EIGHTEEN

BLACK

They triggered him. His parents. They’ve ignored him his whole life, and the times they come see him, all they do is hurt him. It didn’t take but a couple of hours after their visit in Austin for Remy to go full-blown black.

I know it was thanks to them. Pete knows it. Riley knows it. Coach and Diane, they know it too.

The morning after their visit, he could barely get out of bed, and it’s been like this for days now. Remy is down and out. It hurts to see him like this so much, I feel as if I’m getting kicked in the stomach, daily.

“He up yet?” Pete asks me from the living room today. The team is scattered across the couches as they watch me close the door of the master bedroom behind me. I shake my head in despair. Remy has sunken down so far, he is completely closed off like I have never, ever seen him.

He barely looks directly at me. He barely eats. He barely talks. He is in a bad, bad mood, but he seems to be fighting not to take it out on anyone, and therefore, he says nothing, absolutely nothing at all. All I can see of his inner struggle is those fists of his, curling and uncurling, curling and uncurling, as he fixes his gaze on a spot and keeps it there, for minutes and minutes and minutes, as if whatever he sees is inside him.

“Shit. It’s a bad one,” Pete says, dragging a hand down his face. He keeps calling it a “bad” one.

The faces of Diane, Lupe, Pete, and Riley look the way I feel: wretched.

“Did he at least take the glutamine capsules?” Coach asks me, his forehead furrowed all the way up to his bald head. “Otherwise he’ll lose the muscle mass we’ve worked so hard to put on!”

“He took them.”

He just took them from my hand, shoved them down with a gulp of water, and plopped back down on the bed.

He didn’t even pull me to him like the times he’s manic.

It’s like he doesn’t like himself . . . and he doesn’t like me.

Quietly, and feeling as gray as if I have a thundercloud above me, I go and sit on a chair and stare down at my hands, and I feel everyone’s eyes on me for a long, awful minute. They bore into the top of my head, like I’m supposed to know how to deal with this shit. I don’t. I’ve spent two nights holding a big, heavy lion in my arms, crying quietly so he doesn’t hear me. The rest of the days, I have spent rubbing his muscles, trying to bring Remington Tate back to me.

Remington just doesn’t realize he is the one who holds us all together. Now we’re all scrambling to hoist him up. We are so codependent, we are somehow all depressed with him. I know for a fact, after seeing everyone’s faces for almost three days, none of us will smile until we see two dimples again.

“Does he say anything?” Pete breaks the silence. “Is he at least angry at those assholes? At something?”

I shake my head.

“That’s the problem with Rem. He just takes it. Like a punch. And he keeps standing but he takes it. Sometimes I wish he’d just say what he feels, damn it!” Pete stands and begins pacing.

Riley shakes his head. “I respect that, Pete. When you open your mouth to say something, it makes it real. Whatever’s running through his head, the fact that he doesn’t voice it means he’s fighting it. He’s not letting it matter enough to spill it out.”

I drop my hair as a curtain and blink back the moisture in my eyes, refusing to let them see how all this affects me. But it does. I was depressed once in my life. It’s a big, black, dark hole. This was not some light depression where you’re sad and have PMS. It’s the overwhelming feeling that you want to die. And wanting to die is completely against all our survival instincts. Our normal instinct is to kill to protect our loved ones, to kill to survive. Just imagining that Remy is feeling all the same mess I felt when my life blew up around me pulls me so deep into the darkness that I worry about being able to get him out, rather than falling right in with him.

Whatever it is he’s feeling, I need to remind myself he can’t control the thoughts his mind is throwing at him. His mind is not him, even though right now it controls his reactions. I want to support, to be steady, understanding. Not emotional, needy, and like I will fall apart at any minute. And god, at six months pregnant, I am definitely emotional, needy, and falling a little apart without him.

“At least he’s coming down to punch those bags. You don’t know how deeply I admire him for that,” Riley adds glumly.

“Do you think he’ll pull through before the fight, Brooke?” Coach asks me. “By god, watching my boy get humiliated last season out there . . . This was his year. This was his season.”

“I don’t think he’ll fight tonight,” I admit.

“So we can say good-bye to a first place ranking,” Pete swears.

“You can’t let him fight like this, Pete! He could get hurt. He could hurt himself,” I burst out; then I drag in a breath and try to calm down.

“It would have been better if he didn’t remember,” Pete says, with an infinite amount of bitterness in his voice.

“What do you mean?”

“It would be better if he didn’t remember anything his parents ever did to him.”

My protective instincts surge with a vengeance. “What did they do to him?”

There’s something alarming about the way Pete hesitates, about the way his eyes slide across the group, and then settle back on me. My pulse flutters faster than normal by the time he finally speaks. “They committed him because he went black for the first time when he was ten, Brooke. But first, they thought he was possessed. They got all fanatic about it and had an exorcism performed on him.”

When those last words filter into my troubled brain, I am so heartbroken and torn, my heart withers in my chest. I make a sound and cover my mouth.

Diane covers her face.

Curses fall from Riley’s lips as he turns his head to the carpet.

Coach stares down at his hands.

The silence that stretches . . . it is taut with sorrow, with disbelief, and this agonizing frustration . . . of an ill little boy who was so misunderstood . . .

I think of “Iris”—the song he has played to me. The song where he wanted to be seen and understood, by me. When not even his own parents understood him.

Oh god.

“He was put in an exorcism circle in his own home,” Pete says, driving the dagger deeper inside me. “His room was stripped of everything so he wouldn’t hurt anyone, and he was roped to his bed. They went at it for days—we don’t know exactly how many, but over a week—until a little neighbor who used to play with Rem came in looking for him, and those parents intervened. The ‘holy man’ was dismissed, and Remy was just committed instead.”

There’s not a sound in the room.

I’ve stopped breathing. I feel like I’ve stopped living.

“Unfortunately,” Pete continues, “he remembers that manic episode, because at the institution, they did some experimental hypnosis to draw his memories out. See if some therapy would work. Not that it did. Worse is, his own body would have protected him from that hurtful memory if we hadn’t fucked up with that damn hypnosis.”

There’s still not a sound.

But I can hear my heart beating inside me, so hard. Hard and ready, like those times when I could sprint like the wind. I can even hear the blood gushing through my veins, fast and furious. I am ready . . . and angry . . . and desperate to fight something. To fight for him. I remember him telling me he had a memory of his parents. How his mother crossed him at night. An indescribable pain cracks tiny little places inside me. Oh, Remy.

“So he remembers all of that?” I ask, while the middle of my body burns with impotent rage.

“I know he knows they’re wrong . . . when he’s blue. But when that black side comes, I know he thinks about it.” Pete’s frustration and despair is carved into every line of his face. “It’s only natural to wonder why you weren’t wanted.”

“But he is wanted!” I cry.

“We know, B, calm down.” Riley rises to his feet and comes over.

He hugs me to him, and I realize my hands are on my stomach, and the image of my Remington as a boy enduring such a thing because of something that was not his fault rocks in my head. Oh, how I wish I had his fucking evil parents in front of me now, and at the same time, I’m glad they aren’t here, because I don’t know what I would do or say to them. But I want to hurt them for hurting him! I want to hit and scream at them and run after them with a pitchfork. I clench my hands and ease away from Riley. He and Pete are like my brothers now, but Remy doesn’t like them to touch me, and I don’t like to do things that hurt him—even if he can’t see. I want comfort, but the only comfort I want is from the man in the bed in the master bedroom.

Quietly, I head to the master. “I’ll see you guys later—thanks for checking up on him.”

“One of us will be around,” Pete calls.

I don’t want to make noise, so I wave from the door and shut it closed behind me, and my heart does all the crazy stuff it does when I see Remy. His big muscular form is on the bed, sprawled facedown, like a lion at rest. My playful boy, my protective man, my jealous boyfriend, my cocky fighter. My misunderstood little boy.

My eyes run down the length of him, his spiky hair dark against the pillow, his jaw beautiful and square. He’s quiet and resting. Resting like he’s wounded in some place my hands can’t reach and my eyes can’t see.

Reaching behind me, I turn the lock, then ease away and start stripping off my clothes. It’s not for sexual reasons I want to be naked, but because I need to feel his skin on mine. He has never, ever slept a night with me with anything between us.

He likes feeling me, and I ache to feel him.

Climbing into bed, I spoon him from behind. “Look at you,” I say, imitating what he says to me sometimes as I buzz my lips across the shell of his ear and slide my hand around his shoulder and to his chest, spreading my hand where his heart beats. He groans as I kiss the back of his ear.

“Look at you,” I say lovingly in his ear. I lick the back of his ear softly, like he does to me, running my hands down the length of him, petting him like he pets me. “I love, adore, cherish, need, and want you like I never thought possible to love and adore and cherish and need and want another human being or anything in this world,” I whisper. He growls softly as if in gratitude, and my eyes well up, because it’s so unfair he has to deal with it. Why does anyone have to deal with something like this? Why does a beautiful person who doesn’t want to harm anyone feel chemical impulses to hurt himself? To feel life is worthless? That he is worthless? To think he might rather die?

He doesn’t need to tell me. I’ve been there. But I’ve been there only once. He is there so often, and no matter how many times he pulls himself back up, he will always know with certainty that in the future he will be dragged back down. He’s such a fighter. Lovingly, I trace my tongue over the grooves of his abs, his muscled arms, his throat, at the seam of his lips.