Wishful thinking got me nowhere, though. Micah was still a statue in the hallway, and I was still tired, hungry, and craving his affection.
I toed my shoes off and made a grab for his hand. “Come on. Let’s have supper.”
He didn’t protest as I dragged him into the kitchen, but he stopped short at the stool he usually sat on while I cooked. “Don’t. I’ll do it.”
I shrugged. If he wanted to make me dinner, I wasn’t about to stop him. “Lots of mustard.”
He even smiled a little. “I know.”
Silence fell over us as Micah made sandwiches of slightly stale bread, ham, and the last of the cheese. He dug the extra hot mustard out of the fridge and slathered it on. My mouth watered. Whatever else was going on, no one could take this from us.
He squished them in the sandwich press and toasted them to perfection, two rounds for me, one for him that I already knew he wouldn’t eat. Fear flared in my chest. The Micah I knew was guarded by nature, but this was something else. He was shutting down, piece by piece, and there was nothing I could do about it.
I dug into my food, gamely shovelling it in, piling it on top of the despair layered in my gut. Micah stayed quiet, and the bottom of my plate came too soon. I pushed it away. “Look,” I said. “Perhaps we just have to accept it’s part of our normal now. You said it yourself they’re not going to go away, so maybe we can learn to live with it.”
Micah’s hand slammed down on the counter, making me jump as much as the plate that skittered across the marble. Rage exploded on his face. He caught the plate and chucked it across the room. It crashed against the doorframe and broke into too many pieces to count. “Don’t you understand?” he shouted. “It doesn’t matter how many versions of this conversation we have, nothing about this will ever be fucking normal!”
He wheeled away, gone in a flash.
The slam of the front door shattered my heart.
19
Micah
I woke up in a hotel room, buried under the covers of a bed that smelt of other people. The blackout curtains were drawn, shutting the world out, but I was still here, still noisy and broken and heartsick without Sam stretched out beside me. My only consolation was the hotel I’d stumbled into was obscure enough that no one had noticed me checking in. Somehow I’d managed to get past the pap loitering outside the flat.
Time passed in unknown intervals. I slept a lot—so much it scared me. I sunk into the mattress like cat piss on a brand-new couch, and I just... didn’t care that I couldn’t find the energy to move. My leg throbbed—I’d hoofed it for miles before I’d found the hotel—but I welcomed the pain. For however long I lay on that bed, stewing in my own misery, the cramp in my muscles kept me alive.
My phone was somewhere in the bed. It’s vibrating and flashing seemed far away, and I didn’t care about that either. I missed sessions at work and the last minute cancellation appointment I’d scored with Meera. I forgot to eat and avoided the hotel bathroom with its giant, soul-destroying mirror. I didn’t need to see my sallow skin and sunken eyes to know that I was seriously losing my fucking shit.
I’d never felt so unhinged. Even my skull seemed to belong to someone else. It buzzed and zapped, and my fingers tingled with electricity. I lay on my stomach, crushing them with bodyweight, but it was no good. The tingling spread up my arms and into my shoulders and crept up my neck to join the pulsing nightmare in my brain.
New fear seized me. I rolled out of bed.I have to get out of here. Gasping, I scrambled for the hotel room door, but my leg gave out, and I hit the floor. For long minutes, I lay there, chest heaving. The room grew dark and then light again, but I couldn’t contemplate what it meant. Was I losing whole days to a panic attack on the floor? Or was there something wrong with the lights?
Maybe it was me and my skewed perception of my surroundings. My heart ached for Sam. Voices cried out in my head, screaming his name. I needed him so badly it scared me more than anything, but I couldn’t have him. I couldn’t be near him while I was like this. On top of everything I’d already put him through, I couldn’t let him see me so fucking messed up.Like he doesn’t already know.
Groaning, I hauled myself to my knees and crawled back onto the bed. Terror still pounded in my chest, cold sweat trickling down the side of my face.I’m so scared. Confused too. I hadn’t felt this bad in a long time—so sad and overstimulated. The two phenomena warred with each other, fear keeping me awake, while desperate grief kept me prone on the bed. It was the evilest fucking thing.
Go home. Sam will make it better.
But I couldn’t. I couldn’t move. All I could do was burrow further into the mattress and wish I could sleep forever.
* * *
Sam
I had spent many nights staring at my bedroom ceiling and trying to remember what my life had been like before Micah.
I’d never succeeded. When we’d been roommates with unspoken feelings, his quiet presence in my life had been so absolute it had seemed as if he’d always been there. That his soft wit and gentle ways had been my constant companions forever. But reality was a cruel mistress, and his empty bedroom a stick she used to beat me. In the three days since Micah had left, I’d steered clear of it but had somehow felt unable to shut the door. So it stayed open, and his unmade bed taunted me, as if it was a symbol of something I’d yet to decipher, and the longer Micah was gone, the less chance I had of figuring it out.
It didn’t make any sense. I mean, on the surface, it did—Micah freaking out because the media had exposed us and removing himself from the situation to spare me the scrutiny. That, I got, but what I didn’t understand was why he’d been so volatile and vulnerable leading up to this bullshit. He’d had months and months of therapy to help him deal with the fallout of the last time it had happened. Therapy he attended like church and took super seriously. But if anything, in the weeks before the media clusterfuck, he’d been more out of sorts than ever. Why? Had something happened I didn’t know about? Had he stopped going to therapy? Had his medication stopped working?
I sat up in bed and reached for my phone. WhatsApp was already open. Over the past few days, I’d sent Micah many messages. He’d read them all—which reassured me he was alive—but hadn’t replied. The last time he’d been online was hours ago, around lunchtime, when I’d sent him a pleading message to talk to me. That we could fix anything if he’d just come home. His silence had hurt more than a red-hot poker to my chest.
You don’t understand. You haven’t lived his life, and you don’t have the mental health issues he does.
True. But I was still human, and him leaving me had broken my heart. Did he really think he could solve this by ducking out on me? That his feelings for me would evaporate the moment we were apart? If it spared him the pain I was in now, I honestly hoped they would. Micah had suffered enough.
