Even my PTSD is too tired.
Hatley slumps into the chair at the ring-lidden table, the dark circles around his eyes cast down as he traces the water spots with a finger.
“Tristen?”
Emmett’s voice is too soft as he says my name, and a prickling runs up the back of my neck.
“Yeah?”
“I didn’t know … just—here.”
He shoves a plate in my direction when I face him, his hair hiding him from me, and my chest splits wide open.
“Toast?” I ask and it cracks. “T-thank you.”
He peeks at me through lashes that are a darker shade than his hair, his cheeks turning pink.
And I swear, the urge to press my lips to his forehead is so strong, I almost lean in and do it. If he didn’t hate being touched, I probably would have.
Instead, I eat every bite of the almost-burned toast.
Chapter 20
Emmett
The man that walkedinto my hospital room, clad in his leather jacket and armed with the ability to calm a complete stranger, is not the same one that’s sitting next to me now.
His knee bounces. His gaze only leaves Hatley to glance at the host in the front as he drones on about finding God and reaching out for help.
That he’s glad we all chose to come here tonight.
Tristen’s been picking at his nails, running the one on his thumb beneath the others, and jerking at every scrape of a chair leg on the cracked tile floor. Jolting at every creaking seat and sudden sneeze.
The body of the moth tattoo on his throat bobs with his swallows, drawing my sight repeatedly to the way the insect dances on his skin.
I try to focus. To listen for the message in the speaker’s words. To hear anything other than the repetition of my own voice admitting shit in my head I had no business saying out loud to anyone else.
Tristen’s only the second person I’ve ever told.
I’d wholly expected him to kick me out of Hat’s bed, tell me to leave his house, and never come back.
And when he didn’t?
When he made a joke instead? Then invited me to stay every night since …
It made me want to never tell another soul ever again.
Swallowing hard, I turn back to the front, just as the speaker is asking for anyone with weight on their chest to step up.
A Janet takes his place. Tells us that she’s thirty days sober, even though she looks the exact opposite. She talks of kids she hopes to see one day. That it was a boyfriend that got her hooked and left her to die.
It makes my stomach pinch.
Richard replaces her and says that it was money that drove him to drink. That he would have never ended up like his father if he’d just walked away before the greed set in.
That pinch becomes an ache as face after face stands in front of the crowd and admits their faults in a room full of strangers. How mothers abandoned children to chase the high. Brothers become only children and still used.
And yet, they chose to try and make it better. To stop doing the things that made them numb to the life that moved on around them. That begged them to come along.
