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“Yes. That’s it,” Alek lied. “Let’s stop there. End on a high note, and all that.”
Alek tried to rise from Ian’s lap, but he pulled him back down before he could escape.
“I know you’re lying,” Ian said with a light nip to the side of Alek’s neck. “I’m terrible.”
“You really are.”
But teaching Ian was the closest Alek got to practicing. The hand surgeon’s prognosis was even more pessimistic than Dr. Modorovic’s. If Alek didn’t rest his hands, he risked permanent disability that surgery could only attempt to palliate. The surgeon had sentenced him to thrice-weekly physical therapy appointments, during which time his wrists and hands were iced and fussed over and occasionally injected with cortisol.
At first, being banned from the piano had been unbearable, but now it was inconsequential. He didn’t enjoy music anymore.Nothing else had come back since that earlier miraculous development, and it hadn’t been for lack of trying.
He’d sniffed over a hundred fresh wisteria cuttings like an insane person, which for all intents and purposes, he was. He’d tried the oxycodone again while Ian was at work, but there was no divine revelation that time and he liked the high so much he emptied the pill bottle in the toilet and flushed before he could sink to a new low and scoop them back out. He’d surreptitiously fondled the piano key any chance he had and when that didn’t work, quit his endeavors entirely.
“Let’s go for a walk,” Ian said.
“Let’s not.”
Alek didn’t like to go outside anymore. It was much harder to ignore the fox when she was circling between his legs and nipping at his heels.
The first few weeks after Alek started his mental health treatment had been filled with such hope—stupid, willfully ignorant hope, in retrospect.
At first, he’d been honest with Dr. Dhawan about the problems with his medication regimen. When his nightmares became so bad that he dreaded taking the sleeping pill for fear of what sleep would bring, he’d reached out to her.
That misstep earned him fifty-five minutes worth of needling questions—What do you dream about? Why are the dreams so distressing? What do you think it means?
Inventing an answer for each of her questions had been exhausting. After that first appointment, Alek had ditched the training wheels and banished Ian from future sessions, but Ian’s absence hadn’t loosened his tongue.
After the nightmare nonsense, Dr. Dhawan had swapped out one pill for another with fewer reports of vivid dreams, but the new drug dampened what little remained of his synesthesia until not even his sense of smell tangled with his memories.Dr.Dhawan took his concern seriously; thus suggesting a newer medication from an entirely different class. The new drug was the worst of the bunch because it amplified the ringing in his ears until it was as loud as the moment after his mother pulled the trigger. It was like she was haunting him, which was the absolute last thing he needed when the ghosts from his past already consumed nearly every waking thought.
It wasn’t Dr. Dhawan’s fault that the medications weren’t working. Each adjustment to his prescriptions eliminated the side effect that he complained of, which was actually pretty remarkable, but the medications themselves only scratched at the surface of his depression. The whole process was futile.
Alek didn’t want to hurt the psychiatrist’s feelings—a sign that he really had gone around the bend—so he commended her for a job well done. He was finally feeling more like himself. She was a genius! In reality, he had quit the meds altogether.
It had been a few weeks since then.
Hiding his crumbling mental health from Ian was easy. All it took was pocketing his pills under his tongue and spitting them back out into the toilet while he was peeing. When Alek couldn’t sleep, he pretended to, laying still in bed, slowing his breathing until Ian fell asleep, not daring to get up in case Ian noticed his absence. Some nights, he didn’t sleep at all, kept awake instead by the dark thoughts chasing each other inside his head.
Hiding the fox from Ian proved more difficult. When the fox called for Alek, he tried to ignore her. When he saw her at the edge of the forest, he turned away. But he could only resist the call for so long. He couldn’t leave her alone. She was dying. What if he could save her?
Dr. Dhawan suspected he’d fallen off the wagon. Her questions focused more on his symptoms and how he was tolerating his medications. She’d asked him point-blank if he’d quit his medications on several occasions. But for all her vexingquestions and restrained concern, she was true to her word. As far as Alek could tell, what they talked about, which wasn’t much, was kept in confidence, and she kept her suspicions to herself.
“Come on.” Ian stood quickly, lurching Alek from his lap and back into the present. “I found a statue in the greenhouse. I think it’s original to the Victorian.”
Alek groaned. “Couldn’t you take a picture?”
October was usually a mild time with pleasant breezes and clear skies, but that autumn was plagued by a drought that turned the meadows to tinder and the rich, dark forest floor dusty. Last week, smoke from a nearby forest fire settled ash over everything and turned the sky into a burnt orange hellscape.
Today was uncharacteristically humid. Angry clouds kept threatening thunderstorms and failing to deliver. “Earthquake weather,” Ian had said cheerfully. Alek despised hot weather and became increasingly histrionic the higher the dew point climbed.
The Victorian didn’t have centralized air conditioning, and the walls were practically sweating. He’d bought portable AC units for their room and the parlor—he didn’t want the piano to wilt and warp under the humidity—and he didn’t stray from the rooms that offered Alek-approved climates. The constant, droning hum of the AC unit was slowly driving him insane, or more insane, and the hulking appliance really killed the whole Dark Academia aesthetic he was going for, but at least he wasn’t hot.
Weather was only one of the reasons Alek hadn’t been to the greenhouse in two weeks. It had all been very exciting when Ian first started renovating the greenhouse. There was the promise of Ian eye candy and sex alfresco, but the greenhouse was like a vortex. Ian had spent hours there, building enormous piles of hacked-up trees and ripped-out vines and yet hardly put a dent into the vegetation. Last week Ian had one of their crews out tohelp—so they would still get paid while he took a break from accepting new jobs—and despite days of headache-inducing cacophony, the greenhouse looked as packed with brush as before.
Yellow grass crunched beneath Alek’s feet as they wound their way to the greenhouse. Ian tried to hold Alek’s hand, but he batted it away. Alek’s palms were already sweating. Why couldn’t his mental breakdown have had the decency to arrive before the heatwave?
“It’s hotter than Satan’s nether regions,” Alek complained.
The forest was uncharacteristically silent, probably because the heat had made the birds and squirrels lazy, so when Ian exploded with laughter, it was as startling as it was bittersweet, because like all of the other times Ian laughed lately, Alek wondered if he was hearing it for the last time.
