I feel safe. My anxiety is under control."

  "Is it reduced or managed? We talked about this. There is a difference, and I need you to categorize them correctly in order for you to realize what different situations trigger different reactions."

  "Why, if they both allow me to live my life better? I mean, that's the goal, right?"

  "Well, yes and no."

  "You are particularly annoying today. Why?" I asked.

  He shook his head and wrote something in his notebook.

  "Okay, yes, in an ideal world, I would like to live free of anxiety."

  "Not free of anxiety. If we lived free of anxiety, then we wouldn't be the right amount of cautious. Take snakes, for instance. It's good to have a normal amount of anxiety about snakes, so you won't stick your hand in a trunk full of them, but not too much that you think snakes will attack you on the street."

  I recoiled from the description used for my benefit, no doubt, since he was well aware I hated snakes. "Are you okay with your profession and the manipulative tendencies it brings out in you?"

  "Leah, you are not going to out-intellectualize me today. I ate my Wheaties this morning."

  We both laughed, and I relaxed and settled back into the couch. "I know what you're going to say."

  "Can I say it anyway?"

  "Sure, go ahead."

  "I think you're using Ryan to control your anxiety. Like you would use medication or avoidance. It's just another crutch, and I don't think it will work out the way you think it will in the long run."

  "Why not?"

  "Because people are fallible. They don't act and react the way you want them to all the time. I mean, even now, things have changed, right?"

  "Yeah, but I think he just needs time to process it. It's a lot to take in."

  "You are making excuses for him, but is that the real reason? Have you asked him? Have you all talked about it again since you told him?"

  "Well, no. He asked me about starting the foundation and how he can help with that."

  "Again, avoidance. In his mind, you starting the foundation is something you have put off because you fear you won't be able to be as involved as you want to be at this time, while he sees it as the cure."

  "It's the result of the cure."

  My therapist shook his head. "It has nothing to do with your recovery. It's another crutch."

  "Ugh, well. Isn't you telling me I'm doing things wrong the same thing? You're trying to get me to behave a certain way."

  "Yeah, well, I have something that those other things don't."

  "What? That degree on the wall."

  "No. Two years of dealing with you." Dr. Brady slammed his notebook shut, stood up, and walked over to me. "Don't you see? You're putting a lot of faith in this man to be there for you. As long as you're around him, you feel safe. I want you to know that you are safe. I know. The world can be scary and bad things happen all the time, but you have the tools within in you to deal with what life throws at you in an acceptable way, and you don't have to rush in to do it for something or someone."

  I slouched into the couch and bit my lip. Dr. Brady was right.

  I hate it when he's right.

  "The game on Sunday, are you ready for that?"

  "No," I said. It was a relief to say it out loud.

  "Have you told him that?" Dr. Brady asked.

  "No." I was scared to tell Ryan.

  "Why?" Dr. Brady stared at me over the rim of his glasses. He always knew when I was about to lie and he knew I couldn't tell him a lie when he gave me that look.

  "I don't want him to be disappointed in me," I whispered.

  Dr. Brady continued to stare.

  "What?"

  He exhaled and shook his head. "I don't want you to be disappointed in yourself."

  I left my therapist’s office, my mind jumbled and in a bad mood. I usually left there feeling lighter and more at ease with myself, but so much was running through my mind. I needed to talk to Ryan.

  Twenty minutes later, I knocked on his door.

  I knew he would be home. He had practice in an hour.

  When he saw me, his face registered surprise, but he let me in. He leaned over and kissed me on the forehead. When I reached up for him, he had turned away.

  "You hungry?" He was heating up some of the pasta I had cooked for us the night before.

  "No. I'm good." I sat down at the table and waited for him to join me.

  "You okay?" He sat down with his bowl of pasta.

  "You know you ask me that a lot. Do I not look all right? Do I not act all right?"

  He stared like I had snakes coming out of my ears.

  "I'm sorry. I have a lot on my mind. I just left therapy."

  "Oh, yeah. How did it go?"

  "I can't go the game."

  "Okay," I said because I didn't know what else to say.

  Leah pouted and sat at the table. I sat across from her, shoving forks full of pasta in my mouth.

  "That's all you have to say?" She leaned towards me.

  I dropped my fork and looked her in the eyes.

  "Did your therapist tell you not to go?"

  "No. Of course, not." She sat back. "He's trying to help me get over my anxiety."

  "Okay." I stared at the plate of pasta. It was half-gone, and I hadn't tas
ted a bit.

  "Don't you want to know why?"

  "If you feel you need to tell me, then go ahead."

  "What does that mean?" She sat back, her arms crossed over her chest. Her jaw jutted out in a painful way.

  "It means I don't need to hear the reason why. It's not going to change anything, but if it will make you feel better to tell me, then go ahead."

  "You don't care why I can't go."

  "First of all, don't say you can't. You can, you choose not to go. There's a difference. And second, you can do anything you put your mind to, and again, you are choosing not to. If it's not important to you, you won't do it. I know that now."

  She stood up and walked over and knelt next to me. Her hands curled around the armrest. "Of course, it's important to me."

  I stared down at her, trying to read her, and I couldn't. Ever since she told me about what had happened to her in college, I couldn't see her the way I had before. On one hand, I couldn't believe she had the courage to go on. She was so much stronger than she gave herself credit for. I had my own feeling about the assholes who hurt her. Her anxiety manifested itself in ways I didn't understand. I didn't get the connection between being assaulted and locking yourself away from the world.

  I wasn't an expert on these things. I was in no position to criticize the way a person handled stuff. I knew from the look on her face that I was handling our situation wrong.

  I wasn't sure why.

  She reached out and touched my arm. "Why have we stopped having sex?"

  I glared at her, pushed the chair back, and stood up. The jolt of the chair caught her off balance, and she sat back on her heels.

  "What does that have to do with anything?"

  "Uh, everything. We haven't had sex since I told you. That was over a week ago, Ryan and I miss it. I miss you."

  I dumped the rest of my food into the sink. I watched it slide down the drain as I tried to keep the rest of my lunch in my stomach. I squeezed my eyes tight but opened them when it happened. I saw Leah in that space, those guys touching her. Her being pressed up against the wall. Her being bent over the chair. I flinched when she put her hand on my back. I didn't hear her approach, and her sudden closeness made my skin crawl. She reached out. Slid her hand over the waistband of my shorts and pulled me to her. My body reacted to her, my cock growing hard as she slid her hand inside of my shorts and grabbed me.