The first time I surfaced, I didn't know where I was.
That's not quite right. I didn't knowwhenI was. The where was a sensation before it was a fact. A warmth beneath me instead of cold, softness instead of metal, a smell that wasn't bleach or antiseptic but something woodsy and lived-in. My fingers were wrapped around something soft, definitely a pillow, I realized distantly, though my sleeping brain had classified it ashimand was only now grudgingly accepting the substitution. I wasn’t even embarrassed about going to the bathroom with him.
Then the disorientation hit like a wave crashing over a seawall, and I was drowning in it. White walls. Fluorescent buzz. Ruby's voice. The pinch of a needle. The slow, syrupy descent into nothing while my body did things without my permission, responded to chemicals I hadn't consented to, became a vessel for someone else's profit margin—
I screamed.
Or tried to. What came out was a strangled, airless gasp, my throat too raw and my lungs too constricted to produce actual sound, but it didn't matter because the door was open—the door was open, it was open, they never left the door open—and then he was there.
Xavier.
He came through the doorway like something summoned, like my panic had a frequency only he could hear, and he was beside the bed in three strides with his hands up where I could see them, palms open, no needle, no syringe, no clipboard.
"You're in my house," he said. The same words. The same steady, immovable voice. "My bedroom. 4:47 in the morning. Your name is Molly Gilbertson. You were rescued seventeen hours ago. I'm Xavier. I'm right here."
I lunged for him. There was no dignity in it, no grace, just a desperate, animal scramble across the mattress that tangled me in the IV line and nearly sent the fluid bag crashing to the floor. He caught me, caught the line, caught everything, and then I was against his chest again and his heartbeat was under my ear, and the world stopped spinning long enough for me to remember how to breathe.
"There you go," he murmured. "I'm right here. I told you."
I cried. Again. Still. I was so tired of crying, but my body had apparently decided that eight weeks of suppressed tears needed to come out on a specific schedule and that schedule waswhenever Xavier touched me. He held me through it with thesame unshakable patience, his hand on the back of my head, his thumb drawing those slow circles that my nervous system had already cataloged assafe.
"Don't leave me," I choked out. "Please. I know I'm being—I know this is insane, I know you're a stranger and I'm acting like—"
"You're not acting like anything. You're surviving. And I only left because Doc needed to talk to me about your treatment plan. I won't leave again without telling you first. Okay?"
"Okay." I pressed my face into his neck and breathed him in. Cedar. Gunpowder. Coffee. The scent profile of safety. "Okay."
He settled back into the bed with me, resuming the position from before—back against the headboard, me curled against his side, his arm around me like a barricade between my body and the rest of the world. The fluid bag swayed gently on its repurposed coat hook, and he checked the line with his free hand, adjusting the tape where it had pulled against my skin.
"Doc says you're doing good," he told me. "Fluids are helping. Your color's better."
"I look terrible."
"You look alive. That's all that matters right now."
The simplicity of it undid me in a different way than the tears. It settled somewhere warm and glowing in my chest.
I slept again. Woke again. Went to the bathroom again. Each time the same cycle—the lurch of terror, the frantic search for him, the relief of contact that felt like surfacing from deep water. Sometimes he was right there, his body warm against mine. Twice he was in the doorway, already moving toward me before my eyes fully focused. Each time he told me where I was, who I was, that I was safe. Each time I believed it a fraction more.
The withdrawal started sometime around what I guessed was mid-morning, though time had become an unreliable narrator in my personal story. It began as a tremor in my hands—fine,barely visible, like the vibration of a tuning fork. Then it spread. My legs. My jaw. The muscles along my spine contracting in waves that made me curl into a fetal position and press my teeth together until they creaked.
"What's happening to me?" I gasped, and the fear in my voice was different from the rooftop fear. This was internal, my own body turning traitor, systems misfiring without the chemical leash they'd been kept on for eight weeks.
Xavier was already on his phone. "Doc, she's shaking. Full-body tremors. Get in here."
Doc appeared with his bag and his gentle hands and his calm, narrated approach, and they talked me through it—Xavier translating, Doc administering something under my skin that he explained was a low-dose benzodiazepine taper, just enough to keep my nervous system from seizing, not enough to sedate me. The distinction mattered. It mattered so much that I grabbed Xavier's wrist and made him repeat it.
"Not enough to knock you out," he said, his eyes locked on mine. "Just enough to keep the tremors manageable. You'll stay awake. You'll stay you. I promise."
The medication took the edge off but didn't eliminate all the shaking, and for the next several hours I existed in a miserable twilight of sweating and shivering and nausea that rolled through me in swells. Xavier held a cool washcloth to my forehead when the fever spiked. He held a basin when my empty stomach tried to turn itself inside out. He held my hair back with one hand and rubbed my spine with the other and never once flinched, never once looked away, never once made me feel like the broken, disgusting mess I knew I was.
"You don't have to do this," I told him during a brief reprieve, lying on my side with my head in his lap while his fingers moved through my hair in that slow, patient way that was becoming themetronome of my new existence. "You rescued me. Job done. You don't have to…this part isn't in the contract."
"There's no contract." His hand stilled on my head, then resumed. "There's no job. There's just you, and me, and this bed, and the fact that I'm not going anywhere."
"Why?" The word came out small and bewildered and more honest than I wanted it to be.
He was quiet for a long time. Long enough that I thought he wasn't going to answer, and I was trying to decide if I was relieved or devastated by that when he finally spoke.
