Chapter 16 Easton #2
“Fuck it,” I announce, and before I can change my mind, before Elijah can even ask what it is that I’m abandoning, I jump off the moat wall into the water.
I go under fast. The wall wasn’t high, but it was a big enough jump that there’d have been no way to protect my precious five-hundred-dollar keratin and...I just don’t care.
I’m so over caring.
The water is warm and delicious. I kick my way to the surface and Elijah is standing there with the widest grin on his face. “You just jumped in with your clothes still on.”
“I noticed that, actually,” I reply, pulling the T-shirt overhead and flinging it toward him. The shorts covering my bikini bottoms are next.
“Little wild island girl,” he says. “I knew she was still in there somewhere.”
I’d forgotten he used to call me that. I’d forgotten how much I loved it, and the way it made me feel like all my quirks and my recklessness would eventually find a home, someone to shelter them, adore them, rather than trying to shame me out of them the way my mother did, or beat them out of me the way my father did.
“Throw me a snorkel,” I reply, fighting a smile of my own.
He reaches into the bag the pilot gave him and sends the items into the water one by one—fins, then mask, then snorkel.
He puts his own fins on while standing at the wall, which is definitely the smarter way to do it, then drops all our stuff and jumps in to join me.
“How’s it feel?” he asks when he surfaces.
Free. It feels free, and I feel free, for the first time in way too many years.
We snorkel for hours. I’m unwilling to get out of the water long enough to eat, or to drink, and with every second, it’s as if I’m being restored. As if I’ve found some vital piece of myself I’d walled off so long that I nearly suffocated it to death.
“You know how much you love this?” Elijah asks, floating on his back. “You haven’t brought up all the things you’re not supposed to discuss even once since we arrived.”
I grin at him. “I decided to save all of them up for my maid-of-honor speech. It’s going to be entirely about you and your flaws.”
He laughs, then glances at his watch. “I really hate to say this, but we’d better go dry off.”
We swim to where the water gets shallow and wade to the wall. Elijah goes to get our bags and the clothes he spread over the wall’s edge to dry, and I sit with my face toward the sun, feeling it burn off the water. I release a wide yawn and my jaw doesn’t pop, for once.
“Sleepy again?” Elijah asks, handing me a towel.
I press it to my face. “Putting up with your grandmother would exhaust anyone. How did your grandfather die, by the way? Did he just sigh heavily and expire, as if he’d given up?”
Elijah rolls his eyes. “You’re the doctor. Why do you think you’re so tired?”
I shake my head. The most obvious culprit would be anemia, except I have a disorder that causes my iron levels to go high, not low, which is why I normally avoid steak houses. Possibly hypothyroidism, but I’ve got none of the other symptoms. “I think it’s your grandmother.”
“You want to hear my theory?” he asks, taking a seat beside me, hanging his long legs over the wall.
Before I can say not really, he continues.
“I think that going through a breakup and worrying about your career at the same time is a significant hit. I’ve had that happen before—enough shit occurs at once and your body shuts down the way it would if you had the flu. ”
I laugh. “There’s no way that some dumb temporary breakup is hitting me like the flu.”
He looks like he wants to argue, but simply frowns and glances away.
“Out with it, Elijah,” I demand. “I can see you over there killing yourself to keep something in.”
His shoulders settle. “You were always like this—something awful would happen to you, like the stuff your dad did, or your mom leaving, or the shit kids said at school, and you’d just shrug it off. For the whole time I’ve known you, no matter what happens, you don’t react.”
He’s wrong. After he ended things, I was so numb I could barely shuffle across the sand.
I have almost no memory of the walk home, or how I got to my bed, though I remember I remained there for three days straight, too sick to eat.
It felt like I would drown in my grief. Eventually I just had to shut the feeling off entirely.
“You can’t make good decisions when you’re upset,” I argue. “What good would it have done for me to sit around crying when Thomas broke up with me?”
“The benefit,” he says, reaching into the cooler and thrusting a soda in my hands, “would be that you aren’t repressing shit until it makes you sick.
So that you’re not exhausted and pale and way too fucking thin.
You would just claim you’re being stoic.
But I think maybe you’ve got a little, uh, PTSD. ”
I’d laugh outright, but isn’t that what the therapist at school told me too?
I saw her only a few times, right after my life fell apart.
But when she started talking about PTSD, I stopped listening.
It seemed like too huge a problem for me to tackle, like something that would take years when I simply wanted to be set on my feet.
Hearing it again, five years later, makes it register. Maybe I’ve been siphoning off dopamine I didn’t have to spare for so long that I stopped even noticing it was happening.
“So why is it all coming up now, if that’s the case?” I demand. “I had one stressful night a week ago. It just doesn’t make sense that I’m still sleeping it off.”
He shrugs. “You’d be more of an expert than I would,” he says. “Maybe it’s that you’re finally able to relax?”
Perhaps. Or maybe it’s just that it wasn’t until I was here with Elijah that I finally felt safe and whole.
Which is ironic, since he’s the one who broke me.