RUSH (City Lights, #3)(44)

I crawled, searching, desperate to find the bottle. I crawled until I lost all sense of where I was and still felt nothing but hardwood. I heard a cry tear out of my throat, faint under the pounding pain that was like a jackhammer in my skull.

I crawled until I was back to the side table. I propped my elbows on it and hauled myself to standing. Dizziness crashed over me. I flailed for something to hold on to and my hand closed around the lamp.

With another roar, I hurled it across the room. The base shattered as it struck the wall next to the closet, and I felt like I was shattering too. The pain was wracking me, tearing me apart. My throat issued low, steady stream of moans, while tears and sweat poured out of my eyes, my skin.

I fell to my hands and knees again, taking the side table with me. It tipped over, bruising my thigh. A little kiss of pain compared to howling agony in my head. I crawled on the floor like the pathetic wretch I had become, still searching, still finding nothing.

My hands felt hardwood become cold tile. The bathroom. Delirious now, lost in an ugly, dull haze of agony, I gave up the search and thumped my forehead on that tile, over and over; a steady rhythm that kept time to the pounding in my head. How long would this last? This was the end, for surely my head would explode like some grisly scene in a horror movie. Or I’d bang it until my skull cracked open like an egg and the pain spilled out. I shuddered, my stomach clenching.

Make it stop…Oh God, please, someone make it stop…

“Noah? Oh my god!”

Charlotte.

And somewhere, behind the agony where I could still think, I thought it was possible I might come out of this maelstrom alive after all.





Chapter Fifteen


Charlotte

“Get the hell out and don’t come back today.”

It was like a bucket of cold water thrown over me, shocking and chilling me at the same time.

I thought he was getting better. I thought I was making a difference.

I shouldn’t have let it hurt as much as it did. Our walk, him taking his meals with me, when he’d touched my face…I thought something had changed, only to find out we weren’t any further along than we were the day he yelled at me for opening the drapes.

I descended the stairs to the first floor, telling myself that Noah had ‘bad days’ and that his every emotion didn’t have to be about me. In fact, it was better that they weren’t. We were employer/employee, right? Nothing more.

So why were hot tears stinging my eyes? I swiped them away angrily and started to close the door to my room, close the door on him, and let him have his bad day and his foul temper and his denial that was ruining his life.

I almost closed that door.

But I didn’t. I couldn’t. And that’s why, some hours later, I heard the crash two floors above me.

My heart took off at a gallop and I sat up in bed, my book tumbling to the floor. Noah’s rule that I never help him no matter what echoed in my mind, sounding as impossible to comply with then as it had when I first heard it.

I raced up both staircases, not sure what I’d find, but knowing something was horribly wrong. As my foot hit the landing on the third floor, a second crash sounded, this one a heavy thud, punctuated by a muffled cry.

Noah’s door was shut but I didn’t bother knocking. I threw it open, and in the perpetual dimness of his room, I saw the remains of the bedside lamp against the wall to my left, its ceramic base shattered into pieces, the shade dented, the plug mangled from having been torn out of the wall. On the other side of the room, next to the bed, the sturdy wooden side-table had been upended. Agonized cries were coming from the bathroom.

My heart in my throat, I hurried there to find Noah on his hands and knees, banging his forehead on the ceramic tile.

“Noah? Oh my god!” I raced to him and knelt by his side.

“Make it stop,” he cried. “Please, ah god, make it stop…”

“O-okay. Please, it’s okay, please don’t do that…”

I took hold of his shoulders and tried to pull him up, to stop him from that awful banging. But he was in so much pain. It was in every hunched muscle and sinew of his body. His t-shirt was drenched in sweat and a constant hum of agony issued from his throat. I finally got him to sit against the cabinets below the sinks, and gasped at the horrifying ashen color of his face. His long legs writhed, his hands clenched into fists and let go, over and over. He began to strike his head against the cabinets behind him.

“A migraine?” I asked, feeling frantic. “Where are your pills? Did you take one of your pills?”

Oh my god, is he out? Of all the tasks I have to keep on top of…But no, I had checked his supply just the day before.

Noah was shaking his head. “Can’t find…the bottle.”

I didn’t waste a second, but rushed to the bedroom. I got down on hands and knees, frantically searching, and found the little orange bottle had rolled all the way to the other side of the bed, hiding from Noah in plain sight.

I grabbed it and returned to the bathroom. Noah had hauled himself to his feet, braced himself over the basin to vomit in the sink. I rushed to him, steadied him as his body clenched. He’d had nothing to eat all day and I could only image the pressure that the empty heaving had on his already aching head. Sure enough, when he finished, he let out a choked cry and would have fallen to the floor had I not been there to ease him down.