“You think I got through it? Are you fucking crazy? Look at me. Look at me! It’s never over. It will never be over. You think you’re all healed and shit? You can’t be that stupid.” Swiftly, he takes a piece of driftwood and lunges it into the coals in the firepit, making a flame jump out.
Involuntarily, my breathing catches, and I let out a sound. My heart races as a flash of panic sears through me.
“See?” His tone is nasty, cutting. “Trauma—the gift that keeps on giving. Do you actually believe that you can run through the pain? You can’t. You can’t outrun shit. Keep putting on your sneakers and pounding pavement, but you’ll never beat down that bitch.”
He jabs the stick into the fire, creating another burst of flame and hot sparks. It’s a hateful thing to do to me, and this time, I cannot contain myself, so I give up on trying to hold in my tears.
“I love you, but that was goddamn mean, Sabin,” I choke out. “Even now.”
“Just proving my point, darlin’,” he says bitterly. “That fire you think you’re over? You’re not. You’ll never be. And us fucked up Shepherds? We’ll always be tainted with pieces of hell.”
“You arenottainted,” I say as strongly as I can. “Please. That is not who you are.”
He drops his arms to his sides. “Of course I am. Everything about me is tainted. I love you. I hate you. I love Chris. I hate Chris. You’re both my idols and also the people I can’t get away from fast enough. With you two, there is nothing but pain and guilt everywhere I turn.”
I step directly in front of him and take his face in my hands. Immediately, my palms are covered in his tears. “Listen to me, Sabin. I am not leaving you. I won’t. I refuse to let you shut me out of your life. I refuse to let you destroy yourself. That is not going to happen.”
He pushes me away. “Get the fuck out of here.”
Now, I grab his shirt and bring us close. “I love you. Don’t do this.”
“You have to stay away from me. I’m trashing everything around me, so just get the fuck out of here! You can’t fucking help me!”
“Stop it! Stop it!” I’m as frenzied in my emotions as he is, and it’s without full awareness of what I’m doing that I lift up on my toes, press my mouth tightly against his, and kiss him hard.
To get him to stop talking.
To get him to shut the hell up with his story of torture.
To get him to love himself. To feel my love in whatever form it’s meant to take.
To make this explosion end.
I cannot take any more. I cannot pick up any more wreckage.
My hands knot in his shirt as my lips move over his, my tongue sinking into his mouth. Sabin tastes like whiskey and misery. I feel his hands on the back of my head, his fingers pulling at my hair, as he kisses me roughly. Too roughly. This kiss is angry, and it’s heated for all the wrong reasons. I know that.
I try to pull back, but his hands keep us together, so I keep kissing him, trying to drown out his pain. I dig my fingers into his shoulders, pulling at him, silently begging him to feel loved and whole and unbroken.
His touch moves brusquely over my back as he claws his hands down my shirt until he hits my lower back. Sharply, he yanks my waist against him and takes his mouth away.
“Happy? You think you can fuck the life back into me like you did with Chris? Well, you can’t. Because there is no life to get back. I never had one in the first place. All I have is damage. That’s my baseline. That’s all I know. And that’s where I’m staying. So, you go back home and crawl into Christopher’s bed. That’s where you belong. I am fucking done with you.”
There is such disgust in his eyes, in the way he speaks to me, that I move back four or five steps. I know how to handle Chris when he’s upset, even when he’s swimming in a sea of severe pain, but I do not have the slightest idea of how to handle Sabin.
Or how to handle myself. I’m only making things worse for him.
I keep backing up, slowly distancing myself from him. Just as I turn, I catch movement in the corner of my eye.
It happens so fast. He moves so fast. There is no time for me to stop him, to come up with anything to prevent what he does.
So, when he takes the burning stick from the fire and holds it to the skin under his right arm, all I can do is scream. Over and over, I scream.
Sabin’s impulsive and violent act frightens me so much that I don’t go to him. My attempts to get through to him, to help him in some way, only escalated what had already been a heightened situation, and I’m terrified that I’ll just make things worse if I go to him now. That he’ll do something even more awful or dangerous.
So, I just scream and stumble across the beach to reach the stairs.
From my chair on the deck, I keep an eye on Sabin. He drinks a little more, but he leaves the bottle more untouched than I would have predicted. A drink now and then, but he doesn’t down the bottle. That’s a very small silver lining in all of this.
