CHAPTER THIRTEEN #2
“You knew you weren’t okay,” he continues. “I saw it every time I ran with you. You were sleeping instead of running, yet you still pushed.”
“I didn’t think?—”
“No,” he cuts in gently, “you didn’t. Or you did, and you ignored it. Which might be worse.”
My head falls back against the pillow, the guilt settling deeper than the IV in my arm. “I thought running would help.”
“Help what, Lina?” His voice cracks a little on my name. “You collapsed in my fucking arms.”
“I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“Well, you did,” he says, almost too quietly. “You really did.”
There’s something deeper behind it, but I’m trying not to look that closely. There’s silence again. I focus on the rhythm of the IV drip, trying to ignore how much everything hurts. Physically. Emotionally. All of it.
After a long beat, he shifts in the chair, leaning forward.
“Burning yourself out isn’t going to prove anything,” he says.
My throat tightens. He says it like he’s known me forever. Like he’s looked into a part of me I’ve worked really hard to keep hidden.
“I don’t know how to stop,” I admit, barely above a whisper.
I don’t know how to sleep. Not without her reminder looming over me. Not without me feeling like I’m seconds away from spiraling into my own thoughts.
Trying to sleep in the type of silence I’ve never had to dwell in before makes my brain run wild. I don’t want that. I don’t like the idea of lying in bed, waiting to hear the sound of my mom typing in the other room or her rustling around the kitchen looking for her favorite mug.
“You almost died trying not to,” he says. “So maybe it’s time to learn.”
I can’t look at him. Instead, I rake my fingers through my hair.
“Can you admit that I’m right?” he asks, quieter.
Thankfully, I’m not easily embarrassed, or else I would be mortified that I don’t know the answer.
I saw in a documentary once that humans are the only species able to blush—almost like we’re designed to feel ashamed. I’ve always hated that idea, refusing to subscribe to it.
Can I admit that I need to stop the dangerous cycle of no sleep coupled with oddly timed runs? Yes .
But am I willing to make the move to confront my problems and get past the habit? No .
“Grant, I don’t know how to explain…”
“Try,” he replies strongly. “After what I watched happen to you today, I think I at least deserve for you to try and explain it to me.”
I watch him for a long moment, not sure what to say to make this better. I can’t explain the true reason behind the running and my lack of sleep—even if I trusted him with all my heart. I still wouldn’t be able to hurdle my own emotional barriers to get the words out.
“ Please .” He sounds desperate.
And I can’t take it. The way he’s looking at me like I’m slipping through cracks in the pavement. Like there’s nothing he can do to stop it.
“I don’t know how to explain it without sounding…” I trail off. My throat is dry again, despite the IV drip meant to hydrate me. “Insane.”
He doesn’t blink. “Try me.”
I stare at the ceiling. Pale. Clinical. The kind of white that makes the place feel sterile. It’s trying to convince me things are fine, while I’m hooked up to machines because I’m not.
“I don’t like sleeping,” I say finally. “I hate how still it is. I hate that I can’t outrun what waits for me there.” It’s the closest I’ve ever come to saying it.
He leans back slightly, eyes still on me. Waiting. Listening. I turn my face away from him and toward the window.
“There’s this moment,” I say, slowly, like I’m building the words as I go, “between lying down and actually falling asleep. When everything is quiet. When you can hear your own breath, your own heartbeat. And all the things you’ve been avoiding all day catch up.”
I’ve avoided racing thoughts my entire life. I’d even go as far as to say I’m scared of them.
But those spiraling thoughts have been looming ever since my mom died. They get closer and closer the longer I lie in bed staring at the ceiling while willing myself to go to sleep, when I know I’m not going to.
So, I did something about it. I started running.
Running to keep myself occupied. Running from the thoughts themselves. Running away from myself.
Grant says nothing.
“That moment feels like drowning.”
There’s a shift in the air. The kind that feels like a response, even if no one speaks.
“I run because it’s the only time I don’t feel like something’s chasing me,” I whisper. “And yeah, maybe that’s backwards logic, but it’s the truth. It’s the only time my mind shuts up.”
I chance a look at him.
And I realize, a little too late, that I’ve given him more than I ever meant to. I’ve given him a bigger peek behind the curtain of the last year of my life than I’ve given anyone else.
Still not the whole story. Still not her. Or the things that happened to me in the days after her passing. But enough to crack something.
Enough for him to see the outline of my grief, even if I haven’t handed him the name of it.
He scrubs a hand down his face. “Lina.”
“I’m fine,” I say quickly. Too quickly. “It’s not a big deal.”
“It is,” he says, and the words sound like they cost him something. “It is a big deal, and pretending it isn’t is how you ended up here.”
I look away again. This time toward the monitors. The beeping doesn’t bother me. I kind of like it.
One night, when Kara was sitting in the living room with me, she told me the only documentary she’d be willing to watch would be a new medical docu-series that had just been released. In it, there was a fact mentioned about how the human heart beats about 100,000 times per day.
It’s hard to grasp how much work your heart does to pump that amount of blood through your body until you see it on the monitor in front of you. On any regular day, the fact that your heart is beating fades into the background of everyday life.
Today is not a normal day, though.
Seeing my heartbeat recorded on the machine is a reminder that I’m still here. Still alive. Still trying.
“I don’t need a lecture,” I mutter. “I understand what the doctor told me. I don’t need you to reprimand me just the same.”
“You seriously think I could lecture you right now?” He shakes his head, more to himself than to me.
“You don’t have to tell me everything. I get that.
But you have to let me in enough to help.
You can’t keep throwing yourself off cliffs and call it coping, because I’m going to keep trying to catch you. ”
I shake my head just the same. “You can’t help me.”
Nobody can force me to sleep. There’s no comfort to be found in someone else. Not anymore. Not after the last time I tried—when closeness became its own kind of betrayal.
When sleep stopped feeling safe beside someone who said he loved me and proved it wrong in the same breath.
So now I run.
Because stopping means remembering. And remembering feels like trusting all over again.
“You don’t know that.”
I refuse to make eye contact with him. Even when I can feel his gaze burn into me.
“You know what would help me?” I ask quietly. Rhetorically. “If you forget this happened.”