Chapter 16
SIXTEEN
AUGUST
She swipes at her tear-stained cheeks and I rush to the kitchenette and start the kettle.
Hot cocoa? What was I thinking? It’s the most juvenile thing that could have popped out of my mouth.
She probably meant tequila, dumbass. Fuck, I’m spending too much time around a four-year-old.
But also, hot chocolate is much safer than tequila.
Really, it’s the perfect solution. Comfort via cocoa.
Not by making more mistakes getting sweaty and licking each other’s bodies all over till we howl at the moon.
My eyes inadvertently glance over at the full-size bed at the back of the RV, before I jerk them back to the task at hand.
At least I made the bed this morning, Jesus.
While I pull out the cocoa packets and get the water going, Lennon wanders around my RV. Sketches cover all available wall space. I’m always working out new ideas and sometimes it helps to just have them saturating my space while I’m working on something.
But now, glancing around, fuck, it looks like some obsessive crazy-guy conspiracy theory shit. I haven’t had anyone in my space in more than a minute.
But Lennon’s mouth just drops open, like the sketches briefly distract from her upset as she walks around, hands occasionally lifting but always stopping before actually touching anything.
“God, you’re so talented, August.”
Okay, well, that’s not the reaction I expected.
“You gotta stop with all that,” I joke, shaking my head, because she’s always unexpected, isn’t she? “Else I’m gonna get fat-headed with ego.”
“Never,” she smiles back. “You’re too gifted. You deserve a big ego.”
Warmth flushes through my whole body. Mack tells me my sketches are good sometimes, but Lennon’s unabashed praise makes me glow in an entirely different way.
I glance at the electric kettle. Almost boiling. “You’re pretty damn amazing yourself, you know that?”
Understatement of the year.
But she scoffs. “Me?”
Is she serious? “Are you kidding? The way you stood up to Jake out there?” I reach for the coffee cups in my high cupboard. “I’ve never been able to—” I blow out a big expulsion of air. “He was always just so… big.”
I hear how ridiculous it sounds as soon as it’s out of my mouth. And yet it’s the only way I know how to explain it. He was my big brother. And what he said about the world always made sense… until it didn’t. And then everything just got so scrambled up, nothing made sense anymore.
Lennon slips into the little booth seat at the table in the kitchenette. “Can I ask what happened with you two? What was it like growing up?” Then she looks down at the table. “God, I’m sorry. You’ve had a long night. You don’t have to tell me.”
“No,” I suck in a deep breath as I set her cup down in front of her along with her cocoa packet and sit down myself, ripping off the top and tipping the powder into mine. She does the same with hers while we wait for the kettle to finish heating the water.
“At first, I think it was like anybody else’s childhood. I mean, Jake was six years older, so we weren’t exactly close. But I still idolized him, ya know? The way little brothers do.”
My thumb runs over the ceramic rim of the coffee mug. “I was definitely an oopsies baby. Mom clearly wasn’t interested in having another kid. I think Dad talked her into it. Or maybe it was that classic flawed logic of, maybe a baby will save the marriage and make us happy again.”
“But it didn’t,” Lennon states the obvious.
“Naw. And Dad…” I stand back up restlessly and go pull out extra marshmallows from one of the cabinets as the kettle starts whistling. “It didn’t make Dad any better.”
“He was sick?”
“They called it manic depression back then.”
I swallow hard, as I bring the steaming kettle back to the table. “Now we call it Bipolar Disorder. They didn’t know as much about it at the time. There are much better ways to manage it now.”
I wince as soon as I say it, because I’m a coward.
Tell her.
Let her be pushed away like everyone is once it’s disclosed. Fuck, it’s not like she didn’t see it in action tonight.
I set the kettle on the table without pouring any into the cups. I don’t want her to feel like she has to stay for the actual cocoa after I tell her this.
I sit back down and just blurt it out:
“My father committed suicide when I was fifteen. I found his body, and it fucked me up for a while. I started drinking and I got in a couple fights at school. Which made Mom decide I was just like Dad. My drawings scared her.”
I shrug. “She said I scared her. She’d always thought Dad just needed Jesus, not medication.
She didn’t believe in mental illness. She thought it was demonic activity.
Jake took her side and they convinced me that was what was happening to me.
That if I’d believed harder or trusted Jesus more I could have fought back against the demons inside me. ”
“August! Oh my God!” Lennon’s hand flies to cover her mouth. “You were fifteen? That’s just a kid!”
“I’d just turned sixteen when Mom sent me away to a religious wilderness camp. But that place was pretty much torture. Like, they were big on discipline. They’d do sleep deprivation and military drills where they’d just send you on these multi-day marches and other weird shit like that.”
I shoot a glance over to Lennon’s still-horrified face. “Oh my gosh, I’ve seen documentaries about places like that. They’re terrifying!”
“Yeah. It made it all much, much worse. If I ever had a chance of not developing Bipolar myself, that place did me in.”
I cling hard to my mug.
Chill, smooth ceramic under my fingers. Cushioned seat under my bottom. Hard floor under my boots.
I’m here, still grounded in my body.
Even as I reiterate the hardest thing: “So yeah. I do have Bipolar Disorder. Mom wasn’t wrong about me being like Dad. Not demons, but… It’s why Owen’s mom and I aren’t together anymore. I’m pretty shit at stable relationships.”
I force myself to look up at Lennon, my forehead feeling so, so heavy from everything tonight and the constant weight of this… fucking exhausting existence. “So it really is better for you to run while you can. You just escaped my brother.”
The more time I spend with her… I’m not sure I’ll be strong enough to push her away. I need her to be strong for the both of us.
“Please, Lennon.” My voice breaks around her name. “Get as far away as you can from this fucking family.”
“No.”
My eyes close. I expected the answer but hoped for a different one anyway.
She grabs one hand across the table.
“You are not your brother. Or your mother or your father. And you are not every ugly thing they taught you to believe about yourself.”
“Lennon—”
“Don’t you dare ask me to run from the only person who has ever made me feel safe,” she whispers.
“But didn’t you hear me?” I shake my head. “About what I have? I should’ve told you straight up when we first met. Before things got… entangled.”
Her lips pucker a little as she thinks it through.
Then she picks up the kettle and pours the steaming water into her cup with the cocoa in it, stirring it with the little spoon I brought with the mugs.
Which makes my chest leap with happiness, even though it shouldn’t. Does that mean she’s staying a little longer? Long enough to drink cocoa at least?
God, I’m trying so hard to do the right thing here.
“What do you do for it?” she asks, casually stirring her cocoa like I’m not waging a battle in my head every second she stays in the warm, enclosed space of my RV. “Is there like medication you can take?”
I unclip the mini-marshmallows and offer her the bag. Only gentlemanly and it’s something to do with my hands.
“The marshmallows that come with it disappear so fast,” I say. “Sorry, I spend most of my time around a four-year-old and he gets very serious about his marshmallow-to-cocoa ratio.”
She grins and pours in several mini-mallows.
I pour the hot water into my cup and do the same. Usually I load mine up with marshmallows just like Owen—I’m an absolute sugar fiend—but I’m trying to look like a serious person, considering the conversation.
“To answer your question, yeah, I take medication. Religiously. And I go to therapy every week and I work my daily routine like my life depends on it. I wake up, get breakfast and coffee, go work out, meditate, then go to work. Another workout session at the end of the day before bed. Swimming when I’m here, or jogging when I’m with Owen. ”
“Well that doesn’t sound so bad,” Lennon says, taking a sip of her cocoa, eyes bright.
And I sigh, looking down at the table.
“It’s only been the last couple years I’ve been more regulated and stable.
I met Owen’s mother at that shitty Wilderness camp.
Her parents definitely regret sending her, if only ’cause she met me there.
I pretty much ruined her life for the next six years between one manic drug-fueled spree after another, with truly awful depressive episodes in between.
It was a real shit-show. Frankly, I was happy for her when she escaped me. ”
“Do you still do drugs?”
I wrap my hands around my mug. Hot ceramic. Solid ground beneath my feet. I’m here in this present moment, and I can face difficult things without needing an escape.
“No. I quit after Owen was born. And I finally got diagnosed and started on meds. It was too late for Priscilla and me by then. I’d done too much damage. It’s been a slow road to get to where I am.”
I force myself to look up at her, because she deserves to know the truth, and not some skimmed-over or prettied-up version.
“But this is something I’ll deal with for my whole life.
It doesn’t go away. I have a mood disorder and I try to practice radical acceptance of that.
During my hypomanic episodes, I feel invincible and artistically explosive with ideas.
During depressive times, my thoughts feel like molasses and it’s difficult to get out of bed some days. ”
I rub circles on my warm mug with my thumb again. “But with the meds, and my routine, it’s like being on the kiddie coaster instead of The Texas Cyclone, ya know?”
She smiles. “I always liked the kiddie coasters best.”
I shake my head and chuckle. “I’m an adrenaline junkie so I always wanted the giants. But as far as my real life is concerned, kiddie coasters all the way. I’ve got Owen. My work. I’m happy-ish.”
She smiles sideways, a small wrinkle in her brow. “Happy-ish?”
“I don’t know.” I shrug. “Life’s kinda just a series of absurdities, right? We enjoy the ones we can?”
She laughs at that, full out. “You are refreshing to talk to, do you know that? And thank you for sharing all you did. You didn’t have to, but I feel honored that you felt comfortable to with me.”
“Well thank you for… everything tonight. I’m so sorry for my brother.” I full body cringe. “And then how I just… I shouldn’t have come out at all. You clearly had it handled.”
She’s drinking her cocoa, but she sets it down and reaches across the small table to put her hand on mine. “I’m glad you did. It felt really good to have backup.”
Her touch sends electricity all along my nerve endings.
Which is when it fully clocks for me that I have a gorgeous, compassionate and terrifyingly sexy woman all alone with me in an enclosed space that is way too small for the suddenly very large feelings rocketing through me on all cylinders.
As if the same thing has just occurred to her, she takes another long swig of cocoa and sets it down before abruptly standing and flashing a smile that is the first I’ve ever seen on her that seems forced or fake.
Shit.
I’ve made her feel awkward.
And yet still, she’s the kind of woman who wanted to make sure I felt alright after disclosing my trauma, reassuring me that I’m not my family. I should have been taking care of her after fuckface showed up like that and called the cops on her.
I drag my hand down the back of my hair, wishing I had a redo on the entire night.
“I’ll walk you to the door.” I gesture gallantly at the door to the RV that is just three steps away from the kitchenette.
“How very gentlemanly of you,” she says, playing along.
But when she gets there, one hand on the handle, she pauses and turns around.
Except I expected her to keep going, so she turns right into my chest, and suddenly we’re face to face, only inches apart.
She sucks in a quick inhale, her eyes searching mine.
“Thanks for the hot cocoa and… everything.” She swallows hard, eyes still pinging back and forth between mine.
Which makes me swallow hard, because everything inside me is drawn to everything this woman is, with such a powerful magnetism I can’t take the step backwards that I ought to.
There’s a voice in the back of my head shouting: make responsible decisions.
Instead, I freeze.
Both of us breathing in and out, chests almost touching.
Eyes dancing with desperate longing.
I’m not sure which of us breaks first, or if it’s literally both of us at the same time.
But the next thing I know, her arms are flung around my neck, and my hands are under her ass hiking her up into my arms.
My lips crash hungrily into hers and all I can think now is: fuck, nothing has ever felt more right.