Chapter 32 #3
“I feel like it’s just setting me up for failure when you’re expecting me to, like, not fuck this up. You gonna give me a gift the next time I make it to seven days? And the next time after that?”
“I get it,” he shrugged. “But if it was pointless you’d have relapsed already.”
I cringed at his word choice, and it must have shown on my face.
“You know how many times I relapsed in the first thirty days?”
I sifted through my memory of what he and Jae and mentioned previously. “Twice?”
He shook his head. “Three times. And another time when I finally made it to seven weeks. I had to start all over again. But look at me now. I get my one-year coin next month.”
I narrowed my eyes, “And did you get a reward every time you made it to seven days?”
He smiled, leaning to the side, holding me steady as he pulled his wallet out of his back pocket. I watched with curiosity as he opened his wallet and pulled out one of two coins the size of a poker chip.
“No, I didn’t receive a coin for one week. But I did get this one for 24-hours.”
He opened my hand and placed it on my palm. I picked it up, studying the silver coin.
“I know it doesn’t say one week on it, but more importantly I think it proves that you’re able to make it through one day at a time.
That’s all you need to worry about. Minute by minute, hour by hour.
One day at a time. You’ve made it through twenty-four hours clean and each day you can wake up reminding yourself of your commitment and that you’ve made it through another day. ”
I swallowed, and he held my face, pulling my chin up to look in his eyes. “If you relapse, you’ve got this coin as a reminder to focus on one day at a time.”
“Is that what you did?”
Enoch nodded. “It’s what I still do. It’s why it’s been living in my wallet for the last almost year.
But, I want you to have it.” I opened my mouth to protest but he but his thumb over my lips.
“I want you to have it. I’ve already replaced my coin in my wallet with my thirty-day coin.
” I looked into his wallet on his lap between us to see the red coin.
“I know it’s hard,” he said trapping my gaze again. “I know,” he implored. “But I will never be disappointed in your recovery if you relapse. And I will never abandon you because of it, no matter how tough things get.”
It took me several tries to swallow past the lump of emotion in my throat.
“I just thought that having this coin, it might be a reminder for you like it was for me.”
I sighed, my head dropping to rest against his forehead as I closed my eyes. “I almost fucked it all today. So many times.”
His hand slipped into my hair, holding me firmly in place. “Thinking about it doesn’t mean you’ve fucked things up. If that were the case, I’d have relapsed a million times in the last year.”
“Really?” I asked with disbelief.
“Yes. It’s never going to go away completely. The thoughts will always be there; you’ll just get better at ignoring them until one day you won’t even notice them.”
“You…you’ve thought about drinking?”
I braced for his response. Equally craving commiseration and to take away his pain.
“Yeah,” he breathed. “But I leaned into my support network and I didn’t drink. That’s the difference, baby. The thoughts aren’t inherently bad, it’s whether or not you act on them. That’s when it becomes a problem, when you can’t cope without acting on your compulsions.”
It didn’t feel right, it didn’t feel like I was getting ‘better’ when I still thought about cutting or hurting myself physically in any way more times than I could count in a day.
But I trusted Enoch. He’d managed to fight his own demons, one that had physical ramifications when he did decide to stop.
I wasn’t struggling through withdrawal like he had.
I wasn’t physically ill. It was all in my head.
The irritation, the inability to sit still without thinking about it, the intense sadness, the fact that I fucking missed it, fucking craved it.
“What are you thinking?”
I shrugged.
“Tell me.”
I ground my teeth, the coin digging into my palm as I clenched my fist.
“I feel stupid,” I whispered.
“Why?”
“Because it’s not real.”
“Why not?”
“Because…” I unfurled my fist, grazing my thumb over the surface of the coin. “Because it’s not alcohol or drugs. I don’t need a substance, it’s not chemical, it’s all in my head. I’m not sick outwardly, it’s literally all in my fucking head.”
Enoch sighed, pulling his head from mine to reach into a side pocket on his pants and retrieved his phone.
“What?” I asked, trying to read upside down as he opened a Google search.
He motioned for me to wait and I huffed, crossing my arms.
“When you’re not self-harming do you think about doing it?”
I closed my eyes to roll them discreetly before nodded, “Yes.”
“How often?”
“All the fucking time,” I muttered again.
“Have you had to increase the amount of times you self-harm to get the same outcome?”
“Yes,” I mumbled.
“Do you feel anxious, irritable, stressed or depressed when you try to stop self-harming?”
“Yes.”
“Do you spend time trying to hide your behavior from family or friends?”
“Yes.”
He lowered the phone, leveling me with a look that saw straight into my soul.
“Then, I hate to break it to you, but you have a very real behavioral addiction to self-harming. You’ve rewired the pathways in your brain that regulate dopamine to get a high when you self-harm.
You crave it, just like any addict craves their vice be it substances, gambling, sex, or self-harm.
And the compulsion to continue doing it is so strong that it feels impossible to stop, despite however hard you believe you want to stop.
You experience emotional withdrawal symptoms, just like every other addict, even like I did, because withdrawal isn’t just physical.
It might be all in your head, but it doesn’t mean it’s not real. ”
He tilted his phone to show me the article he was reading from.
“You can Google it yourself, but it’s a recognized problem, one that you unfortunately were genetically predisposed to with two addict parents. And it’s real. Requires real treatment, real support, and real empathy.”
I groaned under my breath, scrolling through the medical webpage.
“So, I’m an addict.”
“Yep,” he said nonchalantly.
I growled, dropping my head to his shoulder and he wrapped his arms around my back.
Fuck.
I’m an addict.
Apple didn’t fall far from the tree at fucking all. I feel like I’m still fucking attached to it. Might as well be the fucking tree.
“Welcome to the club.”
I scoffed, and he ran his hands up and down my back in a soothing motion.
“I know. It’s one no one wants to be in, but we’re exclusive as fuck and super clingy.
Once you’re in,” he sighed with a chuckle, “you’re in for life.
Which means, you’re not getting rid of me anytime soon, baby.
Not in this. And not in anything else that life throws our way.
We’ll get you clean. I promise it won’t feel this hard forever. ”
I sighed again, breathing in the scent of his cologne and relaxing further into his embrace.
We sat in silence for a while, until the sound of rain pelting the windows made us both jump.
Enoch chuckled, pulling me back by my hair to give me a kiss.
I melted against him, savoring the feeling of his soft lips, the taste of him, the way he tugged my hair enough to give me a jolt of excitement straight down to my core.
“So…I have a question,” I breathed against his mouth.
“What?”
“If I get a tattoo, is that gonna count against me since it’s pain.”
Enoch hummed in thought for a moment. “Are you doing it because you want to feel the pain, or because you want the tattoo?”
“I mean, I’ve been planning the tattoo for a while. It’s the one you saw when Cole was here. I didn’t plan to get it because I wanted to hurt myself. But I…I can’t lie and say that I won’t likely enjoy the pain a little bit.”
“Why do you usually cut?”
I frowned at the invasive question.
“To avoid feelings, right?” He prodded.
“Yeah.”
Enoch took a deep breath, and I watched as he considered his response, his dark brows bunching together slightly. I noticed the dark circles under his eyes. Has he slept since my nightmare on Saturday?
He finally nodded, tracing his finger over my tattooed forearm. “Then I think it’s okay to do this, so long as you’re not using it as a coping mechanism.”
I deflated with a sigh and nodded.
Enoch drew his finger over the coin still in my hand.
“Where you going to put it?”
I shrugged. “Have you always had yours in your wallet?”
Enoch nodded, “Yeah. I had the other coins as I earned them in all the places I frequented as visual reminders too. Around the house, my desk at work, my car, and my wallet. But I don’t feel the need for all those visual reminders anymore, and I just keep the one in my wallet.
I keep it next to my ID, as a visual barrier if I ever got to the point of paying for some alcohol. ”
My eyes bounced around the room.
“I think,” I paused, letting my eyes fall back to Enoch’s. “I think I need to keep it on me. Like in my pocket. It’s kind of a good fidget too.”
Enoch smiled with a nod in agreement. “If you want, I can drill a hole through it and you can put it on a chain, wear it like a necklace.”
I chewed my lip, looking down at the thin coin.
“Yeah, that’s actually a good idea. Can you do that for me?”
“Of course. I can bring it back tomorrow?”
“You sure you can keep sneaking away from your family? You don’t think they’re going to be suspicious?”
Enoch shook his head, his nose scrunching in a way that made me smile.
Fuck, I’d missed him so much. My chest swelled with emotion, the overwhelming urge to cry bubbling in my throat.
How the hell did I land this man? I feel like I’m stuck in some maladaptive daydream right now and I’m going to wake back up in hell at any second.
“For all they know, I could have a super long workday every day. It’s not a big deal.”
Enoch tucked the coin back into his wallet and leaned back on his palms to stare at me.
“So, your day was long. Was it a bad long or just a tiring long?”
I blew out a breath through puffed cheeks, shrugging.
“Mostly just tiring. I had therapy.”
“Yeah. How’s that going? Did you talk about the nightmare from the other day?”
“Yeah.”
Enoch just stared, waiting patiently for me to give more details.
“I agreed to seeing her twice a week with a commitment to actually talking about my past with her.”
“You weren’t before?”
I shook my head. “No, I…I didn’t want to. I still don’t want to, but I can’t keep living like this. I’m scared that I’m going to hurt you or do something worse that I can’t take back.”
Enoch nodded like he understood, but he clearly didn’t when he was fucking risking his life just being with me. Maybe I wasn’t the only one fucked in the head after all.
“So, does she think that talking about the past is going to help you stop having these episodes?”
“Yeah. She’s not really big on clinical diagnoses, like, she doesn’t like giving patients a label, but she says its PTSD and the only way to, I guess, ‘get over it’ for lack of a better explanation, is to remove the fear surrounding certain things.”
“Things?”
“Yeah. Triggers,” I mumbled. I hated that word. It’d lost its meaning when everyone started using it in everyday speech for anything that evoked any level of negative emotion.
“Right,” Enoch nodded. “Okay. Is there anything I can do?”
I sighed, pulled my hair over my shoulder, curling it around one of my fingers.
“I’m supposed to cut my hair. To face one of my fears.”
Enoch blinked, his eyes drifting to the long red strands that were still damp from my shower. “Oh. Well, I can’t say I’ve ever cut any girls’ hair before, but what can I do?”
I chuckled, rolling my eyes. “I don’t know, I don’t even know why I’m telling you about it. I mean,” I flicked my eyes to his, not wanting to offend him, “I just don’t want to bug you with my stuff any more than I already am.”
Enoch gave me an ‘I’m gonna pretend you didn’t just say that’ look and I rolled my eyes again.
“Anyways, I guess I should buy some proper hair scissors or something. Just thinking about cutting it makes me want to throw up and hide in a closet, but…I don’t know, maybe it won’t be as scary if I’m the one doing it. I just don’t want to fuck it up.”
“Well, there’s tons of YouTube videos we could watch together. Everyone was giving themselves haircuts during lockdown.”
“Yeah, but they were also in lockdown and didn’t have to worry about people seeing their terrible DIY haircuts.”
Enoch chuckled, “That’s fair. But if you just cut, like, a centimeter off, it shouldn’t be noticeable if it’s uneven.”
“Yeah, maybe. What about you? How was your day?”
“Long. I was tired too. I didn’t sleep well. I was stuck sharing a blow-up mattress with Jae and the thing didn’t last more than a couple of hours before it was flat as a pancake. Plus, I didn’t have my Shiloh to snuggle with, so sleep would’ve been futile anyways.”
I bit back a smile, pleased to hear that I wasn’t alone in missing him in bed with me.
It was strange to have become so comfortable with our routine in such a short amount of time.
I never imagined I’d ever be comfortable sharing a bed with anyone again, but with Enoch it just felt natural.
Aside from unlocking my new fear of accidentally murdering him during a sleepwalking panic attack.
“Where are you going to sleep tonight?”
“Eh. Probably just make up a bed of blankets on the floor.”
I scrunched my nose. “That sounds really uncomfortable.”
Enoch shrugged. “It’s only five more nights. I’ll survive.”
Enoch’s phone began vibrating against my leg on the mattress and we both eyed the screen. It was Rick.
“Shit,” he muttered.
“What’s wrong?”
“N-nothing. I just forgot to call him back yesterday and he’s probably worried.”
“Well, answer the call. I’ll give you privacy,” I said, crawling off of his lap.
Enoch gave me a reluctant pout before relenting and swiping to answer the call.
“Hey, Rick.”
Enoch’s voice muffled as I closed the door to the bedroom. I released a sigh, dropping my body down onto the couch. I flopped onto my back, staring up at the ceiling.
It did something to me, to be seen. To have someone crack open my chest and see all the darkness and have them still look at me the same.
One day at a time, Shiloh. One. Day. At. A. Time.