Depression.
Acceptance.
The five stages of grief. The Army shrink had explained them in detail to me during the two mandatory visits after my surgery. He’d been factual about it, not forcing me to be emotional, and so I’d taken his pamphlet and nodded as if I agreed. I’d shoved the paper into a drawer and had never looked at it again. Except my brain had somehow remembered it anyway.
“The next stage is bargaining,” I said softly.
Nash frowned. “What?”
“Denial, anger, bargaining. I’ve clearly been pissed off ever since it happened, as evidenced by everything I’ve done in the last few months, so I guess I need to move on to bargaining.”
Understanding dawned on Nash’s face. “Nah, you can skip straight to acceptance. They’re not linear.”
“Thank fuck for that because if I have to deal with depression on top of everything else, I’ll go insane.”
“Creek…” Nash took my hand and wrapped his two big hands around it. “You need to talk to someone.”
“I’m talking to you, aren’t I?”
He shook his head. “Don’t get cute with me. First of all, I’m not a therapist, and second, the only reason you’re sitting here and allowing me to talk to you is because you fucked up and figured you needed a good scolding. Which we’ll get to, by the way, so don’t think I’ve forgotten.”
Crap. I kinda hoped he had. “You know I’m not a talker.”
“I don’t care. Make yourself one. It’s either that or you will have to deal with that phase of depression, and it’ll hit hard. I don’t want to have to worry about you jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge, you feel me?”
I did. The visual made my mouth bitter, mostly because of how not far-fetched it seemed. “Yeah.”
“I’m gonna give you a week to get your shit together and make an appointment with a therapist.”
Shit. “Yes, Top.”
“Let’s move on to the scolding part.”
I managed to hold back the sigh that would’ve undoubtedly set Nash off. He’d reached the end of his patience with me, and I had learned the hard way to take those signals seriously. “I know I did him wrong, and I’ll apologize to him, I swear.”
“See that you do. Today.”
“Today?”
“Trust me when I say it’s gonna mean a hundred times more today than it will tomorrow.”
“But I don’t have his…” I swallowed the rest of my sentence. “Yes, Top. I’ll find him.”
“Let me know how it went.”
Nash got up and, after putting his hand on my shoulder for a brief moment, left the kitchen. The weight of his disappointment was heavy, and I grabbed my phone and dialed Kent’s number.
“You’re about the last person I want to talk to right now,” were his opening words, and my stomach sank.
“I take it Heath talked to you.”
“He did.”
Oh, he was pulling a Nash on me, wasn’t he? Rather than railing at me, he was using silence. I swear to god, it was a hundred times more effective. Anger I could deal with, but disappointment not so much. “I know I fucked up. Badly. I shouldn’t have kissed him and…” I sighed. “All of it was wrong, and I want to apologize to him.”
“That’s gonna be hard, considering he’s requested to no longer be scheduled at the same time as you.”
“He was that upset?”
