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“I’m way too impulsive, you know this.”
He stretches back with a thoughtful expression, and the chair creaks in protest. Code is scrolling up his screen behind his head. The sky beyond the window is reaching that inky evening darkness. My stomach rumbles.
His eyes narrow. “This isn’t about Nadine, is it?”
My only attempt at a long-term relationship. A girl like me, and a wild, soul-destroying two years.
“No. Fuck, no.”
“Because you deserve someone so much better than her.”
“She was just messed up, like me.”
“You are not like Nadine. Man, the manipulation—”
I hold up my hand.
“Why don’t you just take a chance and see where it goes?”
Falling for someone like Kate and losing her … I am not the kind of person that could walk away. When you lose someone good, it’s all on you.
“I experiment with drugs, Janus. She’s a doctor.”
“Then why don’t you let her help you kick the drug habit?”
He’s always been ambivalent about my propensity to experiment on my body.
“I don’t have a habit. I try out different drug combinations like a chemist, but that’s all it is, man. I’m not an addict. I don’t take anything regularly. I don’t use drugs as a prop: too much lying, stealing, bodily decline. I’ve had periods when I’ve ditched the experimentation and been totally okay with it.”
He grunts at me unhappily. “And yet you keep ending up in hospital? You have to admit it’s a bit of a worry.”
“Why is it any different from alcohol? You wouldn’t turn down a cocktail you hadn’t tried before, would you?”
He sighs. We’ve had this conversation many times before. “It’s a lot more dangerous than a bit of booze.”
But I like the danger, I don’t say. Some people scale cliff faces; I like testing my body in other ways. Oh, I know the trips to the hospital are not the actions of a sensible man, but I like understanding how my body responds. Pushing myself, emotionally and physically, takes me out of my head and into the moment; all the voices and the noise and the running video of my father’s looming face and evil grin disappear. It’s like diving off a cliff into deep water. I pull myself up at the thought—are all these things replacing some emotional space in me that they shouldn’t? I need to return to that idea when Janus is not messing with my thoughts.
Janus coughs. “Anyway, I think you’re protesting a little too much about Kate,” he says.
Later on, after he’s left, I take a cold shower and curse myself as I pad around the apartment.Dammit, what am I doing?The hot burst inside when she told me she liked me. And asking her to dance? Fucking Janus. I think about the courage it must have taken for ice queen Kate to tell me she liked me, and I ran away, knowing in my heart that, while she mightsayshe likes guys like me, the day-to-day reality … well … she wouldn’t stick around. She would come to see me as I saw Nadine—a loose cannon, a liability. And I couldn’t bear the hope. This is like when I was trying to get into college, every time I got closer, did a test, the terror would take me over that someone would whip it away or I would say the wrong thing,dothe wrong thing.Fucking hell.
I clean my bedroom, play several games ofValorantand eventually start watchingKill Billon HBO. But even the body count doesn’t distract me from the pounding in my head. Forty-five minutes in, I pause the film and fling the remote onto the couch, walk across the warm wooden boards into the kitchen, pull a cup from the cupboard, and grind coffee beans, inhaling their bitterness.
Never mind whether this could go somewhere—I like Kate. She’s good people, and I’ve probably hurt her feelings by backing right off after she said she was interested. And you don’t treat decent people like that. I need to apologize and explain.
9
Fabian
My phone lights up on the desk, and I stare down at it, hands stilling on the keyboard. The number for this phone is known by very few people, and I’m looking at a number I don’t recognize.Fuck, it’s compromised!How did they find the number forthisphone? I pick it up, and the desire to throw it across the room is almost irresistible.
“Hello,” I growl.
“Umm, Fabian?” The uncertain tilt to her words makes my whole body swoop.
“Kate?” I pull my phone away from my ear and inspect it. “How did you get this number?”
“Janus gave it to me. Is that okay?” she says, breath whispering down the line. The hairs on the back of my neck prickle. Janus wouldn’t realize this was any kind of special phone—how mundane is giving out a number for everyone else? Most people don’t live in my paranoid little world.
