I See Me (12 page)

Pain exploded behind my eyes. The hallucination forced its way through the mist, feeling like it was tearing the flesh of my brain as it did so.

The figure resolved itself into the curly-haired golden-blond woman with the jade knife. Again, she was inexplicably dressed in a brightly colored sarong and tank top. She stood among the ruins of the temple, so she’d obviously survived the cave-in I’d witnessed in my last hallucination. The oranges and reds of her skirt blurred as she spun until I could see her face. She was screaming. Her blond curls were matted with blood, but I could see no wound on her. She was screaming at someone I couldn’t see. Then she dropped the knife to thrust her hands out to someone she couldn’t reach, and her scream was far more terrifying than anything I’d ever heard before.
 

This woman was confident and strong. She scared me with a laugh. She jested as she traded blows with the dark-suited man. But here … here, she was losing someone.

Someone she loved was dying.

I threw my head back — momentarily breaking free of the hallucination as I did so — and screamed. I screamed for the woman. I freed her pain. It poured through me. I stiffened and then bucked in Beau’s arms. I bit my tongue. My mouth filled with blood. The metallic taste flooded my senses, making me aware of my surroundings.

I opened my eyes.

Gravel crunched under Beau’s feet. We were steps from the Brave. I could feel it more than see it. I could feel my sanctuary was near. Light still flared across the deep blue sky. Beau had gotten us back impossibly quick. Or, more likely, I’d lost a bunch of time.

“Goodness,” a woman said. “Is she all right?” Her voice came from behind us, perhaps from the campsite across the way.

“No, worries, ma’am.” Beau’s voice rumbled in his chest when he spoke, vibrating against my ear. “Just a migraine.”

“Ah, poor girl. You take care of her, then.”

“I will.”
 

Beau reached for the door, popping the lock rather than using the keys in my pocket.

“No,” I moaned.

“I’ll fix it,” he said. “I’ll fix it all.” Then he practically ripped the door off the Brave to carry me inside.

The hallucination flooded my eyes again, but it didn’t seem to be a repeat of the previous vision.
 

Usually, they repeated.

This was going to be bad. Maybe the worst it had ever been. God, I didn’t want to go back to the hospital. If Beau checked me into a psych ward in the States, could I ever get out?

“No hospital, Beau,” I managed to say, though I think my words were garbled by the pain in my head. “No hospital.”

“Of course not,” he said. “Never. I know how things work.”

I didn’t know what he meant, but I wasn’t up for questions and answers.

He placed me on the bed.

In my mind, the blond woman, still in her red and orange sarong, reached down and lifted a body in her arms as if it weighed nothing. I’d never seen the woman she carried before. She had the most shockingly emerald-green-dyed hair. It was never, ever a good thing for me — for my hold on sanity — when new people appeared in my hallucinations.

“Oh, God no. Not more …” I moaned it instead of screaming. I twisted my head until my face was buried in the nearest pillow. Beau’s manly scent filled my senses, pushing the hallucination aside.

Beau was trying to press a bottle of pills into my hand.

“How many?” he asked. His voice was stressed and full of fear. His brush off of the woman from the neighboring campsite was apparently just a brilliant act.

I couldn’t see his face. I couldn’t see anything but the blinding whiteness. “Two,” I managed to answer.

He pressed a glass of water into my hand and tried to prop me up.

“No …” I pushed the water away, spilling it across my leg and onto the bed. The cool wetness soaked into my jeans and pulled me further from the clutches of the hallucination.

He pressed two pills into my palm and I popped them into my mouth. Once again, I willed myself to let them dissolve under my tongue rather than chew them in my terror.

Pain lanced through my head again. I fell backward onto the bed, arching up and writhing with the agony. But I refused to scream, refused to open my mouth and lose the pills.

Beau pressed his hands to me, one at my shoulder and one at the opposite hip. He was attempting to hold me down. I probably looked like I was having a seizure, and maybe I was … except multiple MRIs had ruled out any brain tumors that could cause seizures. I’d held out hope for a brain tumor — for any explanation — for a long, long time.

I fought Beau off.

He let me go.

The pills dissolved across my tongue, flooding my mouth with their chalky taste.

“My bag,” I gasped. “My sketchbook.”

Beau turned away, only to return split seconds later to press my bag into my hands. Still blind, I dug inside and found a piece of charcoal.

“Your eyes,” Beau murmured. The fear in his voice lanced through my chest like a blistering brand. “They’re white. Glowing white.”

I shook my head at him. I couldn’t absorb anything but the feel of the charcoal in my fingers and the pages of the sketchbook open on my lap.

I hunched over to draw.

“Wait,” Beau cried. “That’s not a blank page.”

“It doesn’t matter.”
 

Despite my reply, I felt him flip the pages for me.

“I need you to go. Please.”

“You want me to leave?” he asked, his voice heavy with pain.

“Not like that,” I managed to say, though I desperately just wanted to continue screaming. I wanted to scream and scream until the pills took the pain away.

“I understand,” he said as he moved away. “I’ll be outside.”

It was going to get cold outside. The thought worried me even as I applied my charcoal to the paper. Then, still utterly blind, I drew whatever wanted to break loose from the prison of my brain.

“Is it that guy?” Beau asked, his voice so low that I barely heard it. He must have been standing in the doorway.

“Just go, please.” I didn’t bother to look up. I couldn’t see him anyway. “Please. It will pass. It always passes.”

The Brave shifted with his exit and I heard the door click shut. I thought he’d broken the lock. The lock and the latch were separate things, then. I tried to hold on to this piece of reality. But with Beau gone, the hallucination dug deeper into my mind and had its way.

The pills would kick in eventually, and the sketching should appease the hallucination during the in-between time.
 

I didn’t hear or see anything else of the real world for a long while.

∞

The Brave was moving. When I opened my eyes, it was pitch black, so I didn’t bother trying to see anything. The drowsiness of the pills beckoned me back under and I didn’t fight it. I could feel charcoal underneath my fingernails. I’d been drawing with both hands.

“Bad one,” I murmured.

Then Beau was beside me, radiating warmth and comfort as he tucked the sheets down around me so tightly that I couldn’t move. Which was fine, because I didn’t want to move.

Who’s driving?
I tried to ask, but I couldn’t form the words outside my head. It was a silly question anyway. I was just mixing up moments. Beau was obviously driving. I should be angry about that. That he was driving my freedom without asking permission first.

He didn’t leave. He saw my crazy and he didn’t leave.

Just give him a chance, Rochelle
, a nasty voice countered in my mind. This was the voice that kept me down, that kept my eyes behind glasses and my tattooed arms covered so I didn’t upset the normal people. This voice normally sounded like my shrink, but it sounded exactly like me now.

So I ignored it.

I was accustomed to ignoring things, after all … like the way Beau’s eyes changed color, or the static charges when we touched. I was good at boxing all those things and locking them away in my crazy crate, my broken brain.

∞

It was morning, though I wasn’t sure of the time. I was alone in the Brave, but Beau’s backpack was still on the dinette’s printed orange-and-brown bench seat. The RV was parked in a completely different campsite. Neither of the sites on either side of it were occupied. I could hear the ocean, but could only see trees through the windshield.

I was so, so cold. And disconnected. Terribly, disjointedly disconnected. Distanced from the anger I felt at Beau for driving the Brave without my permission. Distanced from the anger at him for dragging me somewhere I didn’t know I wanted to be. And I didn’t mean the campsite.

I pulled a second hoodie over the one I was already wearing, aware that it probably looked ridiculous. But also aware that this was my space, and it didn’t matter what I looked like at all.

The door opened and the Brave shifted to accommodate Beau’s weight as he climbed in. It was the third time I’d noticed. That was odd, wasn’t it? He couldn’t possibly be that heavy.

He saw me standing in the middle of the kitchen area and paused only halfway up the steps, one foot still on the ground behind him.

I crossed my arms and resolutely looked away. I’d already invited him in once. I didn’t like repeating myself.

“Sorry,” he said. “I had to go farther than I thought.”

He held up a brown paper bag. There was nothing wary in his voice, though he wasn’t smiling. He looked tired. I guessed that he hadn’t slept yet.

I nodded to the table rather than him.

He shut the door behind him, locking it. So he’d fixed the lock.

He stepped forward to deliberately reach into my field of vision and place the Brave’s keys on the table before me. I left them there without comment. He stepped back to the counter beside me.

He pulled a paper cup out of the bag, removed the plastic lid, and pressed it to my hands.

Warm apple juice.

I started crying. Like a child. Something I’d sworn off doing in front of people since before I was twelve.

Beau took the apple juice from me, placing it on the counter as he pulled me to him. I clung to him and sobbed into his neck, which I could reach only because he was now leaning against the table.

“Did you think I’d left?” he asked. “I’m not leaving. I told you already.”

“No,” I cried. “It’s just that I like the apple juice so much it scares me.”

He threw back his head and laughed so hard that his arms convulsed around me. They squeezed me and I lost my breath in a whoosh. That was okay. I didn’t need to breathe around him.

I was beyond breathing.

I was beyond reason. But I had been for a very long time now.

“You’re all wet,” I said.

“It’s raining.”

“Are you cold?”

“No.”

“I am. So cold.”

He tried to pull me in even tighter, rubbing my arms a little too hard. But I pushed him away and reached down for the button of his jeans.

“You should eat something,” he said. “I googled those meds.”

If he had googled the meds, then he knew everything.

He knew it wasn’t migraines. He knew about the psychotic disorder and he still stayed. He drove the Brave to get me away from whatever had triggered me. He fixed the lock and bought me breakfast. My broken brain hadn’t scared him off.

I felt relieved instead of terrified. I’m not sure I’d ever felt the relief that was now coursing through my limbs.

I locked my gaze to his blue-green eyes and touched my lips to his in a whisper of a kiss. He relaxed. His shoulders actually dropped as he reached up to brush his fingertips across my cheek and over my ear, weaving his fingers into my hair.

“You should eat something,” he repeated, but he wasn’t as absolute about it as he had been.

“Later,” I murmured as I tugged the front of his jeans open and reached inside his boxers.

He groaned.

“I’m so cold,” I whispered, pressing a firmer kiss to his lips.

He tugged off my jeans and underwear as I continued to stroke and kiss him. Then he lifted me up, settling me against him until he was deep inside me. I was wrapped around him in a seated position with my legs crossed behind him on the table. I couldn’t move very well like this, but I didn’t have to. He wrapped his hands around my hips, darting his tongue in and out of my mouth. Matching this rhythm, he rocked me up and down on him.

I arched my back, instinctively pressing my hips to him on an angle that increased the friction.

I cried out. My orgasm lapped up and over me before I even knew it had begun. I’d never come during intercourse before.

He lifted me off the table and carried me to bed, still entwined. But then he pulled out as he lowered me down.

I cried out in the painful pleasure of having him exit. “Please.”

“I’m not going anywhere, Rochelle,” he whispered fiercely. “You won’t even be able to make me go now.”

He ripped open a condom and rolled it on. I scrambled backward so he could climb over me on the bed. He didn’t fit widthwise on the double without bending his knees, but he didn’t complain.

He thrust into me and I cried out from the insane sensitivity. I clung to him, riding the painful pleasure. He buried his face in my neck with a moan.

“Don’t make me go,” he whispered, then thrust again.

My brain was going to explode.

“Don’t ever make me go,” he repeated with another thrust.

“I won’t …” The words were torn out of me with a moan.

“Tell me again.”

“I won’t ever make you leave.”

“Again.”

“Beau, Beau,” I cried. “My beautiful, beautiful Beau.”

He came, arching back from me on his arms with only our hips connected for a moment. Then he collapsed forward.

“I’ll fix it,” he murmured against my collarbone “Somehow. Together. We’ll fix it.”

I believed him, though I wasn’t exactly sure what he was talking about. My illness wasn’t something that could be fixed, not by modern or even alternative medicine. Not like Beau could fix an engine with a couple of turns of his capable hands.

My brain was broken.
 

I was broken in a way that couldn’t be repaired. I could only endure. I really, really hoped that Beau staying meant he’d endure with me.