I pull my legs up and tuck them into my body, wrapping my arms around myself and sinking into the warmth of the oversized knit sweater.
“I need you to talk to me, Tadhg. What’s going on with you? You’re acting irrational and erratic; you seem really upset and I can’t totally figure out what you’re upset about… Can you just explain it to me? I know you’re a man and men aren’t supposed to use their words or whatever, but it’s just you and me here, and no one else has to know if you emote. Just spill. What’s going on?”
The silence that follows is fucking painful. I’m chatty by nature, and not filling it is almost impossible. But I know I have to let him come to me.
He fidgets, running his fingers over the fabric of his jeans and worrying at his bottom lip in a way that makes him look somuch younger than the tattoos and the muscles and the attitude normally do.
Because he is young, really. We both are. But he was never allowed to be, so he never got to learn how to grow up the way I did. That’s the difference.
“I don’t know what you want me to say, Bambi. I’m fine. I was just mad that you weren’t listening to me,” he grumbles without looking at me.
I’m impressed. There are some feeling words in there somewhere.
“Butwhywere you so worried about me in the first place? All I wanted was to go to dinner with my friend. And you were acting like it was super dangerous. What was going on in your head?”
He looks at me then, his brow furrowed, before going back to studying his hands.
“I-I don’t know. It was just wrong. It wasn’t safe. It wasn’t right. My gut was telling me. And you weren’t listening.”
I’m trying to pick apart what he just said, and something about it makes me cock my head.
“Wait, did you feel like it wasn’tsafefor me to go, or that it waswrongfor me to go? Because those are two different things.”
“I—” He looks at me sharply, and then away. I can see a cavalcade of emotions working their way across his face, and tension quickly sets up shop in his neck and shoulders.
Despite his sudden shift in mood, there’s no warning before he stands. I think he’s about to pace angrily in front of the couch for a minute, so I stay put, but instead, he walks straight to the nearest wall and punches it.
He hits the wall three times with short, sharp jabs, each one hard enough to fill the space with sound and make me jump. Adrenaline is already flooding my bloodstream while my brain is struggling to catch up to what the fuck just happened. But before I can open my mouth to say something, Tadhg follows his initialpunches by smacking his fucking forehead against the wall with a dull thud, hard enough that it’s definitely going to have done some damage.
“Jesus, fuck,” I mutter, springing off the couch on instinct and reaching up to grab his face before he can do it again.
I get one hand on his forehead, and it stops him hitting the wall again. As soon as my hands are on him, he seems to go limp. Utterly limp, like a ragdoll. His body is heavy, and his movements are sluggish as he lets me manhandle him back to sit on the couch.
The whole thing couldn’t have lasted more than ninety seconds, but it’s taken all the energy out of both of us. Tadhg is staring off into the distance as he sits slumped in his seat, and I’m frantically trying to make sense of what just happened.
I’ve never enjoyed the whole men-punching-walls thing. As a teenager, I saw it a lot, and it normally seemed like guys either acting out because they were wasted, didn’t have a good handle on their anger, or were trying to impress girls with their “manliness”. Mostly the latter.
Every single time, they just looked stupid.
But this didn’t come across as an act of aggression so much as an act of desperation, or self-harm, and it has me just as worried as all of the other self-destructive things Tadhg’s thrown himself into since he got here.
When he doesn’t look at me or make any attempt to speak, I decide to get closer. I need him to snap out of this sudden malaise because it’s freaking me out even more than the anger.
I crawl into his lap, folding myself up small as if I’m still a little kid and inserting myself into the warm space in front of his chest. He still doesn’t move, so I drag his heavy arms until they’re wrapped around me, and then put my face close to his neck. I can feel his pulse racing under his skin, and it’s reassuring that it’s still there, I guess.
“That wasn’t an answer, Tadhg,” I say, once we’ve both had a chance to settle.
He almost laughs. I swear. I can feel it. But it’s like he’s too numb.
“I don’t feel right, Bambi. My head’s fucked up.”
The words are quiet, and they pull out of him like molasses.
“Do you normally feel like this, or is it just since you got shot?”
He tenses under me, and the silence that I get in response makes me feel like he’s hiding something from me. But we are so far past fucking around time. He lost his right to privacy several fucking incidents ago. He’s still shirtless, so it’s not difficult for me to reach out and pinch his nipple—really fucking hard—to try to shock a little sense into him.
“I swear to god, if you lie to me right now, things are about to get so ugly, Tadhg. This is your last chance to tell me what the fuck is going on with you before I lose my shit.”
