48. Seb
SEB
They were sitting in his car under a streetlight in the parking lot behind a coffee chain. Around them, the world was a heavy misted indigo, and the car was flooded with orange. There was a coffee cup nestled between his knees. Lily hunched over the wheel, staring at him.
She was crying.
“Thank god,” she exhaled hoarsely when he turned to look at her.
He looked down at the cup, picked it up, sipped. Hot chocolate. The whipped cream had melted. Two realities shoved up against each other in his recent memory. Both held equal weight.
“What happened?” He was wrung out and threadbare.
“You had a panic attack.”
“No, I mean…it was him, wasn’t it?” He could barely bring himself to muster the word. “Conrad.”
The quiet fury on her face could have split an atom.
The muscles in her jaw strained so tight that she couldn’t speak, couldn’t nod.
She just looked at him in an unfathomable way.
It was hard to tell in the sulfurous half-light, but it seemed like there were too many shadows on her face.
Conrad had been there again, and she’d faced him alone.
Again. She’d faced his past while he’d been out of his mind, completely useless.
If he’d been behind the wheel then, he might have driven right over the palisade and into the Hudson—would do anything to put a stop to the shame and guilt spouting in his stomach like a bullet wound, remorselessly consuming his insides.
He stared ahead at the drive-thru, his gaze unfixed. He wanted to scream, to break something, to break himself—hurl his body up against the brick wall in front of him until it was nothing but pulp.
“You have PTSD, Sebastian.” She could barely look at him. Her voice was low and tremulous. Seven curses, what could she possibly see in him now? “Why do you have PTSD?”
PTSD.
He knew it, had always known it, in that locked-out part of himself, shackled to a stone at the bottom of a river. You didn’t lose your Words or get packed off to Lapland to get sweated out and psychotropized with witches for the summer, if you didn’t.
He stared at the cars inching to the pay window. Give five dollars, get a coffee. Drive away.
He’d tell her when five cars went by.
He’d tell her when ten cars went by.
Fifteen.