Page 133 of Unmanageable

This is the one thing I was never trained for.

There is no playbook for the slow-motion car crash of the human mind. There is no precedent to cite when a man’s history is being bleached white by a disease that doesn’t care about his legacy.

No arbitration clause in the world can fix a brain that is systematically erasing its own blueprints.

Cash looks like he’s trying to physically hold onto a ghost, his shoulders trembling with the effort of staying upright for a man who is already halfway out the door.

His shirt is wrinkled, his eyes are bloodshot, and he looks… diminished. Like the world is finally too heavy for the Golden Boy to carry.

I watch his thumb move across his father’s knuckles. It’s the same small, rhythmic circle he was making against my shoulder last night while we were talking about Gary and Bernadette’s lives.

I love him.

It’s not the fun, dangerous kind of love we were playing with under the highway bridges or against the marble counter in Denver.

It’s this—this gray, quiet, suffocating weight in the room.

I love the way his shoulders look when they’re broken down. I love the fact that he’s too stubborn to leave the chair even though his dad doesn’t know who he is.

I love the whole messy, complicated, terrifying package of him, legal boundaries and agency rules be damned.

Mrs. O’Connell looks up from her son’s hair and catches me watching them. She reaches out one hand toward me, leaving her other arm around Cash’s neck.

“Come here, sweetie,” she says softly. “There’s room.”

I don’t hesitate this time. I walk across the cold linoleum, my sneakers making a faint sticky sound against the floor, and I stop right behind Cash’s chair. I place one hand on the small of his back and I let my other hand find his mother’s fingers.

Cash doesn’t look up, but when my hand touches his spine, his breathing shifts. The sharp hitches in his chest slow down just a fraction, his body leaning back just enough to press his weight against my palm.

I love him.

But I don’t say it. I can’t. The words are too big for this small room, and right now, Cash doesn’t need a girl telling him she loves him while his father is disappearing into the ceiling tiles.

He needs an anchor. He needs someone who can look at the charts and the doctors and the billable hours without losing their mind.

So I keep my mouth shut.

I stay by the bed, my hand flat against his back, the word love sitting under my tongue like an unexploded shell, heavy and dangerous and completely silent.

38

Scottie-girl

It’s quiet.

It’s the kind of suffocating atmosphere that makes you want to stop breathing entirely, just so you don’t disturb the jagged edges of grief hanging in the air.

And then, of course, the quiet ends.

“I’m telling you, Nico, the nurse specifically said wing four! We are in wing two! We are currently trespassing, and I don’t have the bail money for this!”

“Shut up, Brick! You’re being loud! You’re gonna wake up the old ones!”

“You’re the one shouting, Nico! You have no internal volume control! You’re like a megaphone with legs!”

I close my eyes for a long, weary second, pinching the bridge of my nose. I stand up and step out into the hallway just in time to see the circus rounding the corner.

It is 3:15 AM, and the hospital wing has decided to host a chaotic, nocturnal convention.