Page 289 of Breathe Like Hell

“Stop trying to make everything fit in one sentence,” Micah snapped, his voice flat in a way that only meant he was overwhelmed.

“You’re still doing it,” I said, too loud. My chest heaved, my thoughts spinning too fast for me to make much sense of. It was as if he wouldn’t let me hate myself for what I’d done, like he still needed to protect me from something. “Stop fucking doing this shit. It doesn’t make me feel better.”

“Doing what?”

“Making excuses for me!”

“I’m—”

“You are! You won’t blame me for something I clearly fucking did! You’re make excuses for my behavior, and it doesn’t help either one of us.”

“It helps me, Mason.” His eyes were dark, glassy but not enough to become tears.

We were looking at each other like we were trying to survive the same war from opposite sides.

I don’t know what to do.

My throat was tight, my chest bound by anxiety, my hands itching to do something. Hurt him or myself. Instability claimed my thoughts, cracking through my brain. Last time, I’d been able to drop it. I backed off. I let him retreat to the bathroom and slice his wrists open. But I couldn’t do it today.

I deserved the blame, the hatred, the responsibility of almost fucking breaking him.

Watching him carry this on his own shoulders made me irrationally angry.

I didn’t need his protection from this.

“I just don’t know why⁠—”

“Because if I stop making excuses for you, I have to admit it almost happened to me again,” he interrupted me. He blinked slower than usual, as if he was trying to hold himself together.

My stomach twisted in a knot, any sharp response stolen from my tongue.

I stood there in silence, the lump in my throat trying to kill me.

I have to admit it almost happened to me again.

I’d somehow misunderstood this fight.

He wasn’t refusing to blame me because he was still instinctively protecting me.

He was refusing because blaming me meant changing the story he’d been telling himself for two decades. It meant admitting that what had almost happened belonged in the same category as that other terrible wound. The old wound he’d spent a lifetime pretending hadn’t changed him.

“Micah—”

“No. It’s not the same. Understand?” His throat constricted with a rough swallow. “I was raped one time, and it wasn’t by you.”

His response stole every ounce of air from my lungs, ripped out all my internal organs, crushed my heart into something unrecognizable, because in all the time I’d known him, in all those fifty two years we’d been together and in every year since, I’d never once heard him use that word. I knew it’d happened, knew all the ways it affected him, but to hear him state it so plainly and openly felt for the first time like being flayed alive for more reasons than I could count.

“I’m so fucking sorry.”

“I don’t want you to be,” Micah said, his eyes lingering on some point just over my shoulder, never daring to touch my face again.

“I am. And I don’t want you to carry this by yourself anymore.”

“Mason.” He shook his head, lips in a tight line.

“Kill,” I pleaded, wanting to touch him, but keeping my hands away.

“You’re asking me to become someone I don’t know how to be. Just leave it.”