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“She’s dead.” Her eyes don’t seem to be seeing me at all as tears start pouring over her cheeks. “She’s dead.”
Turning the cold water on in the sink, I push Phoebe’s hand under the water and watch her face for a reaction. Long minutes pass without anything happening, and I’m getting really concerned. She keeps going into these fugue states where she loses track of everything except whatever memory she keeps reliving, and she needs to be in a fucking psych ward not here. She needs help- professional help, not the kind of shit I can give her.
But without knowing what she’s facing, I can’t let her leave. I lied to myself thinking I’d drive her away. I can’t do that, especially not after what I just saw. She gets triggered by such simple things. They’d keep her sedated all the time. She’d just be a ghost, walking the halls waiting for something to hit her the wrong way so she can freak out.
I can’t let that happen to her. Unfortunately for her, I’m probably the best chance she’s got of staying alive. I can’t say much healing will happen here, but she’s not safe out there. Not with the way she’s acting. If she turned into this fucking catatonic creature in public, who knows what would happen to her. She’s not going anywhere.
Finally, her fingers start to move. I can feel the tendons in her wrist flexing against my palm, but I don’t let her move away. She needs to come back to reality, and she’s not all the way here yet. The frigid temperature of the water is forcing her body to recognize that she’s not in the past.
“Phoebe, do you feel the water? Do you feel how cold it is? How wet it is?” I ask, forcing my voice to sound calm and not betray what I’m really feeling. “Can you hear it- the sound of it hitting the sink? You’re not there anymore. Nothing’s going to hurt you.”
The moment she gets dragged back to the present, her other hand wraps around my wrist as she fights to free herself from my grip. When she looks down at where her hand is locked between us, she stops and runs her fingers over the claw marks she left in my arm. “Shit, you’re hurt,” she mumbles. “Did I do that?”
“No. I’m fine. Let me get you cleaned up. You scraped your knees.”
She bends over at the waist and stretches the bleeding skin with her fingers. “Ouch.”
Chapter Ten
Phoebe
“We have a doctor in the club,” Josiah tells me. “I’d like to have him come and talk to you. Would you be okay with that?”
“My knees aren’t that bad.” They’re roughly scraped and bleeding with sand in the cuts, but they’ll heal in a few days.
He shakes his head as he releases my wrist and wets a rag under the running water. “Not about your knees. About the anxiety.”
My eyes drop and my breath stalls. I’m already burdening him in so many ways and he keeps adding more. I’m infringing on his space, making him feel bad for sleeping in his own bed, bothering him with my anxiety, and now he wants to invite someone else here when he told me earlier that no one knows where this place is. He’s exposing himself to the members of his club because of my needs.
“Phoebe, I can’t have you losing your mind right now. I need to talk to you, so you’re going to have to postpone the breakdown.”
I glare at him, momentarily stunned into silence. He must have been living here alone for a very long time to be this out of touch with reality and how to be polite. I’ve never met someone so comfortable with this kind of speaking and unafraid to say mean things to me. “That’s an incredibly rude thing to say to someone, Josiah.”
“Good. Now that you should be firmly grounded back in your body, I’m going to have Doc come out and talk to you about this stuff so that you can get on some medicine and start feeling better. Do you want to tell me why that freaks you out?”
No, not particularly, but since he’s being honest- even though it’s brutal- I’ll give him something. “I don’t want you to go out of your way to help me with something that I caused myself.” If I had just kept my damn mouth shut eight years ago, I wouldn’t be in this situation. I might be in a worse situation, but it wouldn’t be this one. I put myself in danger when I decided to speak up, and now I have to be the one to pay for it.
“It’s not out of my way, and I want to make sure you’re taken care of.” Josiah sounds confident in this, and it confuses me.
“Why?” I ask, staring at his eyes as I try to suss out his intentions. Something about these men. Rhett and Josiah are in some sort of club. He was trying to tell me about it earlier after we got stoned, but it just doesn’t quite make sense to me. Rhett did the same thing when I showed up at BIBO begging for a job. He started taking care of me automatically. Why do these men do this for someone they don’t know?
Josiah narrows his eyes, but turns his focus to my poor knees instead. He washes the first one gently, careful not to make it hurt any worse as he rinses the sand and blood away. “What do you mean? You’re asking why I want to make sure you’re okay? Because you’re a guest in my house.”
“I don’t…” I don’t understand how that makes a difference. I’ve been a guest in lots of places, but no one has ever made such huge adjustments to their lives to accommodate me. “I’m fine. I can take care of myself. I shouldn’t even be here.”
“Phoebe,” he sighs. “Please. Just-”
“If your doctor is going to ask me about what happened, he might as well not come at all. If he can talk to me without asking, then fine. I’ll let him.” I can tell Josiah isn’t going to give up on it. He’s going to want this doctor to come speak with me no matter what I say.
Josiah is right. Medication would probably help me a lot in my efforts to heal myself. However, I’m not going to tell him about my past. Not Josiah, not the doctor, not Rhett. The one time I spoke about what I saw and everything that happened after, it turned into a fucking extended nightmare.
Tony’s stare across the courtroom forces my throat to close over the words I might say if he wasn’t in the room. I was led to believe he wouldn’t be, that it would just be me and the lawyer in a room with the judge or jury, but everything has become so blurred. I can’t remember what’s happening from one minute to the next, let alone in the last year since I started all this.
I hate remembering that. I started this. If I had just shut the fuck up a year ago instead of making it a big deal, I wouldn’t be stuck sitting here, looking into the eyes of one of the worst people I’ve ever met. His eyes are so cold and empty. He looks like a fucking killer. Why do we need a judge or a jury of his peers? Can’t they just see it by looking at him?
And who the fuck is a peer to a psychotic rapist? Unless they’ve got a board of inhuman, soulless, evil people, they don’t have any fucking peers to judge him.
The advocate and my lawyer have sworn I’ll be safe. They’re working on some things for me so that after the trial I’ll be an emancipated adult and after that I’ll change my last name and move. They’ve spent the last few months telling me it’s not necessary, that most abusers, when released after a conviction, stay far away from the person that reported them. They don’t think he’ll come after me if he gets out, but we don’t even know if he’s going to be goinginto prison yet.
