Falling into You (Falling #1)(55)
“I wouldn’t have, if it were me. There’d be questions and social services and psychologists and the psych ward. Worst of all, they’d call your parents.” He put two fingers beneath my chin, a thumb along my jaw. “Which is what you’ll get if this shit happens again. I’ll rush you to the fucking ER and I’ll call your goddamn parents myself, like I should this time, but won’t.”
“Why not?” I whisper.
“Because they’d get it all wrong. It’s not a cry for attention or any of that psychobabble bullshit.” He tips his forehead to touch mine. “Because I can help you, if you’ll let me. We can get you through this.”
We? Shit. Shit. My eyes still and my lip trembles and my chest heaves. My instinct is to cause pain to stop the tears. Colton knows this by now, gathers me close and holds me against his chest. He’s determined to do this, to be all supportive and loving. Which is exactly what I’ve always been terrified of admitting I want so so badly. Except he’s tenacious about not letting me hide or lie or retreat or pretend, and he knows all my tricks.
“Let…it…go,” he whispers, his voice a fierce, harsh sound in my hair.
“No. No!” The last word is screamed.
“You have to. You can’t bleed it out. You can’t keep pretending, drinking it down.”
A shudder, a tremble, my teeth clamping down on my lower lip. My fingers claw into the hard slab of muscle that is his pectoral. I’m not sobbing. I’m not.
Goddamnit, yes I am.
“It hurts so fucking bad, Colton…” the words are nearly lost in a sea of choking sobs and shuddering, body-wracking gasps for breath. “I want him back! I don’t want to watch him die anymore.”
I sob and sob, and he just holds me. Eventually I pull myself together and let words pour out of me. “Over and over I see it. Every time I close my eyes, I see him die. I know it’s not my fault, I always did. I convinced myself it was my fault because that was better than the pain of him being gone.”
“He’s gone. You have to accept it.”
“I know. It just hurts.” Now comes the hardest admission of all. “I find myself forgetting him. I see him dying over and over, but I can’t remember what he smelled like. What his arms felt like holding me. What sex with him felt like. What kissing him felt like. I can’t remember him. And I wonder sometimes if I ever really loved him. If it was just teenage infatuation. Thinking I loved him because he was my first. Because we’d fucked. I don’t know. I don’t remember. And now there’s you, and you’re…better than he was. Stronger. You turn me on in a way I don’t remember with him. You make me feel things he never did. The way you kiss me, it’s better than I remember his kisses being. When you made me come, I realized I’d never felt anything like it, ever. Ever. Not in all the times I was with Kyle in the two years we were together.”
A scream of raw impotent pain and self-loathing and anger and grief tears out my throat; Colton clutches me tighter and lets me scream. Doesn’t shush me or quiet me or whisper anything or tell me it’s okay.
“I’ve forgotten him, Colton! I never even loved him, and he’s gone! And I’ll never get him back and I’ll never be okay!”
“Forgetting is the mind’s way of helping you heal. Helping you move on. You did love him, Nell. He was your first. Your best friend before that. I know that much about you two. You were inseparable from birth. You did love him. Yeah, he’s gone and it fucking sucks more than anything. He was taken from you too soon, from all of us. I can’t make that okay. But you have to be okay. You have to let yourself heal and move on. You’re stuck in the moment of his death, right now. Locked into a cycle with no way out. You have to break the cycle.”
“I don’t know how.”
“Feel. Grieve. Let yourself feel all the anger at the fact that he was taken from you. Feel the loss of him. Feel the sadness and the missing him. Don’t block it out, don’t cut so it so stops, don’t drink yourself numb. Just sit and let it all rip you apart. And then get up and keep breathing. One breath at a time. One day at a time. Wake up, and be shredded. Cry for a while. Then stop crying and go about your day. You’re not okay, but you’re alive, and you will be okay, someday.”
“You make it sound easy.”
“Fuck no, it’s not easy. It’s the hardest thing ever. But it’s the only way. What you’re doing is gonna kill you.”
I hear the personal knowledge of this in his voice. “You’ve done this.”
He sighs. “Yeah. More than once.”
“Kyle?”
“Him too.”
“Who else?”
He breathes out again, a long frustrated breath. “Friends. Brothers. A girl I…someone I loved.”
“Tell me.”
“Fuck. Really? You want to hear this now?” I nod and he growls in his chest. “Fine. The first one was one of my best buddies, Split’s and mine. T-Shawn. Split grew up next to him. T-Shawn and Split started the Five-One Bishops together. There was a rumble on a basketball court, a turf thing. Fists mainly, a few chains, one asshole had a bat. Then it escalated. One of the other guys pulled a knife. Stabbed T in the fucking throat. I watched—watched him bleed out all over my hands, my arms. I watched T die, held him in my fucking arms as he bled out…and then I killed the motherfucker. Crushed his goddamn head against the court until I saw brains. Couldn’t stop myself. T was a good guy. A good friend. A gentle guy, really. But he had the bad luck to be born in the ghetto. Ain’t much you can do but what you gotta do to keep breathing. It ain’t even really a choice, for most. It’s just life. Life in the hood. How shit works. T was smart, man. Could have gone to college, written some smart shit, been someone, if he’d have had the opportunity. Didn’t. Now he’s dead.”