“I don’t do relationships, never have, but I would lock you down with us in a heartbeat. I’m scared of the things I want from you, but I want them anyway. I can’t explain it, and I don’t even feel the need to question it because I know it’s right.”
Lock me down, scared of what he wants from me.I have even more questions now. I look around, realizing we’re having this conversation very publicly, and that is the last thing we need to be doing.
“We shouldn’t talk about this out here,” I whisper, unsure of what else I should say.
“If you don’t want me to come in, we can go for a drive or go to my place,” he offers.
“We should just go in. Going for a drive or letting someone see me walking into your place isn’t a good idea,” I remind him.
“We can get out of the city, but I won’t argue with going inside.” He lifts his hand and gestures for me to go ahead of him. “Did I freak you out?” Memphis asks the second the door is closed and locked behind us.
“No,” I reply, but my voice is too high, belying my denial.
“You are a horrible liar.”
“Only to you,” I retort, and his eyes go a little wide. “I just mean you are the only one who calls me on it, not that I do it all the time and don’t get caught.”
Now that we’re in the house, I don’t know how to continue our conversation, or if I really want to delve too deeply into it again. He already said a lot of things that made my heartbeat crazy fast, and I don’t know how many more declarations I can handle at the moment. I was already worried about being a little in love with him before he admitted he liked seeing me before he started his day. Can you fall in love this fast without knowing the person inside and out? Because I feel like there’s a lot the three of us don’t know about each other.
What will they think when I tell them I’ve heard voices as far back as I can remember? That my parents thought I had an active imagination until I was about nine and started hearing things that scared me? That I heard curse words and angry voices that I thought were real and would come for me, so I would ask to sleep with them the nights it got bad?
The doctors didn’t know what to do. Early onset schizophrenia was whispered a lot in the beginning, but I was too young, and my symptoms never quite hit the mark. Doctor after doctor said I would grow out of it, or that it was attention seeking behavior, so I tried to pretend it wasn’t happening, that I wasn’t hearing strange phrases and words randomly, but all that changed in sixth grade.
Class had just started, and the room was quiet as we wrote in our journals about what we did the weekend before. I hated silence the most, it always made the voices easier to hear, but this would have been heard through a hurricane. A wail so pure and sad ripped through my head and my heart at the same time. I started crying uncontrollably and had to be removed from the class, and that started the rumors about me being unstable.
While the voices had scared me before, I’d never felt like I was experiencing anything from them. This was different. My heart ached with a pain I never could have imagined. I wanted my mom, and I never wanted to hear another word in my head again. Two days later, my mom introduced me to Dr. Tobin, and I’ve been seeing him and Maxwell ever since.
I wouldn’t begin to know how to have that conversation. Maybe I should bring that up at my next therapy session.
“Everything okay?” Memphis questions, and I blink a few times. I wonder how long I was in my own head.
“Yeah, sorry. You said you were hungry. There’s food, or I could order something,” I offer.
“You’re not ordering anything, but I will eat something here if you’re sure.”
“Whatever you can find.” I gesture to the kitchen. Memphis pulls out the Chinese food containers and starts peeking in boxes. “You can’t eat that.” I move around him, trying to get to the cartons.
“Are you saving it? Here.” He holds out the box.
“No, it’s too old,” I admonish.
“Like hell it is.” He pulls the box back.
“That’s fromtwodays ago,” I remind him.
“Yeah, talk to me when it’s four, but it won’t be here that long because I’m going to eat it.”
“If I would have remembered that was in there, I would have thrown it away.”
“That would have made Oz cry.” He tilts his head to the side and forks a bite of cold noodles into his mouth, then almost spits it out when he starts laughing at my horrified expression.
“You’re eating it cold too!”
“Want a bite?” He has to cover his mouth, because he’s still chewing.
“No, no.” I shiver with the heebie-jeebies.
“Have you ever tried it?” He wiggles the fork, showing me a playful side of himself.
