To California

LaVieEnRose

I lived a double life in LA, and I didn't tell anyone for a long time, not even Brian. It wasn't the plan or anything, and every single fucking day I said I was going to cut it out, but then...I don't know.

I guess it started my first night there when I woke up on the floor. I'd kicked off the covers before I flailed my way out of bed, so I had kind of a soft landing onto them, so I was okay. And it wasn't even a seizure, just a nightmare. I always have nightmares when I sleep alone in weird places. Brian had told me I should call him when it happened, but by the time I was awake enough to be aware of what was going on, I was way less freaked out about the dream than by the fact that I'd landed on the floor. And I couldn't tell him about that. I couldn't. He leaves me alone for one night and I'm one well-placed quilt away from scrambling my brains on the other side of the country? No way.

So I got up and went to the living room, and I took all the cushions off the couch and set them up around the bed. And then I stood there and stared at it.

This...I look like a crazy person, I signed to myself. I'm a crazy person.

I still couldn't sleep.

**

Outside the house, I was dazzling. I was on fire.

Samir was amazing. He was dynamic, hilarious, and completely unafraid of me and my interpreter, which is fucking rare. From the first time I met him at the site of our mural, he talked straight to me, watched me while I was signing, and used the signs he picked up confidently and un-self-consciously.

He had a mansion in West Hollywood and he threw parties almost every night, fucking just like the ones Brett threw my last time out here. I never brought an interpreter because I didn't want it to feel like business, so I mimed and smiled and wrote things down and maybe I was a bit of a sideshow act, and maybe I sort of hated it, but everyone was so damn nice. Twenty-something girls in skimpy bikinis wanted to mother me, and guys Brian's age thought it was hot when I shut them down with a glare and they wanted me to dominate the shit out of them, so I did.

I went to just about every party. I jumped in the pool, and I danced to a rhythm I could feel through the concrete patio. I fucked boys in bedrooms that no one ever slept in with sea air ruffling chiffon curtains. I laughed and let people touch my hair and when they begged me to teach them signs I did, over and over again. People who were too wasted to remember their own names wanted to know how to fingerspell them. I didn't drink the champagne or snort lines of coke off Samir's glass tables, and everyone inferred a dark past from that and it made them love me more.

I didn't drink the champagne or do all that coke, except that every once in a while I did, and I took risks, and I didn't tell anyone what was wrong with me, and I hid my shaking hand at work and shook alone in Samir's golden bathrooms at the parties. I went surfing, and once skydiving. I roughhoused in the pool. I let people touch me who didn't speak my language, who wouldn't have understood me if I'd told them to stop.

I made no good friends but a fucking bucketload of casual ones, and there was always someone to get lunch with or go to the beach or dance at a club. I worked my goddamn ass off for Samir, and I learned techniques and theory and patience I'd never dreamed of, and we were making a new fixture of downtown Los Angeles. We were creating a world. And I was dazzling.

And I'd come home every night with skin tight from the sun and the first thing I'd see when I walked in was that marble staircase, and every stupid thing I'd done, every choice I'd made that could have gone sofuckingbadly came back and hit me like a...well.

So I would drag those couch cushions around with me everywhere. I'd lie on them on the floor when I watched TV instead of sitting anywhere I could fall from. I put them around my chair when I was in the kitchen, on the rare occassions I didn't eat cross-legged on the floor where it was safer. I never slept without a padded surface around my bed, even though I didn't fell out of it after that first night.

I went to a home goods store and got a bar for the shower in case my leg gave out when I was in there. I never, ever used the stove. I never had anyone over, not anyone.

I never once went up those marble stairs.

I lived a double life and I didn't tell anybody because how could I fucking expect anyone to understand? I didn't understand myself.

I can live okay when I'm on my own, but I can't really understand anything.

But I was making great art.

**

If I was awake and at home, I was probably on the phone with someone. Emily and I had a whole cooking show thing, where we'd make dinner together—never with the stove, never the stove—and Saturday mornings I'd sit down with Daphne, and Derek sent me videos all the time. And there was Molly and my mom, and Gabriel, and Gus once a week or so, and Michael and Ben and Emmett sometimes.

And, of course, there was Brian. Not as much as I wanted and not as much as he needed, but there was Brian.

He was a jerk at first, but I knew he would be, so whatever. I wasn't sure what way to play it, so I started off at first telling him how great I was doing and how much fun I was having and how much I wished he was there, and when that didn't work I tried giving him small problems to fix, and when that didn't work I just waited for him to get the fuck over himself, and that was what did it for the most part.

I was strategic with medical stuff, showing him enough hand shaking that it would look like I wasn't hiding anything while actually hiding everything that he couldn't fix from four thousand miles away, but two and a half weeks into it I wouldn't pick up the phone because it had been a long day out in the heat and the smog and three people at work had told me I was wheezing and I'd done a great job smiling and telling them I was fine but that was not going to work on Brian. I texted him excuse after excuse why I couldn't talk right then but I forgot to scroll up and verify the stories I was making up, and my memory was being a traitorous bastard and selling me the fuck out. He wasn't buying any of it, and he kept calling, and kept calling, and finally told me that if I didn't pick up he was going to get on a plane, and I resisted every urge to say yes, fucking get on a plane, come and get me, what the fucking fuck was I thinking, and picked up the phone and as soon as he got a good look at me he screamed at me for twenty minutes before he got to asking how I was feeling.

But when I called four hours later, five in the morning his time, because I felt like there was a fist around my throat, he said, Okay, that's all right, you're doing great.

So, you know, what the fuck do you do with that? I carefully aimed the phone away from the cushions on the floor and stayed on the phone with him until I could breathe, and he stayed with me.

We did better after that. He called me when he was at the bar with our friends just to tell me a dirty joke, and I called him when I was dressed up to go out and looking hot. We kept things light for a little while, and I had Emily give me regular Brian reports and told her enough about what was going on with me for her to give him regular Justin reports, and maybe that was going to be the way we did it, and maybe that would be fine. Dysfunctional and ridiculous and regressive right back to where we were eight years ago, but maybe that was what we had to be. Maybe all that growth or whatever was bullshit.

Until he called once, panting and wild-eyed, after a nightmare, and I soothed him and distracted him and otherwise showed him I didn't die on a parking garage floor, and then I called him when I had a migraine so bad that I swear to God I was wishing I had.

It's been like this for hours, I said. It's like fucking...fuck, this hurts. I squeezed my eyes shut and buried my face in my pillow. “Fuck!”

When I finally felt like the minimal light in my room wouldn't sear through my skull, I opened my eyes enough to see him. His hands were tented over his lips, and his eyes were wide and focused right on me.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “I'm sorry, don't worry, I'm fine.”

Stop, he said.

“No, I—”

I'm not scared, he said. I'm not worried. You're alone and you're crying. It's sad. That's all. Stop talking and put your head down.

You learn a few things in eight years.

**

And then, one Saturday morning a month after I'd left, his cab pulled up in front of my house. I swear to God, the three seconds between when the cab stopped and when Brian stepped out were the longest three seconds that have ever existed in the history of the universe. But then the door opened and there he was, in a suit like he always wears to fly, not a hair out of place because he primped in the airport bathroom, he wanted to look good for me, and oh God, he looked so, so goddamn good.

I ran towards him, and he laughed and dropped his bag on the ground and held his arms up and stood there looking so fucking cocky, just waiting for me throw myself on him, and God, I did. I jumped up and wrapped my legs around his waist and kissed the hell out of him.

Oh my God, he signed, small, when I broke away, and at first I thought he was making fun of me, but then the look on his face was just...this awe.

“What?” I said.

He shook his head, spun me around, and kissed me so hard.

**

I'd put the cushions back on the couch before Brian came, and tucked away most of the neurotic notes I'd left myself around the house, and otherwise tried to make it look like the home of someone who who thought he was less delicate than a fabrege egg. Jesus, I couldn't stand the thought of him...of him finding out the things I was doing and thinking I was overreacting, even though I knew that I was. The idea that Brian, who knows the shit going on with my health better than I do, would look at something I was doing and think that I didn't need it, gave me this horrible feeling in my stomach, like it would mean he thought I didn't need any help at all. Like he'd think I was making all of this up, or something. And I know that's stupid, that Brian's never been like that at all, but...this is the shit that chronic illness does to you. You get so used to people telling you that you don't look sick that you start to think that maybe you just want to be.

And it doesn't really help to make you feel less crazy if you're making all the accommodations for seizures that you're not even having. Jesus, no wonder I was taking all these risks when I was out of the house. Was I supposed to just not be goddamn sick of myself?

I don't think there was anything I could have done to that house that Brian would have noticed right then, though. I could have burned the whole thing down as long as I'd left a bed somewhere in the rubble, and that would have been fine with him. Hell, we could have made do just fine without a bed.

God, Brian's body, Brian's legs wrapped around my body, Brian's mouth on me and his fingers tangled up with mine. He's such a fucking perfectionist, such a goddamn control freak, that I thought he would want our first time in a while to be all choreographed and planned and perfect, and maybe that's what he'd meant to do, but there was this fucking desperation and hunger and sloppiness about him, like he couldn't decide what the fuck to do to me first. God, it was so fucking hot. He works so fucking hard to keep his composure, but Brian Kinney visibly turned on anywhere outside his cock is the sexiest fucking thing in the universe. He doesn't get like that with anyone but me.

We lay together for hours, fucking and kissing and laughing, and then we made breakfast together, and he kept coming up behind me and wrapping his arms around me and whispering God knows what in my ear, and he gave me this kiss on the neck so rough it felt like a bite, and I couldn't stop smiling. I used the stove without even thinking about it.

**

I don't know how you stand this heat, Brian complained, as we walked from where our Uber dropped us off. That's one thing New York definitely has over LA: decent public transportation. I didn't have a car out here and I hadn't had a neuro clear me to drive in years anyway, so I was spending a fucking fortune on cars to take me around.

It helps that it's not humid, I said. Dry heat is more bearable.

He pulled on his collar. Jesus, says who?

I don't know, I don't mind it. No seizures.

What the fuck's your hand doing, then?

I looked at it. It's just excited.

Mine too, he said, and made a grab for my crotch in the middle of the goddamn sidewalk.

Samir wasn't at the mural today—he has a very strict “no work on weekends” policy that someday I'll convince Brian is the key to success—so it was just a couple of security guards and a few of the assistants slapping sealer on the parts we'd finished. They waved to me and shook hands with Brian, and I took him over to the parts I'd worked on.

See this here, how it looks 3D? That's foreshortening, I've been trying to nail it for ages, I always cheat it for the comic book, but Samir taught me how to do it in like five minutes.

He smiled faintly that way he always does when he looks at my stuff, like he's sort of stoned or something, and I crowded myself under his arm while he took in the mural and tried to imagine how it looked to someone who hadn't been staring at it for a month.

He gave me this tight, brief squeeze around the shoulders, his eyes scanning back and forth across the mural, and it said everything.

We got lunch at this trendy sushi place I liked and watched the people go by with their tiny dogs and their dye jobs and their aviator sunglasses. Brian trapped my foot between his under the table, and he told me about his fight with the maintenance guy and the party Derek threw last weekend and how Molly slept through her psych midterm and made up this tragic story about her sick brother to convince her TA to let her retake it, and I told him about the Jehovah's Witnesses who came to Emily's door when we were on Skype and this girl from Samir's house who told me she felt Deaf, like, in her soul, and the assistant who asked me if I was horny when she meant to ask if I was hungry, and then he took me shopping out on Rodeo Drive and we ate ice cream on the beach and by the time we got home that evening my stomach hurt from laughing so much. I think one of the underrated things about me and Brian, underneath all the bullshit and the neuroses and hell, even the sex, is just how well we fucking get along, how much I like his stupid jokes and he gets my obscure references, and we've always been like that, from the very first night we met. We just fucking like each other. I brought him to one of Samir's parties that night and expected him to do a lot of coke and fuck a club boy or maybe to be cool and disaffected and look around disdainfully at the stars and starfuckers, but instead we just shared a joint and made out on a pool float for two hours. We took a car home and walked around my neighborhood for a little while, and I was exhausted and sore and kind of wobbly. You want to go back? he asked me, really casually, in that bored way he does, and when I shook my head he stuck his elbow out a little bit and I held on, and we walked like that for a while. The sidewalk was narrow, not like New York, and the houses all had black fences and hedges in front, and there were all these tiny birds and a couple ahead of us kissing under a streetlight.

Is it quiet? I asked him.

He nodded and kissed my cheek. There's some music coming from one of these houses, I can kind of hear that. And the birds. And that streetlamp's buzzing. Besides that, quiet. I like when he does that. I could almost imagine everything.

I could almost hear his voice. Had a busy night? I kissed the top of his arm.

His phone must have made a noise or something, because he pulled it out of his pocket with an irritated look in his face. It's fucking midnight in New York, they can't leave me alone?

Who is it?

Just Laura with work shit. We're talking about trying to buy out the dry cleaner's next door so we can get some more space, and apparently this is something I need to be involved in every goddamn step of the way.

I started thinking about office politics and CCed emails and meeting confirmations and I felt the same kind of throat tightening that makes me sleep with a barrier of pillows around my bed, and I shook my head fast. I can't even think about going back to work, I said.

So don't think about it, he said easily.

Okay.

So we talked about my neighbors who were always setting bonfires in their yard, and what they were going to do for Emily's birthday and the present I'd sent to her, and then we went home and made mad, passionate love and I fell asleep without anything but Brian to keep me safe.

**

You seem like you're doing well, he said offhand, the next day. He was cleaning the stove while I read the paper at the kitchen table.

“Uh, I am, I think,” I said, though I didn't really know. It's the kind of thing that my brain freezes up about. Whenever someone asks me how I'm doing I always have to stand there looking for evidence one way or the other, because I never just know. And then of course they really just want me to say “Fine, thank you,” so they're wondering what the fuck's taking me so long.

And Brian goddamn knows me, so he said, Do you have any idea if that's true?

“No,” I said, and he chuckled. “But it sounds good.”

You're still breathing like a fucking freight train, but besides that.

“Yeah, bound to happen.”

Does he have a new estimate for when you're going to be done?

“Early to mid-January.”

He nodded.

“Will you come again?” I asked him.

He shrugged. Sure.

“Hey fun fact did you know that you're the most amazing person who's ever lived in the whole world?”

He rolled his eyes.

“It's just a question, God. I can't ask questions now?”

I thought it was a fun fact.

“I'm a multitasker.”

He set a cup of tea on the table in front of me. Multitask that with your weepy goodbye, then. I have to get going.

I'm not weepy, I said, but once he was packing up I did start to come apart just a little bit. Everything just felt so safe with him here, so fucking sustainable, and once he left there'd be no one to make out with at the parties, no excuse not to dance and drink and smile for the hearing people, and the house would convert back into some horror show of hazards, and I wasn't going to laugh until my stomach hurt or fuck someone who cradled my head when he lay me down.

He sighed and hugged me when I wiped my eyes. Baby, he said, a blend of name-calling and exasperation, and affection.

“I know.”

I walked him out to the waiting car and he kissed me, his thumb stroking up and down my jaw, and I tried not to cling. He'll come back, he'll come back, he'll come back.

Tell everyone I say hi, I said. Try to like, eat a fucking vegetable once in awhile.

Dream big.

Yeah, I know.

He kissed my forehead and rubbed up and down my arms, studying me with this tongue in his cheek.

I rolled my eyes. “Just say it, you freak.”

No, he said, with the most beautifully defiant grin, and God, that was so much better.

**

I almost wish you hadn't come, I said on the phone to Brian a few days later, and I felt like such an asshole and was about to apologize when he shook his head a little and said, No, I know, me too.

It sent us right back to where we were a month ago, was the thing. Emily said he seemed depressed but didn't give me details, which was pretty fair since I was making her promise not to tell him how I was crying every time she hung up because I was so damn lonely. Brian and I texted all the time but kept making really shitty excuses not to get on the phone with each other, until eventually one of us would freak out and call in the middle of the goddamn night.

Things settled down eventually, like they did the first time he left. This time I knew when he'd be back again because he'd bought tickets basically as soon as he got home when we were still in the crazy stage, so that helped, having a date to look forward to. And work was going well. I was learning a ton, and painting at a pace that actually worked for me, and Samir was kind and patient and jokingly stern. It kind of reminded me of how Brian was with Gus, actually, which probably should have made me feel infantalized but I don't know, being out there all by myself made me scramble for any sign I could find that someone nearby cared about me.

I think some people just aren't meant to be on their own, and the sad thing is I don't think I used to be one of them, but I think am now, and it's just so fucking hard whenever I think about the fact that there are aspects of my personality that aren't...me, that aren't innate, that were never supposed to be there. And the thing is, you can never be sure. Maybe if I could easily divide myself up into what was me and what was...well, what was the bashing, essentially, then all of this would be simpler, but Brian told me a long time ago that I couldn't cut myself up like that—that he didn't cut me up like that—so I try not to, because he's right. That's how you end up resenting yourself, and looking at your life as this before and after and thinking of being sick as something that happened to you, something that was put on top of you, instead of something that you are, and that's no way to live, walking around feeling like a victim like that. Feeling like something was taken from you.

You don't want to live that way. So you don't, most of the time.

But I'd gone out and bought more pillows to line the floors, and I left notes for myself all over the house. Remember your keys on my front door. Set your alarm on my nightstand. It's October on my closet.

Brian loves you inside my silverware drawer.

**

But he called me three days before he was supposed to come down, on the first day of November. I needed to get rid of that October post-it. And all the other post-its. And hide my obsessive number of pillows.

Except maybe I didn't, because as soon as I saw his face I knew he wasn't coming.

“Noooo,” I said. “No no no, what?”

He ran a hand down his face. How do you do that?

“Is Gus okay? I just talked to him yesterday—”

He smiled a little. You call Gus?

“Yeah, of course.”

He's fine.

“Then what is it, work? You can do it here, I won't bother you.”

He gave me a look that showed how much belief he had in my ability not to bother him. I'm sick, he said.

I sat up. Are you okay? Did you go to the doctor? Is it—

Sunshine, I'm fine. It's a cold.

Do you have a fever?

No. I'm fine.

Okay, then come. I'll take care of you. I'll be a slutty nurse.

He sighed, and my stomach sank.

It's because of me, I said.

I get a cold, I'm down for a day and a half. When you catch it, and you will, you're down for two weeks, and that's if we're lucky and it doesn't settle right in your shitty lungs.

I dropped my chin on my knees. “They're not so bad.”

He shook his head a little. Last time you caught a cold you were knocked on your ass.

I could catch a cold from work. At the grocery store. On the bus.

Compelling.

I pulled a loose string off my pillowcase.

Don't pout, he said.

“You have to make sure you're getting enough fluids,” I said.

I always get enough fluids, he said.

“I don't know if that's a blow job joke or a whiskey one.”

Whiskey, Jesus. Dirty mind. Listen, Sunshine, it's not all bad. You're still going to get company this weekend, all right? I'm sending you a ringer.

“Who?”

He shrugged. I guess we'll see.

I was expecting Emily, maybe Daphne if she could get the time off work, but it was Gabe. And at first it was amazing—no, the whole weekend with Gabe was amazing, it wasn't that. He's not much for parties, and it turned out I really liked having an excuse to stay in my house for the weekend, and it didn't feel as safe as when Brian was there, but it was definitely a huge step up still from being on my own. It was the longest uninterrupted stretch Gabe and I had ever spent together, not to mention the first time I'd spent literally any in-person time with a Deaf person since I left, and that was fucking great. With hearing people I always have to be so aware of stuff I literally can't actually be aware of, how loud I'm being in every situation. Even with Brian, I try to be aware of that. So it was nice to have a break from just...all of it. Gabe had already spent a decent amount of time in LA, so he was happy to just lay around on the couch and watch horror movies and make me dinner, and God, it was nice. My hand was giving me trouble that weekend and he was patient and a little worried and I drank that right up, and the sex was great, it's always great, so...yes, that part was amazing.

What wasn't amazing was that as soon as the immediate excitement of Gabe being there wore off, I knew Brian had lied to me. I can't explain how I knew, but I did. And I spent the whole weekend acting shiny and happy with Gabe and trying not to think about it, but every time Brian's name came up in our conversations or on my phone or in my head, I had to clamp down how fucking furious I was. I got through the time Gabe was there on a few short text messages, but he called about an hour after he left and I bit the bullet and sat on my re-pillow-surrounded bed and picked up.

He was in his lounging around clothes, white tank top and black jeans, and I wanted to scream. Did you have fun? he asked.

“Yeah.”

He lit a cigarette. Sad he's gone? I'm sure he'll come back if you ask.

“You're not sick, are you?”

He didn't say anything.

“What the fuck, Brian.”

Look...I knew you missed him. And I knew it would feel weird for you to invite him—

He could have come any weekend, I said. You didn't have to give him yours.

You don't have that much free time.

Bullshit. Bullshit! You don't get to make that decision for me! It's...you and him are not the same, you can't just fucking trade back and forth like some sort of boyfriend exchange program and think I'm going to be fine with it!

He pinched his forehead. I thought you would be happy to see him.

I was, but...but I wanted... It was all too goddamn much, the fact that I'd gotten to see Gabe, that Brian had supported me seeing Gabe, that he was running my fucking life and making decisions for me and he was sitting there looking like he looked and I missed him like it was something physical and I was so fucking mad at him, it was too much.

He said, Sunshine, come on.

“How are you fine with this!” I said. “Didn't you want to see me?”

He rolled his eyes and took a drag on his cigarette.

Then what the fuck, why did you lie? Why did you send Gabe here like some fucking babysitter for a kid you don't want to deal with? Why aren't you here?

Justin—

“Stop fucking sneering at me like I'm being fucking ridiculous!”

I couldn't do it, okay? he said. Damn it!

“Brian?”

I couldn't fucking leave again, all right?

“But you...but you planned the trip.”

Yeah, just about the fucking second I got home when I was fucking...going crazy wanting to see you again, and then it got closer and closer and all I could fucking think about was it was going to be two days and then I was going to have to go again, and about how leaving last time was...it was just easier not to come.

“But I'm here for two more months,” I said.

I know.

“So...so what, I just don't get to see you for two more months because you can't stand saying goodbye?”

I don't know, I don't know! God! He got up and paced a few steps away from his phone. I never fucking asked for this!

You told me to come here! You told me you wanted to—

Not fucking LA, you! I never fucking asked for you, I never gave you any goddamn impression that I was capable of handling this shit, and here you are asking me to just fucking—

“We're doing this again?”

You keep fucking expecting me to be able to handle this, to fucking...

“It's been ten years!”

Every night with you is like the first fucking one, you son of a bitch, don't try to fucking tell me there's some way to adapt to this shit that you do to me.

“People live with this,” I said. “People feel these things and they aren't miserable—”

They fucking don't and you know it.

“I know.”

And don't you sit there and fucking act like you were fine, like I'm the only one—

“THAT'S WHY I NEED YOU HERE!” I screamed, and we kept going around in circles until we were both ragged and breathless and hysterical and nothing, fucking nothing was resolved.

I wish we loved each other just a little bit less, I said eventually.

He laughed bitterly. Finally something we agree on.

**

So then I got sick, because how else do any of my stories ever reach their conclusion?

I started feeling really crappy at work one Thursday in mid-November, just dizzy and echoey and out of sorts. I bailed out of plans that night and went straight home, and I threw up when I tried to eat and ended up lying in bed with all these muscle spasms. If I was at home I would have taken my emergency anticonvulsant, the stronger one, but if I take that and still have a seizure it's like a huge fucking deal, and there was no one here to watch me and see if I did, so it felt like...I don't know, if I didn't take it then there wasn't as much of a risk. I realize now of course that that doesn't make any sense, but I wasn't exactly thinking clearly. I went ahead and texted Samir that I was staying home the next day, and I texted Brian and told him what was going on and asked him to check in on me in the morning, and at the last minute I decided to sleep on the cushions on the floor instead of in the bed.

That was probably a good call, because obviously I don't know for sure what happened when I was asleep, but the way my muscles were screaming when I woke up gave me a pretty good idea. I dragged myself up and closed the blinds because the sunlight was killing me, and I was trying to decide whether I was going to throw up again when Brian texted asking me how I was feeling.

I said pretty bad but i'm ok, i'm gonna go back to sleep because otherwise if I missed a call he was going to have the fucking paramedics sent to my house or something, and I didn't want to get back on the ground so I curled up in bed. Everything hurt so goddamn bad, my head and my neck and my shoulders, and I didn't think I was actually going to be able to sleep when I felt this shitty, but the idea of keeping an eye on my phone and lifting my arm up to text felt impossibly difficult.

So I just lay there for God knows how long, but in retrospect it must have been at least six hours. It was kind of like when my eyes were fucked up again, because I had them closed the whole time and I wasn't doing anything, but this time I was too sick to care. I lay there and took these shallow breaths because it hurt too much to take anything else, and I felt so goddamn awful that counting those breaths was about all the entertainment I could handle. I knew it wouldn't last; I'd been here before. All you can do is just lie there and breathe and wait for it to pass. So I did that, and everything kind of drifted by, time and the light changing through the blinds.

And then at some point, the feeling of the air in the room changed, like it was lighter, or something, and I smelled his cologne, and I whispered, “Oh God, please don't be a dream, please don't be a dream,” and I felt the bed dip down next to me. I said, “If you're a murderer who smells like Brian, you can just go for it, I'm not going to fight.”

He kissed my cheek and I tried very very hard not to cry.

“Hi,” I said. “Hi. I love you. Fuck. I love you so much.”

He kissed me again, next to my eye, and I knew he was telling me to open them. So I did, and there he was, and this time he wasn't in a suit and he wasn't primped in the airport bathroom. He looked tired and peaceful and beautiful and I swear my heart just about stopped, just looking at him.

He gave me a small smile and signed, Breathe.

So I did, slow and deep, and he did it with me.

Breathe, he said again, and we kept going until I fell asleep.

**

Brian woke me up a few times to give me meds and make me drink some water and help me to the bathroom to throw up the meds and the water, but it was morning on Saturday before I really rejoined the living. Brian wasn't there, but there was a bottle of water and a granola bar on the nightstand next to me and a note saying he'd gone out for groceries because your fridge is a fucking disgrace.

My fridge. So he'd seen all the notes.

I sat up and looked around. He'd left all the pillows where they were.

Fuck.

I got out of bed and used the bathroom and washed my face and felt slightly more human. I wandered into the kitchen where he was putting groceries away, and he held out his arms when he saw me and I folded into them.

“Hi,” I said, and he gave me three kisses on my forehead all in a row, which made me smile.

Feeling better? he asked me.

“Yeah, thanks.”

Sit down, I'll get you some water.

I did, pulling my legs up onto the chair with me. “I can't believe you came all this way.”

Yeah, I knew something was wrong.

“Probably not as bad as you thought.”

No, it was literally exactly what I thought.

“Guess you know me pretty well.”

He rolled his eyes and handed me a cup of water, and I pulled him down and kissed him, the first real kiss since he'd gotten here. He stayed close afterwards, eyes closed, a little bit of a smile on his lips.

How long are you here? I asked.

He squeezed my hands and sat down across from me at the table. A week.

“Really? Hey, really?”

And you're taking a few of those days off, all right? You look like shit.

“Yeah, I know. Okay.”

He tapped his fingernails on the table. So we need to talk, you know. About how this fucking house looks.

My stomach tightened. “Yeah, I know.”

Either it's been worse than you're telling me...

I shook my head.

He kept his eyes on me. Or you've been really scared.

I chewed the inside of my cheek.

He sighed and took my hand, playing with my fingers. Why didn't you tell me?

Because there isn't anything to tell, really. I've been fine. I go out in the world and I...I'm all brave and social and everything's fine, it really is. And then I come back here and just...

You're scared.

“Paranoid is more like it. I know it doesn't make any sense.”

It makes fucking perfect sense.

I shook my head.

Yeah, Sunshine, it does. Of course you're not going to be scared in front of people you don't know. You have PTSD, dumbass. You're going to bottle it all up and keep yourself from feeling vulnerable in front of people who could hurt you and then come home and it's gonna boil over.

I winced. Maybe not the best metaphor.

He wrinkled his nose and kissed my hand.

I said. You know I haven't even gone up the stairs? Not once. And like, what are the odds that I would fall on them? It would almost definitely be fine.

You know most people don't deal with this, right? he said. Most people don't have to walk around feeling reassured by the fact that they probably won't have a major seizure at any given time. That's not supposed to be comforting, that it's a small chance. Any chance at all is fucking scary. The shit that you think is supposed to be making you feel better wouldn't comfort anyone else either.

I sighed and sipped my water. So what do I do?

Fuck if I know. Not live alone, if it were up to me, but... He shrugged. What does your therapist say?

I haven't told her.

Well, maybe start there. And this week you can just let me do the worrying, all right? Take a break.

I think that was a big part of it, honestly. The fact of the matter is Brian's a better caretaker than I am, probably always has been, and even though I have the benefit of being inside my body and knowing exactly how things feel, something about this comes naturally for him and not for me. He's able to worry without getting incapacitated by it, and I'd gotten really complacent about having that around. I'd feel worse about it if he didn't like it, but he keeps telling me he does, so...

Jesus, this is like coming up for air, he said that night, when he counted out my pills for me, and I knew exactly what he meant.

We weren't made for each other, but we've certainly grown that way.

**

Brian made me a little nest of pillows in the living room, and I hung out there when I was watching TV or working on my laptop, but I didn't set them up around the bed or drag them around the house with me anymore. We went upstairs once, together. It was nothing special. He told me to stop being a fucking audacious moron at the parties.

He helped me figure out which of the notes to myself where actually helpful and which ones were paranoia, but after he left I opened my silverware drawer and found one we'd missed: Brian loves you.

And underneath it, in his beautiful, cramped writing: Good.