Little Battles (27 page)

Wallace cleared her throat and I turned to look at her. “You need to know and understand that using drugs in any form, outside of what a doctor prescribes and monitors, is dangerous. It is
not
acceptable and will only hinder the healing process.”

Yeah, I needed to be high for this shit. It was like a whole big roller coaster ride. I mean, not like I’d ever been on one or whatever, but these emotions of mine were all over the place. Anger shifted into guilt easily, and annoyance transformed into sadness, which then turned back into anger.

I hadn’t been the one asking for a stupid
healing process
, for shit’s sake.

When I remained silent, Wallace turned to Tom and said, “Why don’t you go home? I’m sure it’s been a long day for you. I’ll just keep Sophie a little longer and have Elliott run her home.”

Tom spent the next minute just looking at me. I looked everywhere but at him. My hands wrung together of their own accord. A minute was a long time when someone just stared at you. Out of the corner of my eye I saw him finally stand. He moved to touch me. “Sophie, I…”

I pushed back into the chair, looking from his hand to his eyes, and then frantically over to Wallace.

“Tom, you’ll need to respect her personal and physical space. Especially when she’s in heightened emotional states. A man hurt her and even though it wasn’t you, her body and mind have certain automatic responses that she can’t necessarily control. You’ll…”

I shut my ears off.

I was tired and the extreme fatigue anchored me. It was like a sedative.

“You did well. How do you feel?”

I looked up. My father was gone and it was just me and her. “Like shit.”

“It’s difficult stuff you’re pushing through.”

“It hurts,” I admitted, although I still didn’t understand how I came to talk to Wallace about this shit.

She gave me a smile that seemed real. “You don’t like that, do you?”

“What?”

“Feeling that hurt.” I didn’t say anything because sometimes things simply didn’t need an answer. “How is your experiment in celibacy going?”

“It’s frustrating.”

“But so far you’ve succeeded?”

“I haven’t had sex with anyone.” Not that it was her business.

“Will you tell me about the first time you got high, Sophie?”

At first I nearly panicked because I thought that maybe Elliott had told her, but then I realized that Elliott would
never
tell her something like that. I didn’t want to cover that ground again.

“Not tonight.”

“Will you tell me about the first time you had sex with someone other than Helen’s boyfriend?”

I shook my head. “I’m tired.”

“Pick one of the two questions and answer it, then you can go see Elliott for a little while before you go home.”

As much as I wanted to think that she was a moron who was incompetent at her chosen occupation, I couldn’t. She was actually pretty damn good because she used the fact that I wanted to see Elliott to her advantage. Therapists were nothing more than master manipulators, and she was pretty masterful. At this point, I would have told her whatever story she wanted just to get out of that room and into Elliott’s.

“He was—”

She interrupted me. “Who’s ‘he’?”

“Helen’s boyfriend.” He had a name, but I didn’t use it.

“Go on.”

“He was nicer to me when I did things right, so I learned exactly what he wanted. I was very careful not to make a mistake. I paid attention and made sure that I…” I paused long enough to suck in a deep breath and scan the corner and baseboards for any signs of webbing, “did things he liked. It was mechanical and automatic. Then when I was fourteen, there was a boy at school who was good-looking, and he always treated me nice, so I let him fuck me in his car. It was different than with…” I wasn’t going to finish that sentence.

“This was in high school?”

I nodded. It was at the very beginning of my freshman year.

“How old was this boy?”

“Eighteen.”

“So you were a fourteen-year-old having sex, willingly, for the first time with an eighteen-year-old young man?”

“Yes.”

Her question had been layered with judgment, and I was sure she wanted me to grasp some kind of hidden meaning in it. I failed to see what she was driving toward.

“Go on. What happened after you had sex with him?”

I shook my head. “I had sex with him again and then after awhile he wasn’t all that nice to me anymore.”

“So what did you get out of that experience?”

What the hell did she mean “what did I get?”

“An orgasm.”

She sighed. “That’s your body’s trained response to the stimuli. What did you get emotionally?”

“Nothing. Can I go see Elliott now? You said that if I answered your question, I could.”

I looked up and saw that she was smiling. “Yes, you can go see Elliott.” I stood and walked to the door.

“Sophie?”

I reluctantly halted.

“For Friday, I’d like you to think about what you get emotionally out of sex, and if it’s what you’d
like
to get out of it.”

I didn’t get anything out of sex lately, mainly because I wasn’t having it with anyone other than myself, and fingers were pretty emotionally void. I mumbled something about thinking about it before leaving.

I finally got to Elliott’s room and knocked, smiling when I heard the click of the door being unlocked. “Hi,” I said as he swung the door open. He scanned my face for a moment and it made me nervous. “You have to take me home in a bit, but we could hang out for…”

He grasped my fingers loosely, and then tugged on me gently, silently telling me that it was okay to come in. I heard him close and lock his door behind us as I took in his room to see if there were any changes since the last time I’d been here.

There were two books sitting on his bed, one of them was Seuss. “Am I keeping you from practicing?”

He was still holding my wrist and we both went over to his bed together.

“I usually t-try to p-p-practice at nnnnight.”

“I’m sorry,” I said immediately, hating that he was changing his normal routine for me.

“I’m nnnot. I can p-practice by talking to you.”

Elliott sat down and I did the same. “Are you o-okay?” I scrunched up my face and he explained, “Your d-d-d, ffffather was yelling.”

“Oh.” I supposed Tom had been fairly loud.

“I d-didn’t mean to hear.”

I shook my head. I couldn’t remember what Tom had said, and I didn’t know if I should’ve been embarrassed that Elliott heard it. I decided to change the topic to something I’d been thinking about since early this morning.

“I’m sorry I didn’t go into school with you today, Elliott.”

“What?” He locked eyes with me and I felt suddenly very exposed.

I turned away to glance at his books on the shelf. “I mean, I should’ve recognized that it might have been hard for you. Your first day back or whatever.” He was quiet, so I turned back to him. “Was it? Hard for you?”

“It w-w-was okay.”

Grabbing the green Dr. Seuss book, I absently flipped it over and over in my hands. “I suck at being a friend.” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him shake his head and the action hurt because he was so incredibly willing to overlook all of my many flaws, and I had no idea why someone would do that.

“What’s this one about?”

I faced him again. I liked looking at him when he spoke. Sometimes he’d look me in the eye when he talked, and others not. Usually when he wouldn’t look at me, he stammered more and was generally more anxious than at other times. I wondered if he noticed that.

He was staring at my chin, but eventually looked into my eyes again. “There’s a c-c-c-c, mm-many different sssstories in it. But the mm-mm-main one is ab-b-bout a turtle w-who w-wants to be k-k-k-k…” He shut his eyes tight and balled his hands up as much as his bandages would allow as he struggled with the hard ‘K’ sound. I hated seeing him like that, and yet I could not look away.

His effort to speak was fascinating, because I would have given up a long time ago. Maybe he didn’t try this hard for other people, but he
always
tried with me. Contact usually seemed to help him, so I put the book down and took his hand, absently stroking my thumb over his knuckles.

“…k-king of all he sssssaw.”

I tried to let the sound of his voice soothe me. I wanted to be high, but I was happy that at least I was with Elliott. I didn’t want to go back to Tom’s. Even now that my room was a soothing shade of blue, I still wasn’t comfortable. Maybe it wasn’t Elliott’s
room
that I found so comfortable.

Maybe it was Elliott.

“So he was a king? And then what?” I didn’t give a shit about turtle kings, but he said that talking with me was like practicing, and while I didn’t mind his stutter, he seemed like he really wanted it to get better.

Plus, I wanted to hear him talk and I was too drained to hold much of a conversation. So as he told me about stacking turtles and shit, I leaned into him and allowed him to relax my body and mind, creating a lovely calm.

It was like a sedative. My breathing slowed.

I wasn’t listening to the words he was saying, but merely hearing the melodic sounds of his deep, musical voice. Even with the stops, starts, and stuttering sounds, his voice was like chemicals in my veins.

I hadn’t even realized that my head was on his shoulder, and I was slumped against him.

He was warm.

He was like a day on the beach.

It was incredibly cold here and I missed the Tampa heat. It was comforting, and every time it got too cold inside, I sat outside in the heat until every bit of me felt better.

Elliott was like sitting outside in the sun. He was the warm that sank into my skin, down to my bones.

Elliott was comfort.

But then the room was dark and I felt
his
hand on my cheek,
his
thumb stroking underneath my eye. I could feel the sting of his touch down to the bone. I felt it creep into me like poison. It kept me from breathing right, thinking right and
being
right.

Oh, fuck, Sophie, be my dirty girl.

My eyes popped open as my own gasp shocked me. “Shit!” I shoved away from Elliott.

I had fallen asleep on him.

He shot his hands out and caught me before I tumbled off his bed.

I hated being grabbed, so once I was stable and sitting next to him, I stole my arms back, but my wrists were still burning. I balled my hands up and forced myself to dig my fingernails into the meat of my palms. The sharpness of the sting gave me something to focus on.

I stood and pulled my hair to one side for a moment before letting go of it. I spotted the green rock on his shelf. I’d brought it back today with the intention of leaving it here, but my feet carried me to it and I grabbed it quickly.

“Are you o-okay?”

With a deep breath, I turned around and said, “I’m…great.”

He was absolutely beautiful. I averted my eyes but held out my closed hand. “I’m taking this rock, just so you know.”

“O-okay.”

“Next time, just let me fall.”

“No.”

I glanced at him again and just like always when he looked at me like that, he made me want to cry. “Will you take me home, please?”

I woke up on Tuesday having roughly two hours of sleep, and I was pissed off. Last night, not only did I have to talk about rehab with Tom and Wallace, but I fell asleep on Elliott and looked a like a total ass when I nearly fell off the bed. After that, I’d been plagued with thoughts about stuff that I didn’t want to think about.

Again.

Tom cooked me stupid breakfast. Like oatmeal and blueberries would make him a good father. I burned myself on the damn coffeepot again and almost broke it right there. Tom watched as I took my blood sugar, his brow all creased as if he were really interested.