“Reth,” I whisper, voice breaking. “Please… I’m here. I’m right here. I would take this from you if I could. God, I would take all of it.”
A sob catches in my throat as another cramp rips through him. I feel so small. So useless. All the strength I thought I had crumbles in the face of watching the man I love more than anything endure this kind of torment, and there’s nothing—nothing—I can do to make it stop.
I reach for his hand.
"Get away from me,” he snaps, and the force of it knocksme back. Not his hands—his voice. The raw, gutted authority of it, coming from somewhere underneath the delirium, somewhere that’s still him, still Reth, still the man who has spent his entire life calculating exactly how much distance to keep between himself and everything he might damage.
"I'm not going anywhere?—"
"You bleed." His voice cracks apart at the seams. "Every time—every time I get close, you bleed. I watch you?—”
“No. I’m not bleeding, Reth. I’m okay.”
“Get out.”
“Reth, please. Let me help?—”
“Get the fuck out!”
Tears falls. “No, Reth, please?—”
“Ian!” His shout fills the room and the hallway and probably the whole mountain. “Ian! Get her out!”
My hands start to shake, my heart thundering as I try to absorb it the way you absorb something that hits too hard and too fast for any defense to be useful.
I know it’s the withdrawal shouting. The delirium. But it's not confusion about who I am. He knows exactly who I am, and he’s screaming for someone to get me away from him. It’s a kind of devastation I wasn’t prepared for.
Ian’s through the door in seconds.
“What the fuck is going on?” Eyes sharp, hair disordered, taking in the room with the rapid inventory of a man built for exactly this kind of worst case. He sees Reth against the headboard, legs still cramping, face streaming with sweat and tears indistinguishable from each other. He sees me on the floor with my hand still extended toward a man who just screamed for me to get away from him.
“Sophia, Jesus.” Ian’s next to me within a second. “Are you okay? Did he hurt you?”
“No.” I shake. “He didn’t hurt me.”
"Get her the fuck away from me!" Reth starts rocking, and everything inside me breaks.
"Crazy, come on. Back up."
"I'm not leaving him like this."
"Back up." Ian moves between us, not roughly, just solidly, a wall I can't get around. "He doesn't know what's real right now."
"He does know." My voice cracking. "That's the problem. He knows it's me, and he still?—"
"Sophia."
"He needs me, Ian."
"Right now, he needs you to leave." His eyes find mine, and I can see how much he hates saying those words, almost as much as I hate hearing them. "I can’t have you in here. He doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing, and if he hurts you?—”
“He won’t hurt me,” I spit out. “Reth won’t?—”
“He’s not Reth right now, okay?” He pauses. “At least not the Reth we know. So please. I need you to trust me right now and go into the hallway."
I look at him for a long moment. At Ian, who slept next to me when the nightmares came and gave me Gerald and made things on sticks and held me in a kitchen at midnight when I fell apart. The Ian who walked into Valeria’s estate and brought him out. Who is standing in front of me right now looking like it costs him everything to send me away.
I look past Ian's shoulder at Reth. At the man I flew across the world for. At the man I saton a bench in Japan for counting days. At the man who built a house from my diary and left me lollipops and once pressed his forehead to mine and saidI love youlike he was handing me something he'd been keeping in a locked room for years.
