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Chapter Twenty-Two
I sat on the sofa in her living room, waiting for her to get dressed. We hadn’t exchanged any words since we’d arrived back to her house. I ran her a bath, I sat in the bathroom with her while she allowed her body to relax and gain some kind of brain function back again.
I noticed last time she had this kind of episode—while it was much worse then—that it took her the rest of the day to feel somewhat normal again. She’d been on edge, sudden movements spooked her, she wanted to have simple conversations and just relax her body. I guess it helped her mind to regenerate from what seemed almost like a trauma.
So I was waiting… waiting until she was ready to talk. Because frankly, I was done, and I had questions that needed fucking answers.
Seeing her car outside Eric Deanwell’s office building almost made me crash my bike into a line of traffic. I’d been over there checking out one of the girls from X-Rated, where she lived, and what she was up to given that today was her day off. Everything seemed fine, and I found her at home babysitting two younger siblings while her mom picked up an extra shift at the hospital. I was heading across town to check on another when I spotted Sugar’s car.
To say I was fucking pissed, would be an understatement. Not only was I ready to rip Deanwell a new asshole, but I was minutes away from calling fucking Optimus and letting him deal with it. I didn’t know whether I could hold my temper without tearing shit to pieces.
Yet, what I found, definitely wasn’t what I expected.
“You didn’t call, Op,” Sugar stated quietly as she stepped into the living room, drying her wet hair with a fluffy blue towel. Her movements were slow, but I could see in her eyes that she was alert. I knew I shouldn’t push it, but I was struggling to find any fucking reason in the world for her to be in that office. That combined with her strange behavior over the past month or more, and I was beginning to get pretty damn concerned with what the hell was going on.
Was she working with him?
Was he forcing her to give him information on the club?
What in God’s fucking name was the connection?
“No, I didn’t call him,” I answered, before adding. “Not yet anyway.”
She cringed but nodded as she walked over to the small laundry area and tossed the towel on the washing machine. “Thanks.”
“Don’t thank me just yet. Because if I don’t get some answers soon, I’m gonna call him over and there ain’t no way he’s gonna let you out of his sight ever again.” I laid it down thick. I knew that if Op knew right now what had happened, he would hit the fucking roof. And if I had to, I would fucking tell him. Even it if meant putting my own ass in the shit, just to protect the club.
“I get it,” she said quietly as she took a seat on the other end of the sofa. She hung her head, but this didn’t seem like it was out of exhaustion, the look on her face was rather one of shame, embarrassment, and guilt.
“Please,” I begged softly. “I need to fucking know what the hell I’m dealing with here… it’s been going on for too long now. We both know you’re hiding something, and we both know how much better you’ll feel when yo—”
“I’m bipolar.”
The words fell from her mouth in a rush, like she forced them out in the moment before she could convince herself not to. Her eyes stared straight ahead, staring into nothing, emotionless.
“Bipolar?” I questioned, unsure if I’d heard her correctly. I knew the term, had a basic idea of what it was but wasn’t really sure why it was important. “What are you trying to say?”
She stared at me like I’d grown two heads. “I have Bipolar Affective Disorder. It affects my emotions, gives me extreme highs and sometimes debilitating lows.”
“The panic attacks…” I said, my brain catching on to what she was telling me.
She nodded slowly, pulling her knees to her chest and continuing to avoid my eyes. “It started when I was a teenager. I’d have weeks where I felt like I was invincible finding it hard to sit still and focus at school. I was defiant and a little crazy. I just wanted to go out, have fun, do stupid things and screw the consequences.”
I could tell even as she explained her emotions and her actions, that she was playing them over and over in her mind like she was watching an old movie of herself.
“Then the lows started to hit me. I’d refuse to leave the house, not wanting to acknowledge that there was a world outside. I felt hopeless and empty. My parents didn’t help at all, they only wanted a perfect daughter. One that they could show off and use as competition against their friends…” She shook her head, her voice a soft whisper that I strained to hear even in the complete silence of the room. “But what they got was me. If I wasn’t wreaking havoc and embarrassing them, I was refusing to eat and sitting in my room contemplating giving up on life.”
I wanted to reach over and pull her into my arms, feeling the broken energy surrounding her. I wanted her to know that I was here, but I knew by now that I didn’t have to say the words. She felt comfort around me, even if we were sitting in silence, she felt at ease, and that was all I wanted her to know as she bared her soul to me.
“They thought I was crazy. People looked at me like I was a freak, some kind of sideshow act. In the world I grew up in, it was something that was always buried away with the skeletons in the closet. But everyone had already noticed, so there was no hiding that something was wrong with me.” Her fingers were playing with a loose thread on her sweat pants, tugging at it, twisting it in her fingers. “They finally diagnosed me when I was around seventeen. But as far as my parents were concerned, I’d already tainted their reputation too much. I was broken, and they wanted to quietly pass me on to someone else to deal with.”
I finally reached out and took her hand, threading her fingers through mine. She finally looked over and met my eyes, I could see the pain reflecting back at me. This was hard for her, she was baring her soul, and like every person in her life who knew about her disorder, she was expecting me to run.
I wasn’t running.
“You’re not bipolar,” I told her softly.
She looked at me with a frown. “Yes, I am, I’ve been living with it for over ten years.”
