by Heart,Skylar
But Hunter… Hunter looks at me, at my body, in a totally different way. He doesn’t see a medical condition, he sees a woman. He doesn’t touch me functionally, he touches me adoringly, like I matter to him not because I need to be fixed, but just for existing. His touches heat up my skin, make me feel things I’ve never felt before. He’s not afraid to touch me, to reach out and let me know that I exist. That there is more to my body than a bag of bones, insides and flesh, blood and gore. I’m a human, a whole human, a woman, someone who is worth adoring.
And the things that Hunter makes me feel just by being near, letting me touch him, just by existing. There are even more things that I’ve learned about myself, about my body, when he isn’t even around. I can be aroused, that is a word that I never associated with myself. Arousal. Excitement. Orgasms.
Orgasms were for porn and people who actually deserved them. Not for fuck-ups like me. I never even understood what was so amazing about it, about having other people touch me, about someone… about having someone inside of me. I never understood people’s obsession with sex. It was something I did because that is what people expected of me, like so much in my life. Like so many other things I pretended to understand. People couldn’t complain when I met their expectations. So I did things that they liked, because that is what they wanted from me, even if I didn’t like them, or was indifferent about them.
But Hunter… I want him, when I’m near him I long for him. New words. Longing. Desire. Pleasure. All things I’m feeling for the first time.
I nearly jump out of my skin when someone knocks on the door. “Yeah?” I rush to get dressed.
“Rose can see you now.” Janine doesn’t open the door. At least I’ve got some privacy, which is totally ironic here.
“I’ll be out in a minute.” I pull on my shirt and then pull on the socks. I grab my notebook and my diary and step out the door.
Janine looks at me weirdly. “You’re blushing.”
“Oh.” I’m not sure what else to say. I feel like a little kid who has been caught with her hand in the cookie jar. With so little privacy, what was I even thinking? Well… Naughty things, to be honest. I was thinking naughty things.
“How do you think you’re doing?” Rose sits down on the other end of the desk as I sit down, fiddling with a pen between my fingers.
“Pretty good?” I was so sure about it this morning, but the look in Rose’s eyes makes me doubt it.
“Yeah? Why do you think so?”
“Because I’ve not been cheating and I’ve been following everything that you told me to do.” I’ve been good, that’s why I know.
“Good. Well, true, there is improvement, but I’m not happy about all of it. There are a couple of things that worry me. One of it is that it seems to be going a little too well.” She frowns and I flex my fists, nearly breaking the pen I’m holding.
“Because I never wanted to go here. I told my parents that I’d be able to do this on my own. I was doing okay.”
“You lost weight.”
“I was careless.”
“Careless… Interesting choice. How were you careless?” I don’t like the intonation that she’s using. Like she’s trying to catch me in a lie. Like she expects me to admit to fudging and then being caught.
“Not eating is so much easier. I just… I was so caught up with everything going on that I missed a couple of meals.” And as soon as that started… It all got so much easier.
“A couple of meals doesn’t make you lose four pounds in a month.”
I’ve not been lying, I’ve been trying to be good. Why the interrogation? I close my mouth and try not to cry or burst out in anger. I don’t know how it happened, I just know that I never wanted it to happen.
“Lizzy, if you want to get better, you need to be honest.”
“I am.” Tears start tumbling down my cheeks. “I am.”
Rose stays silent for a while, each with our own thoughts. Then she moves. “How is your eating schedule going?”
I shrug. “Fine, I guess.” It’s very similar to what I eat back home, I wasn’t skipping on my main meals, it was just the snacks that were throwing me off. At first anyway.
“You need me to change anything?”
I shake my head.
“So, you’re okay with me switching out a couple of things, try new things?”
I nod. Why not? It’s not like I have much of a choice anyway. “I… Can I go?”
“Sure.” Rose nods. Then she stands up. “You need to tell me if something is wrong. Is it too much?”
“No.” My voice is harder than I mean for it to be. “I made a mistake. I know that. But I don’t want to be here, I want to be at home, with my friends, live a normal life. How is progress a bad thing? How can me getting better faster than expected be a bad thing? For the first time, I have a life. Sure, maybe the life-health balance was a bit off. But I didn’t need to be locked up. I could have recovered at home, I didn’t have to be ripped away from all that.” I storm out of the room, blindly going for the doors to the balcony. I need fresh air, now.
But no matter how hard I push at the doors, they won’t budge. I slide down, my back to the doors as I fold in on myself, the tears not stopping. How did I deserve this?
I’m not sure how long I’m sitting here, but a pair of shiny black shoes stop in front of me. “Lizzy?” Dr Cole’s voice is quiet, careful. “I think it’s time for us to talk.”
I nod and push myself up against the doors, the world spinning for a moment and I know I’ve been stupid. “Can we sit outside?” I hand Dr Cole my diary, so he can check it.
“I’ll open the window in my office, okay? Maybe next time we can sit outside.” He walks next to me as we go to his office. I want to tell him that I want to go out there, now. I need the fresh air, the feeling of freedom, even if it’s just on a balcony. Dr Cole opens the door to his office and I follow him inside. “You want to sit at the window?”
I look up, at the small fields at the sides of the hospital. I’m not sure that sitting there would make me much happier. “I’ll stand.” I open the window. It’s cold. I’d forgotten that it’s the end of October now. Dammit, how fast the temperature drops. When I met Hunter for the first time, it was insanely hot, and now it’s already cold, maybe even too cold to go outside without a jacket. I stare out the window for a while, looking at the people walking past, as Dr Cole reads through my entries from the last couple of days.
He looks up. “Can you close the window? It’s getting really cold.”
I nod and close the window before I sit down in a chair, pulling my legs up under me and pushing my hands into my lap, trying to warm my stiff fingers back up. Some people say that Dr Cole is scary, too imposing, but I don’t see it. He’s kind and seems to really want to understand what is going on.
“So, you had a bit of a breakdown at Rose’s office?”
I shrug.
“Can you talk about it? Do you want to talk about it?” He pulls his own notebook onto his lap and holds his pen. He likes writing with fountain pens, he’s the only psych that I know who does that. He also doesn’t use black or blue ink but always things like green or red or purple. It’s… I don’t know, I guess that it’s one of his quirks.
“I try really hard to get better. But she thinks it’s wrong. That I’m getting better too easily.” The tears start again and the words just won’t come out.
“Are you? Is it too easy?”
I shake my head. “I just don’t want to be here.”
“Nobody wants to be here.” He sounds so sure, but I’m not that sure, not with some of the girls I’ve seen.
“I don’t…” I stop myself. It sounds really stupid, but I need to say it anyway. “I don’t belong here. Not this time.”
“Don’t you say that every time you’re here?” Dr Cole moves and I look up. “You lost a significant amount of weight, you were ill and you’d hurt yourself. That pretty much sums up that you do belong here.”
�
��But I… I didn’t hurt myself on purpose. That was…” What was it? Instinct? Self-protection?
“Then tell me about that night.”
The one thing I’ve been refusing, the one thing that people keep asking me. To tell them about what happened that day at Hunter’s. I shake my head.
“Lizzy… We can’t make progress like this. We can only work with the facts we have if you don’t give us more information.”
I don’t want to remember. I don’t want to remember the crazed look in Hunter’s eyes, the loud noises, the way he destroyed everything he could get his hands on. And then the blood on his hands, the scratches and bruises.
“Lizzy. There is something going on in your head. Share it. Tell me why we’re interpreting things wrong.”
I don’t even know where to start. What part is the most important?
“This dream from last night. Hunter is protecting you against himself. Is that what happened?”
I shake my head.
“Did he hurt you?”
“No. Never.” Never physically. The pain is all mine and my messed-up brain.
“Did he hurt someone else?”
“Himself.” I don’t mean to say it, but now it’s out. The dam broken. “He went crazy. I asked him something and he just flipped. He started throwing things.” I only remember bits and pieces of this part. “I had a panic attack.”
“He got mad because you asked something?” It’s a reasonable conclusion, but it’s not right, right?
“No. He… It wasn’t my fault. He had… a bad flashback.” Right? I’m not so sure any more. He didn’t want to hurt me. Damn, the look in his eyes when he realized what had happened. I’d never seen him look like that. He was scared. Scared of himself in a way that I can totally relate to, even if he doesn’t know that.
“A bad flashback?”
“He lost his girlfriend last year. A motorbike accident. He was there with her. They’d been together for years. He… He was about to propose to her.”
“Are you sure you’re not making the same mistake as with Dennis or other guys?” I’ve told Dr. Cole about that before—anything to avoid talking about Hunter, anything to avoid talking about the last couple of weeks.
I shake my head. “No. I…” I what? Actually love him? I want him? I’m in lust with him? How can I even explain how I just know that this is different? How I know that Hunter is actually a good guy? “I wish I could explain it.” My voice drops to just above a whisper. How can I explain that no matter how much I want him, how much I can’t stop thinking about him, I just know that I can’t have him? That his darkness will only make mine worse?
“Do you want him to touch you, embrace you?”
I nod. I long to be in his arms right now. Make everything bad go away, just for a little while. Even though, right after his outburst, I couldn’t stand for him to touch me again, but at the same time, I wanted him to hold me and tell me things would be okay.
“That is the first time ever, right?” His voice is soft and as I look up at him, maybe he does understand. Maybe my brain isn’t as insane as I think it is.
I nod again.
“Up until now, only Lola has been allowed to touch you.”
“Some—”
“No, let me rephrase. She was the only one who you wanted to be physically close to.”
“Yes.” I miss her. Every night, I miss her.
“And now Hunter.”
“Yes.”
“I think… I do think that is quite a change.” He writes something down. “I’m going to ask this, and you don’t need to answer if you don’t want to. Yeah?”
I swallow hard, but still nod.
“Do you want to be intimate with him? Do you have an urge to do that?”
Do I? From the moment that I laid my eyes on Hunter, I knew that I wanted to touch him. Sure, there is a certain artistic quality about him, but that is not where my mind went. The first time I saw him, somewhere in my brain, for the first time, hormones released that would change everything. I was suddenly aware of someone in a sexual way. “Yes.” And it’s not just an urge. “I have.” I can feel my skin heat up.
“You have been intimate with him?” I can hear the surprise in Dr. Cole’s voice, because I don’t dare to look at him right now.
“Yes.”
“Willingly?”
“Very.”
“I’m now going to ask a really stupid question, to you anyway. But it’s important. How did that interact with your eating disorder? With how you perceive yourself?”
“I—” I don’t know. I guess I’ve looked at myself differently recently. “I don’t hate my body as much, I think. I’m still trying to process that. On the one hand, there is still the issue and the eating disorder hasn’t gone away, but on the other hand, I look at myself differently and no longer in a bad way.”
“Okay. Good. Honest.” He takes a deep breath. “I think that you would really be helped with some more help from here. Guidance. Rose and I have talked about what would be an achievable goal, and I think that we’ll keep to that for now. I also think that we should keep meeting.” I’m about to groan. “But I also think you should get more privileges. I can understand that with everything going on, you were in a situation that you hadn’t been in before. And that messed things up. We’ll get you used to a new normal and I think that you may be helped with some other therapy too. Take the help, get better and you shouldn’t have to be an in-patient much longer. Does that sound good?”
Does it sound good? It sounds like the best thing ever. Finally someone who believes that I wasn’t doing this on purpose, finally someone who understands that I wanted to get better, not worse. “So… those privileges?”
Chapter 24
Hunter
I can’t do this. I stand in front of the cemetery where Tessa is buried. It’s been nearly a year and I’ve still not visited her grave. I don’t belong here. It was my fault and I don’t deserve to visit her. I don’t deserve it. I turn back around and walk around the borders of the cemetery. I’ve come here a couple of times, but I’ve never been inside. I just couldn’t. I wish that maybe, at some point, I can do it. But today is once again not the day.
I grab my bus pass and get to the nearest bus stop. I thought that I could do it this time, but I still can’t. And for the first time, it only makes me sad. I’ve lost my anger the night that I burst out in front of Lizzy. It’s weird. For a long time, I’ve carried this anger inside me. This anger that was eating me up inside and making me do stupid things. But now… The anger is gone, and there is only sadness. Sadness and pain. How did that happen?
The bus arrives and I step on, taking a seat close to the door. I stare out the window, not seeing what is going on, only seeing Lizzy in my mind’s eye. It’s been a month since I last saw her, since I last talked to her. I know that Lola has had some contact with her, but I don’t want to keep bothering Lola and it’s not like we’re friends like that anymore. She saw the damage I’d done to my studio and I knew that whatever friendship was rebuilding between us, that was gone. She’ll probably never trust me again.
I’m so focused inside my head that I don’t realize new people have stepped on the bus until a voice calls out to me. “H.” Lola.
I look up and there she is, standing in the aisle. “Hey.”
Then Lizzy steps from behind her, staring at me, her eyes big. And I think I must look the same. She’s different. She looks so much better—she looks healthy. Lizzy inclines her head at me and then breaks eye contact.
“Hey.” I feel silly for repeating the greeting. Just her being here, standing there, it makes me very aware of myself. “I didn’t realize you’d come over this weekend.”
Lizzy nods.
Well, so much for having conversations…
“We’re on our way to the mall.” Lola moves Lizzy so she’s sitting in the seat next to me, also at the door. “What are you up to?”
I shrug. “Going home.”
“Do you want to join us?”
“Lola.” Lizzy speaks up, frowning.
“Hey, he’s welcome to join us. I don’t think that the doctor said that we couldn’t have someone else join us too.”
“But I wanted to spend time with you.” Lizzy leans away from me.
I sigh. “I’m good. I’ll just go home.”
“No.” Lola crosses her arms in front of her. “We’re not doing this. Lizzy, you can’t keep avoiding him. He was worried too.” She looks up at me. “H. Don’t pretend like you don’t know us just because Lizzy is being difficult.”
Lizzy and I both nod. How did Lola get in control of us?
“Is there a place you want to go?” I turn to them more and Lizzy relaxes some. I reach out slightly, touching Lizzy’s hand with my fingers. She stretches her hand and then weaves her fingers through mine. And holds on tight. Touching her releases the tension I’ve been feeling for the last weeks, knowing that no matter what happened… We’re still okay.
“I was just thinking the mall, I didn’t have a place in mind. Lizzy has to be back at the clinic before dinner.” Lola now moves and sits in the seat behind us.
“Well, that gives us a couple of hours, right? Don’t your parents want to see you too?” If she’s finally let out of the clinic for a day, why would she not spend it with them?
“It’s just Lola and me today.” Lizzy shrugs. “Our parents come by the clinic every couple of days. I just really needed to be out of there.”
“And she’s in desperate need of art supplies and clothes.” Lola chimes in.
I meet Lizzy’s eyes and I can see how she’s calmed down a little, not as nervous about me joining them.
“I can help with that. Both of them.” I grin and Lizzy squeezes my fingers, hard.
“Hunter.” She stage-whispers at me as she turns a pretty shade of pink.
“Oh, this I haven’t heard yet.” Lola leans forward. “What about clothes and Hunter?”
