Page 50 of Wait for Him

“Fuck off, you.” I try to elbow him, but he stays safely out of range while shoving me toward the bathroom.

“Use soap. A lot of it.”

I spin around. “I swear to God, Jackson—”

He closes the bathroom door in my face.

I stare at it for a second before the smile wins anyway.

“Asshole,” I mutter, and turn toward the shower.

***

The morning passes mostly in a blur of hangover, exhaustion and a low, humming sexual frustration I can't seem to file away with the rest of the morning's correspondence. It's not even about David, not really. Watching a man I trusted rut into his pretend cousin on my own sheets stripped something from me that I've spent a long time learning to keep a grip on, and now my whole body wants it back.

Control.

The need for it has come roaring up out of wherever I keep it, and it doesn't care that I'm sitting at a conference table surrounded by a board trying to salvage their CEO's reputation, or that it's my brother's genitals currently trending, or that I have approximately nine fires to put out before noon.

I know the psychology behind it. I'd be insulting myself to pretend I don't.

I was sexually assaulted the same night my parents died.

The same night.

I'd been attacked only hours earlier and was still shaking, still crying and bleeding as I drove myself toward the nearest hospital when my phone rang. Somewhere along that road, the night went from unsurvivable to something I didn't have a word for yet.

Vanguard Airlines, flight VG 811, crashed shortly after takeoff heading from Houston to LAX.

No survivors.

Both of them gone, just like that, in the time it took to answer a phone call.

Michael was at a sleepover for the weekend with Samson and his family. Fourteen years old, asleep two doors down, blissfully unaware that the entire shape of his life had just changed while he slept.

So I never made it to the hospital.

I turned the car around somewhere in the middle of the worst night of my life, went home long enough to throw clothes into a bag with hands that wouldn't stop trembling, and headed for the airport instead. Getting to my brother before the world told him about our parents first mattered more than anything that had happened to my body a few hours earlier.

By the time the wheels touched down in Houston, the assault had already quietly filed itself under never happened. Never reported. Never spoken about. Never given enough room to become something I'd have to deal with, because there was suddenly something bigger waiting for me on the other side of that flight.

Michael.

From there, everything became about him.

I don't resent him for that. I need to make that distinction, even in my own head. Michael didn't ask me to bury anything for him. He didn't know there was anything to bury.

I did that.

That was the deal I made with myself somewhere around thirty thousand feet without ever putting it into words. He gets a childhood. Whatever is left of one. He gets school and friends and birthdays and someone who remembers to buy groceries and sign forms and make sure he isn't spending every waking hour wondering whether the last people he has will disappear too.

And I get to keep moving.

As long as I never stop long enough to feel any of it.

Turns out that's not how trauma works.

Inconsiderate, really.