“It’s not raining outside.” Olivia’s gaze lingers on my footwear of choice. I glance at the window and then back at her for further explanation.
“Nooo, it’s not,” I say, as if she’s the crazy one here.
“You’re wearing gumboots,” she explains, setting her small tasteful clutch down on the kitchen bench and folding her cardigan over one of the high-backed stools. God damn do I want to wipe the bench with it, just to piss her prissy arse off.
“I know.”
“But it’s not raining.”
“It’s a political statement,” I bite out. There’s nothing political about me walking around in Sam’s boots at all. I just have a habit of putting on his shit when I find it lying around; I’ve done it since I was a kid. And no, the subconsciousness behind wearing his clothes doesn’t escape me now that I’m older. Now that I’m older, I revel in it. I’d rub myself all over him like a cat with its favourite catnippy treat if it meant I could smell like him—provided he didn’t have me committed for it.
Her brow creases. “I don’t follow.”
“You’re not supposed to.”
Sammy steps out of the bathroom in a cloud of billowing, aftershave-scented steam. His hair is wet and curling around the nape of his neck. My fingers itch to yank it. Hard. He wears a black button-up, rolled at the sleeves, and chinos. Fucking chinos. And what’s worse is he looks completely damn edible in his namby-pamby grown-up attire. I wanna punch him as much as I want to trip Olivia. Instead, I turn away and trudge back to the sink, practically throwing the dishes in it to drown out their chatter. I hear it anyway.
“Thanks for meeting me here. Sorry I’m late. I absolutely would have picked you up, but I had to stay back at the station.”
“It’s fine. I hope no one was hurt?”
Someone’s about to be. I scrub the Brillo pad against the dish I’ve been washing for the last five minutes, wishing it was her face I was removing instead of the food stains on Sam’s dishes.
“No. Everything was fine. I just had to file a couple of reports that couldn’t wait. You look gorgeous, by the way.”
Gorgeous? Sam never told me I looked gorgeous. Beautiful, yes. But not gorgeous. I wanna ask him what it means. I want to ask what the difference is, but I can’t at the risk of looking like a … crazy person. I take a deep breath and exhale slowly. Apparently it wasn’t as quiet as I thought, because Sam’s gentle grasp on my shoulder startles me.
“You okay?”
“Yeah. Why wouldn’t I be?” I reply tersely.
“I don’t know, you just seem jittery tonight.”
“Nope, just as awesome as ever. You kids have fun now,” I say, and stalk off toward the bathroom. Shutting the door quietly, I lean my weight back on it and close my eyes. After an eternity, in which Sam stands around in the loft, talking to his date, they leave and I catch my reflection in the mirror. My hair is thrown up in a bun, speared through with a plastic chopstick—and not a cute, kitschy hair one, either, I mean one of those cheap-arse, off-white numbers you find at every bad Chinese takeout—and it’s sticking out at all angles. My T-shirt is stained and so threadbare that upon closer inspection you can just make out the darker blush of my nipples. My shorts … well I already described those monstrosities. Sam’s dark green gumboots swallow over half of my short, stumpy legs, and I’m pretty sure I have chocolate ice cream on my face from when I attacked the pint while Sammy was taking a shower. I think back on Olivia’s perfectly put together sexy librarian outfit and want to die. I also want to stab someone.
Instead, I do what any idiotic girl in love with her flatmate does. I wipe away my tears, I exit the bathroom, and I make the shit out of some awesome cupcakes. Then I eat said cupcakes until my stomach aches as much as my heart. I take my time cleaning up, and once the dishes are done I scrub the bench until it sparkles, all except one spot: the stain that I can never seem to remove from the bench, no matter how hard I try. I scrub at it with a cloth, then I attack it with a scouring pad, but it does no good. It won’t come out. It won’t come out and I can’t stand the sight of it. I want it gone. I want it out. Panic unfurls inside me, rising in my chest like the vicious burn of bile. My heart races, my head is swimming, pounding, and I feel as though I can’t breathe. I’m sucking in air quicker than my lungs can filter it. I drop the scouring pad and yank out one kitchen drawer after another, tossing aside forks and butterknives, which are all far too small and blunt for my intended purpose.
Hot tears burn my cheeks; the tightness in my chest doesn’t abate. I finally locate a large kitchen knife and pull it out, blinking through my tears at the razor-sharp metal blade, and then I lean over and plunge it into the countertop, right above the stain. I dig and scrape and plunge with the knife over and over, until my hand, slick with sweat, slips on the blade.
White-hot pain sears through my palm and it all falls away. Sammy, my parents, the family, Stieg, my failure, my regrets, the longing that pours out of me every waking second for a man who doesn’t reciprocate my affections, or worse—one who reciprocates but denies what he feels for the sake of everyone else. All of it falls away for one brief second and I’m weightless. I’m free. I’m no longer screaming inside my head. I’m above it—beyond it. I’m free, and then I see Sam’s stricken face and it all crashes down upon me. More pressure than before, more squeezing, forcing me down again. Down into the blackness I’d escaped for just a few seconds, down into the void that swallows me, that suffocates me as if I were being lowered into a vat of hot tar, and it fills up my nose, it invades my eyes and my head, seeking out orifices with which to enter.
I’m suffocating from the inside.
THE DATE had been fine so far. Olivia is sweet, far better spoken than any of the women in my life. I knew her story; we’d gone to the same small school in the same small town we’d lived our entire lives in and she’d been only a year below me, so it wasn’t like she was a great mystery. Not like Pepper, who I’d spent more time with than anyone else walking the planet, and who was still as much a mystery to me now as the day Holly had birthed her in their lounge room.
The date had been perfect. Olivia had filled what would have been awkward silence with talk of people we knew, she laughed when I said something funny, she was outright gorgeous, but didn’t know it because she’d spent her adolescence as the “fat girl” and hadn’t learned yet to readjust her self-confidence to a level befitting her current hotness. I wish I could say I was the kind of guy who noticed her before she’d slimmed down and transformed into the beauty before me, but I wasn’t. Because I had only ever had eyes for a girl six years my junior, a girl I’d been told all my life to love and protect like my sister. I’d loved her alright, but any feeling of familial affection had nothing to do with it.
On paper Olivia was perfect for a guy like me, and she’d make some lucky bastard very happy one day, but if you can’t see sex in your future—much less a larger commitment before the entrée is even brought out—perfect date or not, it kinda feels like a waste of time. Time that I could have been spending with Pepper. She didn’t seem right when we left, and I would have given anything to not have to thrust Olivia in her face like that, but I just fell way behind at work. I don’t even know why I let Jake talk me into this, but he just kept pushing. I glance at my watch, surprised to find it’s only been an hour since we arrived, and yet we’ve already eaten, consumed a bottle of wine, and refused dessert.
“If you have to go, I understand,” Olivia says, placing her small, delicate hand over my forearm.
Shit. I am a fucking grade-A arsehole.
“I’m sorry,” I mutter, polishing off the rest of my wine. “I had a really rough week at work, and a very early start tomorrow.”
“I completely understand. I don’t know how you do it. Going into fight fires? Saving people? There are not a lot of men who could do what you do.”
“I don’t know … I guess it just kinda comes naturally to me.” I shrug, putting the remains of a pape
r napkin I’ve been tearing into pieces in a pile near my glass. “Helping others is what I’ve always done.”
“Is that what you’re doing with Pepper?” she asks tentatively. “Saving her?”
I let out a very long sigh, wondering whether she’s just overly perceptive or whether she had heard the rumours that circulated after Pepper was hospitalised as a teen. “I guess that remains to be seen. Sometimes I think I hinder her more than help.” I shake my head and glance around, signalling for a waiter to bring the cheque. “It’s complicated.”
“I can see that,” Olivia says, and fuck me, if she doesn’t sound like a dejected kid. I am an arsehole of epic proportions. I never should have agreed to this date. I don’t know what I was thinking, beyond wanting to get the mental image of Pepper taking my cock between her perfect ruby lips out of my head. For a half second I’d swapped that image with Olivia and it seemed like a good fit. I’d said yes, and then I’d headed home, locked myself in the bathroom and jacked off while I imagined Pepper on her knees before me. I couldn’t cancel on Olivia. That would be worse than speeding my way through a date with an attractive woman that, try as I might, I had absolutely no sexual interest in.
Maybe this is worse.
Hell if I know. All I know is I feel like shit, and I want out of here as quickly as possible. I hadn’t even sprung for a real date and taken her somewhere nice. Instead, we’d left the loft and wandered two doors down to Nut ‘n’ Sweeter, a restaurant that Aunt Kristine and Michael had owned, but that had since turned to shit once they’d sold and the new owners had taken over. From the looks of this place—with their tiny servings of crappy food, and the stained tablecloths that probably haven’t been changed in a month—they’re just seconds away from foreclosure.
I pay the bill and hurry out into the balmy summer night. I can’t shake this feeling like something is wrong. There’s this sense of urgency that’s crushing my chest like a lead weight. I stop walking when we reach Olivia’s car, parked out the front of Belle’s.
“Well, I had a great night,” I say, attempting to ignore the dejection written all over Olivia’s pretty features. It doesn’t work, but at this point I figure I’ve come this far—why pretend to be anything less than an arsehole now? “Will you be okay to drive home?”
“Of course. Thank you for dinner.” She smiles, and then pauses with her hand on the car door. “Oh, you know what? I think I left my cardigan inside.”
“Okay. You wanna come up and get it?” I ask, annoyed, because all I really wanna do is take off these fucking clothes, change into my favourite pair of worn jeans and chill out on the couch with Pepper.
“If you don’t mind?”
I shake my head and unlock the metal grate, trudging up the stairs with her heels softly clicking the wooden floors behind me. I shove the keys in the lock, probably more forcefully than I need to and push open the door.
My heart stops and I’m instantly taken back to the day I found Pepper on her bed, carving up her own skin. Only now her hands are bleeding instead of her legs, and she’s carving up my kitchen counter.
“Fuck.” I race over to her side, and carefully ease the blood–slick knife from her hands. “Little, what did you do?”
“I have to get it out. Why won’t it come out, Sammy? Why won’t it come out?” She has that glazed over look in her eyes that comes on with her full-blown panic attacks, mascara stains her cheeks from her tears, and I cradle her face in my hands and smear my thumbs over her skin in an effort to get her to focus on me. She claws at my shirt, pulling me closer. My heart races, my chest squeezes painfully, and I’m filled with dread. I grasp her wrists, feeling for cuts, wounds, anything. Her skin is smooth, slick with blood, but unharmed.
“Look at me, baby,” I say, cupping her face in my hands again. Now her pale cheeks are wet with tears and smeared with blood. She’s muttering softly, staring at my chest, but seeing straight through me. I jerk her head up. “Where are you hurt?”
She blinks in response. Her pupils are dilated. The whites of her eyes are bloodshot, and her skin is clammy and pallid. She stares blankly down at the blood covering her hands and then with a panicked expression her gaze shoots back to mine and it’s full of questions.
“Sammy?” she whispers, sounding so much like the panicked kid I rescued time and time again.
“I got you, Little,” I say resolutely, stroking her cheek with my thumb. “I need you to focus. Where does it hurt?”
Her wide doe-eyed gaze meets mine, and she shakes her head. “I don’t. Everywhere. It hurts everywhere,” she whispers, before holding up a trembling hand. “My hand. I cut my hand.”
“Okay, let me take a look.”
She shakes her head. “The spot.”
“Forget about the spot. I’m gonna remove the countertop tomorrow, okay? We’ll get rid of the spot.”
She shakes her head profusely. “I have to get it out. Have to get—”
“Pepper, you’re hurt, baby. Forget the spot,” I plead. “We need to find your pills, okay?”
She nods, but even as she does it her head turns a fraction of an inch toward the counter. I grab her chin between my thumb and forefinger and hold it tight. “Where are the pills?”
“I don’t—”
“Where?”
“Do you need me to call someone?” Olivia asks. “Does she have a doctor? Or I could call an ambulance?”
I freeze. Pepper stills and stops breathing. I’d forgotten all about Olivia the second I’d seen Pepper covered in blood and hacking away at my kitchen counter. I don’t want her to see Pepper like this. I don’t want anyone to see Pepper like this, much less a stranger. She wouldn’t understand.
“You should go.”
“I don’t mind helping, Sam. It’s no—”
“We don’t need help.” I say grabbing her cardigan from off of the chair and throwing it at her. It’s stained with blood. “Get your shit and go.”
Olivia’s breath catches. I sigh. The last thing I wanted to do was hurt her. It wasn’t fair to use her to escape my feelings for Pepper, but I don’t want her here to witness this all the same.
Her heels tap across the floorboards as she hurries through the door, slamming it with a definite bang that fills the quiet apartment. Pepper flinches. I scoop her into my arms and carry her into the bathroom where I sit her down on the toilet seat and hand her a couple of pills from the bottle in the cabinet along with a glass of water. Then I clean up her hand, relieved she doesn’t need stitches because I have no intention of taking her to a hospital tonight. They’d take one look at her and her history of mental health and put her into psych evaluation. That shit nearly killed her the last time. She insists she hadn’t been trying to kill herself the day I found her cutting, but she’d told me that the psych evaluation and the endless therapy sessions almost made her wish she had succeeded in everything they said she had tried to do.
“Come on,” I say, scooping her up. “Time to get you to bed.”
“I thought you’d never ask,” she murmurs, sleepily. I carry her to bed, laying her down against the soft comforter. I slip my hand out from beneath her, but she catches it up and squeezes my forearm with weak fingers. “Don’t leave me Sammy.”
I ease myself onto the bed behind her. She’s weightless as a ragdoll when I roll her small body onto her side and wrap myself around her. I close my eyes and breathe her in. Though I hate this disease that fucks with her head, that twists her up inside and turns all her thoughts upside-down, I revel in it also, because it makes moments like this possible. Moments when she’s so vulnerable that all she sees is me, her safe harbour, her saviour. I know that makes me sound like a douche, and believe me if there were some magic pill she could take to make it all go away, I’d be the first to advocate that shit, even if it meant she no longer had a use for me in her life. I’d pay that price to make her better. But a part of me hopes she’ll always need me, because if she has no use for me, if she cut me out of her life entirely
, that’s something I just couldn’t live through again.
I kiss the top of her head and wrap her tightly in my arms, whispering, “I’ve got you, Little. I’m right here. Right where I’ve always been.”
Six years ago
I LEFT school after the first period. I refuse to let anyone see me cry, much less that arsehole Luke. Even as I trudged across the brittle winter grass lining people’s front lawns on my way home, I refused to cry. I save that for when I’m by myself, so no one will see how pathetic I am. I save that for the mirror, and the razor, and the burn and sting of my flesh afterwards. I save tears for when I’m truly alone. No one gets to see them but me. It’s my private hell, and I’m the only one with a front row seat.
I stare into my reflection, daring her to say something, daring her to stop me, daring her to pick up the blade. An old Slipknot song, “Wait and Bleed”, blares out from my iPod dock. I think about Coop and how he’d react if he knew what I did in the quiet privacy of my bedroom. He’d likely pitch a fucking fit. Holly would have kittens, that’s for sure. But I don’t intend for anyone to find out. This isn’t a suicide attempt, and it’s not a cry for help; it’s a release of the hurt, of their words and the cruelty, the pain and the slut shaming. I giggle at that last thought. Hard to be a slut when you’re saving yourself for a dude who looks at you like his little sister. I take a long pull from the bottle of Bundy rum I stole from the liquor cabinet—my parents really need to start locking that shit up—and finger the blade. It immediately slices through the skin on my index finger, though it’s shallow and not deep enough to bleed. Not deep enough to feel.
I don’t normally drink and cut, but today I feel as though I need the haziness the alcohol brings in order to cope. I take another hard swig and sit on the end of my bed in a T-shirt and underwear. I look into the mirror, and the floodgates burst. Tears burn my cheeks, I take the blade to my thigh, careful to line up the cut with my previous scars, and I push down. Pain. Burning, stinging, searing pain as I press the blade a little deeper, slide it across my skin a fraction longer, and then the first wave of nothingness rolls over me and it feels as if the planets have aligned and everything is as it should be.
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