There are no words for the kind of torment clawing at my bones, being willing to give my life for him if it meant saving him, yet he doesn’t want me here.
He's looking at me from across the room with his back against the headboard and his legs seizing underneath him and his face doing something I have never seen it do, not in any of it, not in any of the worst moments we've been through—he looksterrified.
“I’ll stay here with him, okay?” Ian’s hands are on my shoulder now. “I’ll take care of him, I swear it.”
Something solid breaks. Deep. And it steals the air I breathe. It’s the worst defeat I’ve ever felt, loving someone with your entire being and discovering that love isn't the solvent you believed it was—that it can’t dissolve years of damage that was never meant for him to carry in the first place.
I nod. My legs carry me to the door the way legs are supposed to, steady and functional and utterly indifferent to the fact that I would rather they give out entirely than walk away from him.
There’s a second where I hover at the threshold, everything inside me pulling me back in, toward him. I’m two breaths away from doing just that when Ian places a hand on my shoulder, thumb brushing the back of my neck.
“You did not break. Through everything. Not once. And you’re not breaking now, understand me?”
My throat closes, and I’m barely keeping myself upright.Barely able to breathe except in sharp, shallow bursts. “I love him, Ian.”
“I know you do. And that’s why you’re going to get through this. For him.”
I nod without looking at him; one step, and the door closes behind me. Shutting me out. Cutting me away from the man my heart’s aching for. It’s a different kind of sadness, grief—when you’re unable to help the one person whose pain has become yours.
I press my back against the wall, look at the ceiling of the hallway of the house he built for me, and I let the sob out, finally, the one that has been building since forty-seven breaths.
From inside the room—sounds. The crash of something. The violence of a body in war against itself, the medication not yet at the level where it makes a meaningful difference, the withdrawal doing what withdrawal does in its first peak hours regardless of what you give it to fight with.
His voice, sometimes, saying things I can't make out through the wood. Ian's voice, steadier, lower, anchoring.
I slide down the wall until I'm sitting on the floor. Pull my knees to my chest.
Gerald is still in my jacket pocket, downstairs, and I want him stupidly badly, want the small solid weight of him in my hands, and instead I have the hallway floor and the closed door and the sounds coming through it and the cruel knowledge that the most loving thing I can do for the person I love most is stay on this side of the fucking door.
And I don't understand it.
I don't understand any of it.
But I don't have to understand it tonight. Tonight, I justhave to be on this side of the door and keep breathing and trust that Ian is in there and that the medication will build in his system and that the doctor is twenty minutes away if we need him and that this—all of this—is survivable.
Even when it doesn't feel survivable.
Even when I'm sitting on a hallway floor at three in the morning listening to the man I love suffer through something I can't touch.
I close my eyes.
One.
Two.
Three.
Still here.
Still loving him through a hell I can't enter.
17
SOPHIA
Seventy-two hours.
I’ve stopped saying it out loud. Saying it makes the number feel like a stone in my throat, heavy and impossible to swallow. But seventy-two hours is how long it’s been since Ian bought him back, since I finally felt his arms around me again—warm, solid, alive—only to watch them turn into something else. Something that trembled with the need to push me away.
