Ryan (Mallick Brothers #2)(5)

She was in no way anything like Dusty.

I was almost offended that he would even suggest it.

But that was insane.

We stood there for twenty minutes, every moment that passed had me wondering what she was doing in my car, if she was still freaking out, if she was hating me for dragging her out of her comfort zone.

The firemen came back out finally and informed Andrew and the rest of us that the idiot twenty year old pothead in 2A left his stove on with the flame burned out and that they had opened all the windows in the halls and it should be safe to return in about an hour.

Andrew walked off toward 2A to give it to him and I finally got to walk back around the building toward my car. I went to the driver's side and opened the door, making Dusty jerk up from where she had been sitting back in her seat, hand still on her belly, but body a lot less tense than it had been when I left her.

I slid into the seat, taking a second to let the pumping heat thaw me out before turning to her.

"2A left the stove on," I supplied, turning slightly to find her watching me intently.

"The pothead," she said, smile quirking up slightly.

"The one in the same," I agreed, nodding. "You alright?" I asked when a silence fell between us.



       
         
       
        

"Better than I thought I'd be," she allowed with an honesty I found myself surprised by. "Though I think Rocky is going to get payback for this."

"Looks like he already did," I said, reaching out despite knowing from her interaction with the dirtbag Bry that she didn't seem to like being touched, and ran my finger across the side of her hand where the angry red scratches had blood beaded up on the surface.

Had I maybe been a little less focused, a little less observant, I might have missed the way her air rushed out from between her lips, the way her fingers twitched but she didn't pull away.

I might have missed that.

But I didn't.

So it wasn't that she didn't like being touched; she just didn't like being touched by guys like Bry.

"This," she said, her voice a little airy, "this is nothing. He really hates his crate. Or, um, being told what to do at all. You know, being a cat overlord and everything."

I found my lips curving up at that, unexpectedly charmed as I reached past her for the glove box and flipped it open, pulling out what was a pretty full-service first aid kit. Call it a perk of the job I often found myself in, I was never without some antiseptic, triple antibiotic, butterfly closures, or superglue for makeshift stitching.

I flipped the top off the tiny squirt bottle.

"This is going to burn," I warned.





FOUR





Dusty





His hand slid under mine, holding my fingers still as he positioned the travel size squirt bottle of peroxide over my hand. It was the closest thing I had had to holding a man's hand in about three years.

Three years.

So that whole burning warning thing, yeah, that was pointless. Because I didn't feel anything but the way his strong fingers curled around mine; the way his palm was calloused which was at complete odds with his usual impeccable suit-wearing appearance. His knuckles and the top of his hand were all marred with too many scars to count, the way they criss-crossed over each other in varying stages of red, pink, and silvery white age making it impossible to even try.

They weren't the hands of a man in a suit. At least not in the way I understood men in suits. Men who had rough and scarred hands like his were supposed to be construction workers or mechanics or, I don't know, cage fighters.

Not business men.

So maybe he wasn't a businessman after all.

And that, well, it shattered the little origin story I had created for him after so long of seeing him come and go.

In a way, I was happy for the new story.

Maybe because I was getting to experience it somewhat first hand, not conjuring up nonsense in my head, an overactive mind trapped in a stationary body. 

Had you told me an hour before that I would find myself thrown over the shoulder of a man I had maybe had more than a handful of sexual fantasies about over the past year, his strong arm crossed the backs of my thighs to keep me in place, being carried out of my building like some freaking hero from a romantic period piece, you know back when guys did heroic crap like that, and then deposited into his car and tended to like my tiny little scrapes were of upmost importance, well, I would have had a good, much-needed laugh about it.

But that was exactly where I found myself.

I won't lie.

In the moment, when I found my choice pulled from me, when I was forced out of a place I hadn't stepped outside in years, it hadn't seemed heroic or sweet or romantic.

In that moment, I had been so desperate to be shut back into my little prison that I had pounded my fists into his back; I had tried to kick my knees into him; I had screamed and begged and, God, cried.

Because my heart had taken up residence in my throat, beating wilder than it ever had before, making my air get caught, impossible to squeeze past, causing me to get lightheaded as I broke out into a sweat and felt the bile swish around threateningly in my belly.

Again, I knew it was irrational.

Of course it was.

But that didn't change anything.

Anxiety wasn't rational.

I barely understood it myself and it was impossible to explain to others.

I had heard it all over the years.

You're so obsessed with your mental illness.

Maybe because it impacts every single part of my life.

It's all in your head.

I know, right? It's sort-of like it's a mental illness.

Why do you let it stop you from doing everyday, normal things?

Hmm, maybe because a mental illness is an actual illness.

After a while, you stop defending it, you stop talking about it, you shut it all up inside like everything else, letting it drive you just a little more crazy every single day.

Until one day, it was all there was left- the crazy, the unstable, the unstoppable wave of adrenaline that you couldn't even fight. Because it isn't just mental. The anxiety causes a physical reaction that causes endless symptoms in the physical body that you literally can not control.

I read in one of my many self-help books that the adrenaline released during a panic attack was linked to a biological fight-or-flight instinct and that those who were more inclined to anxiety attacks came from a strong lineage of people who trusted on those instincts and acted accordingly.

I had ancestors who ran away from their problems.

And that left me with the need to stand and fight my invisible ones.

Too bad I was a crappy fighter.

But once he had deposited me into his seat and turned over the car and reminded me to breathe, the lightheadedness started to pull back slightly. Then when he left me to go check on things, I had managed to pull myself back mostly and get a hold of myself. The car wasn't so bad. It was warm. The seat even warmed up behind and under me. It had a somewhat soothing vibrating as it idled, reminding me of my life before when I had loved endless, pointless joyrides when I had a long day and needed to unwind.

In the backseat, Rocky had accepted his imprisonment and stopped shrieking and thrashing.

And that helped lessen the anxiety as well.

By the time he climbed back in, I felt mostly myself again. I was a little frazzled. My skin felt tingly and my heart was still beating a little hard and I was a bone-deep kind of exhausted from the aftermath of the adrenaline surge, but I wasn't freaking. Much.

"You alright?" his voice asked, unexpected. It had been so long since there was any other voice around me except for my uncle's visits and the scheduled appointments with Bry that it was startling to hear it.



       
         
       
        

I jerked slightly, my fingers involuntarily tightening on his, as my gaze flew up to his face. "What?" I asked, blinking twice as his piercing blue eyes pinned mine.

"The peroxide," he explained, making my gaze fly down to where my hand was somehow dripping, though I hadn't felt the spray at all.

"Oh, ah, yeah," I said, looking back up, giving him a somewhat clumsy smile. "Didn't even feel it," I explained.

And it was right about then that I realized my fingers had relaxed on his from their little involuntary spasm, but his were holding mine tightly.

My heart, yeah, it stopped pounding so damn hard for a second so it could do a strange, delicious little flip-flop thing that made an unfamiliar warmness spread across my whole chest.

Human contact. I had forgotten what it was like.

I felt the peroxide bottle slide down on the seat along my thigh to rest near my butt as a crinkling sound made my brows draw together for a second before he brought up a little round packaged roll of gauze up to his mouth and nipped the side, ripping it open.

So he didn't have to release my hand to use it to open it.

"I, um, I don't think gauze is necessary," I forced myself to say though the larger part of me really, really wanted him to wrap my hand for reasons I was choosing not to analyze.

You have to actively make an effort to stop the swirling thoughts, Dusty.

That'd be my therapist, Amy, talking.

She insisted I call her that too- Amy. Not Dr. Robertson. I guess it was some technique they were taught at school or something to help patients feel more at ease. Kind of how she didn't call us "patients" either, but "clients". Why, I wasn't sure. I was definitely sick. I was absolutely a patient. It was a completely appropriate term. But maybe it was easier for people stubbornly stationed in denial to accept themselves as a client instead of a patient.