Panic reared in my throat, sudden and hot. “Who? Who did you call?”
“A doctor who can prescribe the drugs you need to get back on an even keel. It might take a few days to settle you, and at some point, you need to figure out why you stopped taking them in the first place, but it’s a good place to start.”
I fell onto a nearby stool. “I didn’t do it on purpose. I forgot.”
“Yeah, but why?”
I shrugged. The conversation felt off, as if I was having it with the wrong person. “I was happy. And doing different stuff, sleeping in Sam’s room, doing different things in the morning. I guess I was so obsessed with him I forgot about myself.”
“He didn’t remind you?”
“He didn’t know. I mean, he knew about the pills, but he didn’t know I wasn’t taking them until he found the full boxes in my drawer.”
“I remember,” Dom said. “You told me that he called you to let you know. Have you spoken to him since?”
“No.”
“Why not? Sounds to me like he cares about you more than you deserve, and that you’re crazy about him too. Why shut him out? He’s got to be out of his mind with worry.”
Crazy. Out of his mind.I wondered if Dom knew what those words really meant. “You’re right. I don’t deserve him.”
“I didn’t mean it literally.” Dom slid a bowl of pasta across the counter and passed me a spoon. “You need to get past this block in your head when it comes to letting him love you. I get it—you don’t want him exposed to the toxic bullshit people like us bring to the table, but we can’t change who we are any more than him and Lucky can. Let him deal with it in his own way. If he walks away from it, at least you know it was his own decision.”
“He won’t walk away.” It was out of my mouth before the truth of it hit me.
Dom nodded like it made perfect sense. “It would take more than a few dickheads with cameras to scare Lucky off too. Aren’t you more worried he won’t want to deal with the rest of it?”
“Huh?”
Dom gestured to the general state of me. “Sam sounds amazing, but if I was going to be worried about anything, it would be that a depressed ex-footballer with manic tendencies would be too much for him. It doesn’t seem to worry you, so why are you so agitated about the press? They’ve done their worst with you already. The rest is just noise.”
Sitting in Dom’s kitchen, poking at his pasta while he brewed tea on a stove straight out of a Delia Smith book, logic finally found purchase in my brain. I shuddered. “I don’t know why I do anything. I feel—I don’t know how to explain it, like my brain and myself are disconnected, and I can’t trust any of my emotions, good or bad. I don’t know why the press thing freaked me out so much. It snowballed, man. I couldn’t catch it.”
“Understandable if you’d been off your meds for a while, and it’s also totally understandable that you lost your way a bit when you and Sam got serious. Mental health and big life changes don’t always mix, even if the changes are good. I had to learn that the hard way when me and Lucky first got together—I couldn’t understand why he still found life so hard.”
“I want to be happy.”
“I know you do, mate. And I know you love Sam, or you wouldn’t be here. But you know you can love him a whole lot better if you take care of yourself, right?”
I didn’t. I didn’t know anything. But I accepted Dom’s insistence that I wait for his doctor friend before I made any more ridiculous decisions. He took my phone away to charge it while a young woman who carried her doctor kit in a SuperDry bag worked me up. She asked me a hundred questions. Poked and prodded me. Then she made me fill in a thousand forms before she handed over a three-day supply of my pills. “You’ll need to go back to your regular doctor to get another prescription,” she said. “If you don’t go home, that is. You still have a supply there, yes?”
I nodded and swallowed the pills she’d placed in my hand. The idiot in me expected instant relief, but of course, none came. Even with the perspective Dom had gifted me, it would take days for my mood to settle.
The doctor left. Dom brought me my washed and dried clothes and hovered over me as I sat on the stairs, tying my shoes. “Are you sure you’re going to be okay? You can stay here a few days if you want. Or I could drive you home?”
“It’s fine.” I stood, ignoring the protest from my leg. “I need to get back to normal.”
“That’s going to take time.”
“I know, but it’s not going to happen hanging around here and disrupting your life too.”
“You’re not disrupting my life. I understand where you are.”
Of course he did. His privacy had been violated as much as mine, and he’d spent as much of his life hiding his sexuality as I had. The difference was he’d handled it like a champ, and I was a fucking mess.
A mess that needed to get back to Sam and tell him I loved him before I really did lose my mind. “I need to get home.”
Dom let me go. He stood over me while I made emergency appointments to see Meera and my GP, and he called me a cab to take me back to the flat.
