23. Ben
TWENTY-THREE
BEN
Below Rock Bottom
My stomach was growling, my hair was greasy, and I needed to pee.
But I still couldn’t get up.
I stared up at the ceiling, unblinking but also unseeing, lost to the depths of my mind.
I needed to get up. I needed to feed myself and my kids. But I couldn’t.
Eventually I would. I couldn’t let my children go hungry, but that would be the only thing to rouse me to move. Well, that and maybe wetting myself.
God, I was fucking pathetic. Things were finally going right for me, and I was letting it all crumble between my fingers.
I managed to text Giselle three times a day, as was our usual, but that was all I could manage.
She kept trying to reach out, and while I desperately wanted to bask in her presence, I also couldn’t let her see me so fucking pathetic.
I wasn’t worthy of happiness.
I’d thought I was ready for it, that I’d found a way to honor those I’d lost and move forward for me and my kids. What an idiot.
To think that it all had started with a simple change of the calendar. One month sliding into another like they were permanently doomed to do. And just like that, everything hit me all over again.
It started with the night terrors. I had three in one night, then another two back-to-back when I’d tried to go back to sleep, and one in the middle of the day when I’d lain down with Veronica, exhausted by the terror my subconscious cooked up.
But it had progressed from there, getting worse and worse with each day. I was chained to the past, and those bonds were growing ever shorter, pulling me back into that festering blood I’d only recently begun to escape from.
I was ruining everything. It seemed to be the cycle of my life. I truly deserved nothing. I was too weak to ever protect what I truly wanted.
I wanted to cry, because at least crying would be expressing some sort of emotion rather than having them boil me alive from the inside out, but my body wouldn’t let me. I was my own worst enemy, unable to allow myself the most simple catharsis. I was caught in a hell of my own making, and?—
Did I smell bacon?
The thought that Benny was trying to cook on his own had me vaulting out of bed. I nearly stumbled from the head rush, and I belatedly remembered I hadn’t had anything to eat or even drink in over a day, which was fairly detrimental to a shifter with a high metabolism.
I regained my footing and ran down the stairs.
Although I didn’t care one lick about myself and often wished I could escape from the curse of existence, the thought that my child was so desperate that he was cooking unsupervised was the override I needed.
All that grease splatter could start a fire.
When I got to the kitchen, I stopped in my tracks. Benny wasn’t cooking. Standing in front of the stove, dressed in a soft sweater dress with my apron over it, was a familiar willowy figure.
“Giselle?” My throat sounded raw, as if I had been screaming endlessly for the past few days, and my voice was barely more than a croak.
“Hey there!” she said, using tongs to set the pieces of bacon on a cooling rack.
It was only then that I realized she’d pulled them from a baking sheet from the oven rather than frying them in a pan.
Huh. I hadn’t known it could be done that way.
“I wasn’t planning on waking you until the food was ready, so there’s still a bit of time.
Would you like to take a shower in the meantime?
I’ll have it all plated up by the time you’re done. ”
I waited a moment for what had to be another night terror to shift into something truly horrific, but her pleasant gaze remained on me, like everything was normal and I wasn’t a disgusting, greasy, useless shell of an alpha standing in front of her.
“Where’s Natalie?” I asked finally.
“Off getting a well-earned spa day. I called in some favors and managed to land her a mani-pedi as well as a hot stone massage and a facial. That you’re paying for, of course. An alpha provides and all that, so I was sure you wouldn’t mind.”
My inner wolf raised his head for the first time in days; he’d been so buried under the flashbacks of everything I wanted to forget. No, not forget, just not be constantly haunted by.
Provide?
It was like a beacon of light in my primal instincts, but it still wasn’t quite enough.
I could still hear the gurgling in Jon’s chest as he drew his last, ragged breath.
I could still smell the smoldering embers mixed with stale blood of my home when I returned.
I could still feel my wife’s cold, clammy skin against my palms. There was no escape from it. No respite.
I thought that I had found it in Giselle, but that had just been a momentary reprieve, making me remember what it was like to be content, to be happy, to have hope, only to rip it all away again.
“What the hell are you doing?” I asked without an ounce of passion in my voice.
It was flat. Almost lifeless. It had taken an extraordinary amount of effort to text her the few times I had, but I wasn’t an idiot.
I knew she could tell something was wrong; I just couldn’t bring myself to explain it to her.
I wasn’t sure if I even had the words, let alone the energy to type them all out.
“Making breakfast,” she said as if everything was perfectly normal. Which it wasn’t. I didn’t think that normal was something that I could ever have again.
“ Why?”
“Because one of my students asked for help. Isn’t that right, Benny?”
I finally looked over to the kitchen island and realized my son was sitting there, Veronica on the floor at his feet, playing cars and unicorns. I never was quite solid on what the rules of that game were, but Veronica seemed to know them pretty well.
“You asked her here?” I said shakily. While I knew that I looked a mess, I’d made sure that my kids had meals whenever they needed, as well as help with their homework, with Natalie pitching in as well. I thought that that might have been enough to fool them, but clearly, I was an idiot.
“Yeah, Daddy, I missed her.”
I missed her too.
The realization startled me, because I was surprised there was room for anything other than anguish within my chest. I was being torn in two directions.
The pain, the trauma, the memories all wanted me to rot in what my failure had caused, to never move on, to never live a full life.
But my children, my darling children, needed me to live.
And for the first time, I really wanted to.
I had things I was looking forward to. Dreams that didn’t just revolve around milestones in Benny’s and Veronica’s lives.
I thought I had made the choice that night Giselle and I had shared together, bodies entangled like young lovers. I didn’t expect my trauma to rebound ten times worse.
“We can talk later,” Giselle said, her voice turning to honey. Her hand alighted on my shoulder, and my wolf wanted nothing more than to rub his head against the touch. “For now, how about you go take that shower?”
I hadn’t been able to bring myself to bathe since the beginning of the month, but with Giselle and Benny both looking at me with such hope and trepidation in their eyes, I finally found the wherewithal to try it.
“Yeah. Shower.”
Not exactly Shakespeare, but it got the point across, and I headed back upstairs to at least try recovering my hygiene just a bit.
I was in a bit of a daze as I ascended the stairs, shucked off my sweat-soaked clothes, and got under the spray of the shower. It was as hot as I could make it, and although I first entered begrudgingly, it rapidly became a physical revelation.
While a hot shower couldn’t fix all my problems, it definitely helped. I stood there for what felt like an eternity, letting the water wash away the top layer of filth and thaw the frigid iciness in my chest.
Eventually, the logical part of my brain decided to make a peep, demanding that I wash myself before the water ran cold. I lathered myself up, scrubbing my skin hard enough to make it feel pinkish and new.
I went from dreading a shower to not wanting to leave, and I might have stayed in there until every single ounce of molten liquid was used up, but eventually the delicious aromas filling the air got the better of my stomach, and I realized just how fucking hungry I was.
I hadn’t wanted to eat before because not only was I too exhausted to do so, but because the pain of an empty stomach felt like an appropriate punishment for surviving. But I could suffer for eternity and it wouldn’t be enough.
It could never be enough.
I went downstairs dressed in loose-fitting sweatpants and an old, worn pajama shirt, but at least both were clean. God, I must have smelled awful before.
“Here you are!” Giselle said, cheerfully handing me a plate loaded with tater tots, bacon, sausage, English muffins with jam and cream cheese, and four eggs. “There’s more on the stove if you like, but only so much would fit on a plate, you know?”
She put a much more reasonable serving of food in front of Benny, before picking Veronica up and getting her situated in her highchair.
Truth be told, my daughter was getting to the age and developmental skills where she could transition to a booster seat, but the thought made my head spin.
How had so much time passed and yet none at all?
Sometimes it felt like the massacre was only a month ago, and it took looking at how much my kids had grown to realize we were approaching two years.
Soon, we were all sitting and eating. Giselle fed Veronica between bites, and for a moment, I pretended I could have a happy life. A normal life. But any time I started to believe it a little too much, I heard the cries of my pack again, always beckoning me towards what I couldn’t escape.