“I can’t…I can’t…” I’m running, now. Out of his room, into the kitchen.
It’s drink or cut. He’s bringing it all up, forcing all the shit I’ve buried to the surface. He knows it and he’s doing it on purpose.
I’ve kept it all down for so long, and whenever it threatened to come up, come out, I’d drink until it settled back down, or I’d cut and bleed it out rather than feel it, rather than cry or scream or be angry.
I know he has whiskey somewhere, but I can’t find it. It’s not in the fridge, and I can’t reach high enough to look in the cupboard above the fridge where I know it must be. I climb on the counter, reach for it, and lose my balance. I fall, slamming hard into the floor, and the breath is knocked out of me.
It’s coming up. It came up when he forced me into tears, when he made me admit I killed Kyle. The guilt came up and out, and that hurt, like knives shredding my heart.
This?
This is the grief. The loss. The knowledge that Kyle is gone. Of course he’s gone, I’ve known that. But this is the grief. The hurt. The loneliness. It’s worse than the guilt. I always knew the guilt was wrong and misplaced. The guilt I can’t justify away, can’t shift or explain or bury any longer.
I’m fighting sobs, fighting the clenching in my stomach and heart.
No.
No.
I won’t let it out.
He forced out the guilt. He can’t force out the grief. I don’t want it. It’s too much. It’ll shred me.
A drawer slams open, silverware rattles. I’m not aware of moving, but it’s me digging in the drawer for a knife. Let him be mad. I don’t care. I hear his feet stomping, now. He’d been giving me space to calm down I guess, but now he knows what I’m doing.
He’s too late.
The pain is a blessed relief. I watch in guilty satisfaction as a thin line of red wells up on my forearm. The knife wasn’t very sharp, so I had to press. It’s a deep cut.
“What the f**k?” Colton, wearing shorts, rushing at me, angry, scared. “Nell…what the f**k?”
I don’t bother answering. I’m dizzy. Bleeding. I look down and see the spreading red, and it’s too much. I cut deep. Too deep. Good. The grief slides away and slicks across the scratched laminate floor.
I’m in his arms, and there’s pressure around my arm. A white towel, turning pink-to-crimson. He’s squeezing my arm so hard it hurts past the cut-pain. The towel is wrapped around my arm, and then a belt cinched tight.
I’m between his knees, my back to his front. I feel his hard chest and his frantic, panting breath, his arms around my shoulders. He’s holding the belt in one hand, my wrist in the other. His face is pressed to the top of my head. His breath huffs loud in my ear, on my hair.
“Goddamn it, Nell. Why?”
I find my voice. The hurt in his words is palpable, as if I’d cut him rather than myself, and I want to soothe it. Odd. I want to soothe his pain, the hurt over my cut.
“I can’t take it,” I whisper, because a whisper is all I can manage. “It’s too much. He’s gone, and he’s not coming back. My fault or not…he’s gone. He’s dead. He’s bones in a wood box, a fading memory. Nothing stops that pain. Not even time.”
“I know.”
“You don’t.” The last word is growled, rabid. “You weren’t there. You’re not in my head. You don’t know.”
“He was my baby brother, Nell.” His voice sounds almost as broken as mine.
“But…you left when we were eleven. You never even came back to visit.” That was something that Kyle and I never talked about, but I knew it confused him, hurt him. His parents wouldn’t talk about Colton.
“Yeah, well…I didn’t have much choice. I was barely surviving. I missed him every single day. I wrote a thousand letters to him in my head while I tried to fall asleep on park benches and in boxes in alleys, covered in newspapers. A thousand letters I’d never be able to write, couldn’t write. I couldn’t afford food or shelter, much less a bus ticket back to Detroit.”
Something in what he said strikes me as odd, but I’m dizzy and weak and foggy and can’t place what.
He lets go the pressure of the makeshift tourniquet, gingerly lifts the towel away. Blood seeps out slowly, but sluggishly. I’m lifted and carried, and I let my head flop against his broad chest. He sets me on the bed, vanishes, comes back with a roll of gauze, medical tape, and a tube of Neosporin.
“You probably should have stitches,” he says, folding a bandage and placing it over the cut and rolling gauze tightly around my arm. “But I know you won’t get them. So this’ll have to work.”
“How do you know I won’t?” I ask.
“Will you?”
“Hell no. But how’d you know?” I watch as he tapes the edges down.
“I wouldn’t have, if it were me. There’d be questions and social services and psychologists and the psych ward. Worst of all, they’d call your parents.” He put two fingers beneath my chin, a thumb along my jaw. “Which is what you’ll get if this shit happens again. I’ll rush you to the f**king ER and I’ll call your goddamn parents myself, like I should this time, but won’t.”
“Why not?” I whisper.
“Because they’d get it all wrong. It’s not a cry for attention or any of that psychobabble bullshit.” He tips his forehead to touch mine. “Because I can help you, if you’ll let me. We can get you through this.”
We? Shit. Shit. My eyes still and my lip trembles and my chest heaves. My instinct is to cause pain to stop the tears. Colton knows this by now, gathers me close and holds me against his chest. He’s determined to do this, to be all supportive and loving. Which is exactly what I’ve always been terrified of admitting I want so so badly. Except he’s tenacious about not letting me hide or lie or retreat or pretend, and he knows all my tricks.
“Let…it…go,” he whispers, his voice a fierce, harsh sound in my hair.
“No. No!” The last word is screamed.
“You have to. You can’t bleed it out. You can’t keep pretending, drinking it down.”
A shudder, a tremble, my teeth clamping down on my lower lip. My fingers claw into the hard slab of muscle that is his pectoral. I’m not sobbing. I’m not.
Goddamnit, yes I am.
“It hurts so f**king bad, Colton…” the words are nearly lost in a sea of choking sobs and shuddering, body-wracking gasps for breath. “I want him back! I don’t want to watch him die anymore.”