Loverboy

Milo

ONE OF THE perks that comes with failing to kill yourself is seeing who shows up for you.

This wasn’t my first time, and it wouldn’t be my last. If I could stop myself from self-destructing like this every time I was faced with the possibility of being alone, I would.

But the thought of being abandoned, of having to start all over again—it made me fucking sick, and it wasn’t just the entire bottle of pills I’d swallowed.

By the time the nurse made another round, my face was buried deep in a metal bowl twice the size of my head, already brimming with vomit. My eyes burned, but there were no more tears, only spurts of bile clawing up my throat. There couldn’t be much left.

My insides were raw.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her standing there, unblinking, entirely unbothered by the mess I’d made. At first, I was embarrassed. But not anymore. I was only numb, and she’d probably seen a dozen losers like me before.

“Next time, you should pick something that acts faster.” Her shoulders shook with a quiet laugh. “Acetaminophen works slowly. Shuts down all your organs first.”

What the fuck. Who says that to someone?

My throat seized, and another wave shot up. Not empty yet. I was a little over twenty-four gruelling hours in, but at least it had stopped coming up a vibrant Tylenol red. A win was a win.

She checked my IV and then left me alone again, following a distant beeping sound beyond the curtain. It was just me and my bowl of puke once more.

It’d been hours since the psychiatrist stopped in. Each time he did, I was welcomed with a grimace and the promise that he’d come back later. I’d managed to avoid him this long by rotating between vomiting and passing out, but time was running out.

I didn’t need his assessment. I still wanted to die.

As the hours dragged on and left me with what I was convinced were the early signs of bedsores, I came to understand that nurses had a remarkably dark sense of humour.

It wasn’t some medical drama trope I saw on television.

The IV working to purge the shit out of my system had started to leak at one point, and when I mentioned it to another nurse, he joked about me sabotaging his master plan.

Master plan to what? Every true crime podcast I’d listened to about angels of death in hospitals whizzed through my mind, and this guy thought it was fucking funny.

My phone lit up on the bedside next to me, the vibration making my chest tighten. Maybe Sofia had answered one of my dozens of text messages. Maybe she was sorry, and my near-death experience changed her mind. I’d lie and tell her I could be different.

I could be less like me.

Jasper: Did you hurt yourself?

I nearly crushed the phone. It wasn’t her.

I was so unlovable that she didn’t care, not even about something as serious as this.

In the end, all she wanted was to get the fuck away from me.

I couldn’t blame her. I fantasized, briefly, about tearing out the IV and letting the entire pharmacy of pills in my system finish the job.

Jasper: What did you take?

My worst-case scenario had come to life. The only explanation was that my so-called best friend had broken his promise to keep his mouth shut by telling my younger brother. If I weren’t dead now, I would be later.

Fuck you, Oliver.

Hours of rehearsing what I might say to Jasper evaporated in an instant, my thumbs paralyzed over the keyboard.

There wasn’t a single thing that made up for what I’d done, not after he spent the last two nights trying to console me about the breakup over text.

I’d promised I’d let him know if I needed anything.

Spoiler: I never did.

Milo: Hi.

It was the only response I could muster.

The two-letter apology had to be enough to make him forgive me.

I needed him to see past my inability to communicate and read between the lines, to know that I was alive and sorry, so fucking sorry for making myself into another mess for him to clean up.

Like always. He never complained, even when we were teenagers.

Jasper: Milo.

Only my name. He was scolding me, reprimanding me, judging me—worrying about me. I didn’t answer, at least not with any words. My thumb hovered over the button to share my location for a moment that stretched into eternity before I pressed it.

“Fuck,” I grumbled. I dropped my phone onto the bed and threaded my fingers into my hair, yanking the bleach-abused strands to punish myself. My eyes flitted to the phone as it lit up again, the little chime making my heart skip.

I didn’t need to look.

Jasper: I’m coming.

The hours I spent convincing the staff to discharge me while Jasper took his sweet ass time getting there were hell.

I had to swallow my distaste for mental health professionals and speak to the psychiatrist, play along and pretend I didn’t want to get out of there and walk in front of the first bus I saw.

On the plus side, I wasn’t throwing up anymore.

“Do you have a plan?” The psychiatrist tapped his notepad rhythmically with a pen, and my head throbbed with the beat.

“A plan for what?” I fought the urge to roll my eyes into the back of my goddamn skull. I knew what plan he was talking about. I’d been asked this question a hundred times by every professional at least once—school counsellors, therapists, and nurses included.

“For hurting yourself if you get discharged today,” he clarified, straightening to stare at me critically, undoubtedly looking to make me crack.

“Nope. My brother’s gonna come pick me up, and we’ll probably joke all night about this whole thing.” I winced. Idiot.

“So you don’t have a plan of action, and you do have support. That’s good.” He plucked the positives out with obnoxious ease.

I was envious of his ability to do that.

My brain didn’t operate that way. No, instead, I was stuck with picking everything apart in search of something negative.

Who the fuck planned this sort of thing, anyway?

Were there people out there meticulously plotting their suicides?

If I wanted to die, I was going to die. No preamble.

Fuck the foreplay, put me out of my goddamn misery.

“Nope, no plans to do this again. The vomiting was a pretty good deterrent,” I joked darkly, finally meeting his gaze. I’d avoided looking at him directly the entire conversation, but I needed to be convincing now.

“I bet.” He smiled at me, but it felt rehearsed. “Well, let’s complete this assessment now that you’re feeling a little better, and then we’ll see about getting you discharged. I’m happy that someone is going to take you home.”

My stomach twisted with apprehension as he handed me a clipboard like he was extending an olive branch. I took it reluctantly, and it was as bad as I’d imagined. Pointless, stupid questions. Who would answer these honestly if it meant being stuck in here?

After filling out the sheet with the answers to avoid a grippy-sock vacation, I handed it back to him and waited with bated breath for his determination. I needed to leave. I needed to get back to… nothing.

No one was waiting for me.

“Alright. I think we’ll be able to get you out of here sooner rather than later,” he said, tapping the paper with that stupid pen again. “The only catch is that you’ll have to agree to an in-home visit with a therapist.”

Fuck.

After I agreed to the terms, he handed me a stack of printed resources from his little briefcase and promptly left the room.

Hurrying onto the next mentally unstable patient, if I had to guess.

We were a dime a dozen, and my case wasn’t anything special.

The interaction exhausted me, and the only thing I wanted to do was sleep.

It was one of the ways I always coped. When I was a teenager, sleeping pills solved all of my problems. When I got the call that my sister had overdosed and died in her sleep after a rave?

I took a pill. When my first girlfriend left me?

I took a pill. Forget the violent full-body shakes and nausea; it was easier to avoid it all entirely.

At least when I wasn’t awake, I couldn’t feel anything.

Once the psychiatrist’s footsteps faded down the hall, I slid the stack of papers underneath the pillow so I could conveniently forget to take them home with me later, and then pulled the thin sheet over my head, melting into the bed.

Everything smelled like puke. I wished somebody would end it for me right then and there so I wouldn’t have to go home to my empty apartment.

I’d never been alone. I moved straight out of Mom’s house and into a new place with my girlfriend, so I had never truly lived by myself.

Grow up, Milo.

Sofia’s parting words were burning a hole inside of me. Actually, it might have been the bile eating away at my stomach lining and threatening future ulcers.

How was I going to sleep in my bed? Who was going to pet my hair? How was I supposed to remember to eat? Who was going to make sure I folded my laundry? A fresh wave of panic crept past my lips and expanded in my throat, suffocating me with dread.

I thought I’d grown, become more independent. But I hadn’t. I was barely even a person, let alone a man.

“I told you to talk to me.” The sheet was suddenly ripped off me, the bright lights scorching my tear-swollen eyes. The panic that had been strangling me abruptly fell flat, and all that was left was a silent prayer.

Don’t fucking look at me, please, please don’t fucking look at me.

My brother loomed over me, the weight of his hand pressing down into the bed next to me like an accusation.

As my eyes adjusted to the fluorescent lighting again, I realized quickly that looking at him was a mistake.

Gone was the playful, sarcastic, and teasing brother I knew.

In his place was the same frightened teenager who didn’t know what to do when I’d spent a few months on a self-destructive bender over a girl who took everything I had on her way out of my life.

I was only fifteen then, the first time I noticed how faulty the wiring in my brain was, and would always be. I was twenty-four now, and the pieces should have come together. Where was my defining moment of coming into adulthood? Why was I always ten steps behind everyone else?

I was dead weight.

“I know.” I swallowed past the lump in my throat.

“I told you I was right here,” Jasper rasped. His knuckles turned white from the way he fisted the sheet. “For anything. Anything at all. You just had to call.”

“I didn’t want to bother—”

“You could never bother me,” he snapped. “Not with something like this.”

My bottom lip quivered. “I’m sorry.”

The moment was too charged. I thought I might die right there, his agonizing expression the last thing I’d ever see. If Oliver never said anything, I could’ve gone home, let the dust settle, and then reached out.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way.

Painful silence rolled over us, and Jasper withdrew from my bedside. He rubbed his hands over his face and sighed before removing his glasses to wipe the lenses on his sweater. Once he regained his composure, he looked my way again.

“Alright, come on.” He sliced through the tension with gentle teasing. “Let’s get out of here, loverboy. Before the narcotics start going missing.”

“Things do go missing in hospitals.” I grinned and sat up to face him.

It wasn’t our first time in the hospital together. It was our second or third. The last time, I’d gone because I actually wanted help. I remembered it clearly. The nurse took one look at my arms and asked me if I knew that I couldn’t kill myself by cutting where I had.

I never asked for help again.

Even though he’d resumed our usual joking around, Jasper’s thick brows were knit together with concern, and his jaw was clenched.

Deep brown eyes peered at me from behind his glasses, too easy to read despite the way he tried to keep the conversation light.

Being serious was hard for him—for me, for us. It was a space we didn’t navigate well.

He pushed his damp, dishevelled hair back and out of his face, and it was evident from the way some of those chestnut strands clung stubbornly to his cheeks that he’d hurried here. The guilt hit me like a freight train.

“No more being a fucking idiot,” he said sharply, sounding desperate even as he gave me a stern look. “Please, Milo.”

“I’ll try.”

Liar.