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“Brooke, this is the shit he’s lived with his whole life. He’s up, he’s down, he’s all over the place. His decisions might hurt but making them gets him through it. This is how he was formed—this is why he’s who he is. He is strong because of this bullshit! You can be pitiful or you can be powerful, but you can’t be both. He is powerful. You have got to be strong with him—he’ll break if he knows this breaks you.”
Even though my fears have completely gnawed away all my confidence and my stomach is about to turn over, I somehow manage to pull myself into some semblance of a person. I manage to straighten my spine and lift my head, and take a small, ragged breath, because I will do this for him. I will do it with him and I will prove to myself, and to him, that I am going to be strong enough to love the hell out of him.
I suck in another breath and wipe the corners of my eyes. “I want to be there.”
Pete signals at the door and gives me an approving nod. “Be my guest.”
My steps are quiet and almost hesitant as I go into the room. He’s big and massive and strong, I know, even if my heart is a rag in my chest and all my blood seems to feel like ice inside me, I am going to prove to him that I am worthy of being his mate and the one who will stand when he can’t. I don’t know how I will prove this, because I am toppling, like a crushed building, as I walk inside. I look all right, but inside of me, in my very soul, I’m disintegrating, nerve by nerve, organ by organ.
He looks at me now—straight into my eyes, and I can see the worry in his dark eyes. Of course he’s afraid I’ll topple. He doesn’t want to see that in my eyes. “Okay?” he asks me in a husky whisper.
I nod and reach for his hand. My reply should be, “More than okay.” Right? But I just can’t get any more words past my closed throat. So I rub his fingers with mine, and when he squeezes me, I remember our flight out of Seattle, this hand, the one I will not let go of, and I squeeze back as hard as I can and smile shakily down at him.
“That’s my girl,” he rasps, brushing his thumb over mine.
He’s strapped and about to receive electroshocks and he asks me about me. Oh god, I love him so much, if he dies I want to die with him and this is no f**king joke. I blink back the tears and squeeze him harder.
“Can I hold his hand?” I ask one of the nurses.
“Sorry, you can’t during the procedure,” she tells me.
Remington cautiously watches me as I force myself to step back and they attach some electrodes to his forehead. A ball of fire is in my throat, in my heart, and in my stomach. I am not even breathing when a nurse asks him, “Are you ready?”
“Hit me,” he answers, his eyes briefly flicking over me to check my reaction before he faces the ceiling again.
They start the IV flow to sedate him.
They begin asking him questions. “Full name?”
“Remington Tate.”
My eyes well up.
“Date of birth?”
“April ten, nineteen eighty-eight.”
“Place of birth?”
“Austin, Texas.”
“Names of your parents.”
“Dora Finlay and Garrison Tate.”
I can barely take the fact that he is strapped, talking about his f**king parents, who made him black like this, his voice deep and strong, answering whatever they ask him.
Then she tells him, “Count from one to a hundred.” And they put a mouthpiece on him.
He starts to count, and I count in my head with him. His eyes shut. Beautiful dark lashes against his strong cheekbones.
My protective instincts rage so loud I want to scream at them to stop, now that he can’t see me and he can’t keep me from stopping this. But I stand here, because he wants to do this. Because he is strong. Stronger than me. He will whip himself into shape just like life has beaten him to it.
Then the shock goes.
His big body seizes and tightens on the table.
My body tightens and begins to implode.
The machine makes a beeping noise.
His toes curl.
I didn’t know if he’d be flailing, breaking things because he’s so strong, but his body remains relatively still as he takes the shock in his brain. Oh my god.
Oh my god.
Oh my f**king god.
I am in love with Remington Tate and he has Bipolar 1, and it crashes down on me like an avalanche.
I don’t think I’ve ever cried this way. Despite putting all my effort into not crying, the tears are literally exploding out of my eyes and my arms are shaking and my body so weak with grief, I edge back to lean against the wall and unsuccessfully try to suck back all my tears.
“Hey, Brooke, hey,” says Pete, kneeling at my side, hugging me.
“It’s so hard,” I say, covering my face and trying to pull away from him because Remy wouldn’t want it. Remy wouldn’t like it. “Don’t touch me, Pete, oh god, this is so f**king hard. So f**king hard!” He grabs me and shakes me a little, his voice comforting, his eyes showing pain.
“He’s not suffering, Brooke. He just wants to get better. Brooke, he is NOT a victim. He makes his choices based on his circumstances. He’ll worry about you. You need to condition yourself like he has—please, I beg you to be strong.”
I nod, while all I can think of is Remy’s beautiful brain, his beautiful body, my church, my sanctuary, enduring this.
“Brooke, it hurts me too. All right? It hurts me too. You can’t let him see that. He’s strong because as far as he’s concerned, this is his reality; he deals with it—he’s never had any different. He doesn’t lament it. Don’t let him see this breaks you or you’re going to break him. You don’t have to save him; just be with him while he saves himself.”
Getting a grip on myself, I nod and wipe my tears as I try to piece myself together. I squeeze the tears out of my eyes as I try to stand and the nurses and doctor say it’s all done.
Remy is still sedated, on the table, and they’ve removed his mouthpiece and somehow cleaned his air ducts. I grab his hand when they unstrap him, bring it to my lips, and kiss each of his knuckles, then wipe them dry of my tears with my lips.
The way Remy is taken care of . . .
Pete is such a good man, it breaks my heart that my sister must not have seen it.
“Pete, my sister really liked you—I don’t know what happened,” I whisper.
His eyebrows fly up to his hairline. “What? Brooke, I like her too—I still do. But I won’t leave my brother for just anyone.”
Nodding in silence, I study Remington’s large hand. Every callus, every line in this palm . . . the rise of his knuckles, the length and shape of his beautiful fingers, the short stubs of his clean, square nails.
Quietly, I stroke the lines in Remy’s palm and then lift my head and smile into Pete’s kind brown eyes. “One day you’ll find someone who makes you want to do anything for her. Pete, I’m going to take care of him. You’re going to teach me to take perfect care of him.”
He smiles and pats my shoulder. “Until then, neither of you is going to have to do this on your own.” He puts a hand on Remington’s shoulder, and I swear in heart and mind, even if not in blood, he truly is Remington’s brother, and at this moment, how I wish my sister and I were as close, and as loyal, as this.
“Brooke, I did something I’m very ashamed of, and I think I owe you an apology,” Pete blurts out. Seeing the despair in his eyes plants a cold little ice cube in the center of my belly.
“When you were gone, he got so bad. He was on suicide watch at the hospital, and they kept sedating him when he woke up, because he destroyed things and tried to go after you. They gave him antidepressants, and they didn’t work, and with rapid cyclers like Rem it’s not a good idea anyway. So we had to start him up on this.” He signals to the table. “We did it for several weeks so he could be discharged. . . .”
He looks at me, and I don’t think I’m even breathing. I’m just staring, waiting for more, confused and partly numb from the roller coaster of the day.
“After the first three treatments he got a little better, so he was discharged, and we came three times a week for ECT for a couple weeks. During that time, he was still black. We brought him fourteen women.”
My heart cracks at the mention of them, and I feel myself erecting several mental blocks as I grip my stomach and my brain screams, I don’t want to know, I don’t want to know, I don’t want to know!
“I make all these women sign paperwork that they won’t talk, no pictures, that they’ll use double protection. . . . They all came out half an hour later with the condom packets intact, confirming they couldn’t get him to turn over or even raise his head from the bed. He told them all to leave. All of them.”
I keep staring, and Pete rubs his face with his hands, and adds, “He didn’t sleep with any of them, Brooke, no matter how hard we tried for him to. He was obsessed with your f**king letter, reading and reading it every moment he was awake. When he finally pushed through that depression and came into his blue eyes, he had no recollection of anything. Maybe because he was black, or maybe because of the electroshock’s side effects. He had about twelve treatments. But we’d almost lost him, Brooke, you know? Riley and I were . . . we were pissed as hell with you too! So we told him he’d been having fun with all these women.”
