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Ghosts of nights buried in layers of dust shouldn't be dragged into the forefront of her consciousness by jovial writers of medications that promise to make the world less overwhelming, if only while their chemicals swirl in her brain and mute the ones she makes too much and too little of when left to her own devices. Her fingers shake as she trails the tips along the screen of her phone, sending a message to the only person she can even begin to consider trusting right now. James won’t ask awkward questions. He’ll just come get her, take her somewhere less exposed, let her drink herself stupid, and let this nightmare end if only for a few alcohol soaked hours.
She loses time, and when the door opens and a strong hand wraps around her shoulder she swings out – hard.
“I deserved that,” James mutters, while wrapping his hand over hers and stilling the twitch toward a second swing.
“Hi?” she offers up. She’s not sure how much time passed while she waited. Her heart isn’t hammering in her chest as hard, and she can breathe, so in theory she no longer needs rescue. Except that even thinking about it makes her heartrate tick upward and her breath catch in her throat.
“Tell me what happened?”
“No.”
She asked him to come, demanded help, but now the idea of explaining why is abhorrent. Weakness isn’t tolerable, even with someone she knows doesn’t hold with making judgements on her. She could tell him that the therapist smelled like stepfather number something or another, the scent of a long forgotten cologne cloying and nauseating. She could tell him that the office was decorated in inspirational quotes that made her want to jump out the second story window. She could explain that the meds make her feel like a failure, automatic guilt at her inability to control her own brain when she knows good and well that she’s never been able to. She could tell him all those things.
Instead, she cries.
“Shit,” she hears him grumble and then she’s shoved across the seat and into the passenger side of the car. He pries the keys from her fist and the engine sputters to life. The seat belt is drawn across her body, the soft click of the latch echoing in her ears.
She curls in on herself, knees drawn tight to her chest and face pressed against them. Now that the tears have come, they won’t stop. Memories flood in, of the scent of cologne that made her breath stall and drag, of hands that pinned her down, of orders to be good, to be quiet, to be still.
“Almost there, Tasha,” James is telling her, his voice breaking into the litany of terrifying thoughts. She tries to hold onto it, to cling tightly enough to here and now to ground herself, but it doesn’t work. She can’t, and it’s another failure in a lifetime of them. She’s never been good, and she can’t be quiet, and the sobs shake her shoulders too hard to ever be still.
“You don’t have to be quiet,” James breaks in again, and she realizes the words aren’t just in her head.
She digs her nails into her forearms then, the sharp bite of pain as their edges break the skin. James is cursing again from behind the wheel, but he can’t reach for her and drive, not like he could when they were kids, not like she needs him to, and it’s the first time she’s really thought about the fact that her big brother went away to war and came back missing a piece. The tears come harder at that, when she remembers that she needs him, that she latched onto him like a lifeline the moment he was there and she hasn’t even tried to ask him how he is. She’s a terrible person, worthless, useless, and she doesn’t deserve the care he gives her, has always given her, even when she was a little kid with pills and powders and tiny bottles of alcohol that never quite dulled the edges enough to keep them from drawing blood.
The car shifts, halts, and the latch is released as she’s pulled bodily into his arms. The center console is in her ribs, and she whines and squirms.
“I’ve got you,” he tells her, and there’s an arm between her and the offending bit of vehicle before James somehow shoves his body into the space while she latches onto him as tightly as she can. He doesn’t flinch when her fingers dig into his shoulders as she presses herself into the safety of his body.
She can’t stop the flood of tears and she’s choking on snot; trying desperately not to gag as globs of mucus slide down her throat each time she pulls in a breath.
“Breathe, Tasha love,” he’s coaching her, but she can’t obey, can only choke and sniffle and press her face tighter against his chest. There isn’t any air for her to breathe, only the images that won’t slow down and the feel of arms around her that should mean comfort and instead just bring guilt. She wonders for a moment what she pulled him away from, what task he abandoned to rescue her for what is surely the thousandth time.
He’s saying something, but she can’t hear his voice clearly enough to decipher what it might be, or to pull meaning from it even if she could. It doesn’t matter. Fingers slide up and down her back, tracing the slats of her ribs and notches of her spine, reminding her both that she is fragile and that she is real, that she cannot be a ghost if his hands can trip along the bones there, that she must exist, if only in this hazy half reality where every ounce of energy goes to breathing around the suffocating flashbacks and trying not to drown in the tears and snot.
Time is fluid, shifting and swirling around her as she clings to the only anchor she’s ever trusted to keep her in place. His breath brushes her skin and though the words don’t land with any kind of sense to her incoherent brain, they are soft and warm and home.
When the panic finally backs down, the first thing to return is the realization that the shirt her face is buried in is soaked through. Blinking up at him through hazy vision, she pulls away to find that there is a long trail of snot and damp and gross down his chest.
“Oh my god,” she mumbles.
He glances down, shrugs, and pulls the shirt over his head, stripping down to the only slightly less disgusting shirt underneath. At least this one only has tears.
“I wash.”
She nods, remembering the last time he told her that, when she was barely more than a kid and several shots too deep into a bottle for her own good. She closes her eyes, resting against him and sniffling. He’s talking to her again, but she can’t focus on the words as exhaustion drags her down hard. She barely registers his hands as he buckles her back in before resuming his spot behind the wheel to take them out of this parking lot and off to somewhere she can sleep until her brain comes back online.