Page 93 of Haunt Me

Samuel

Knox doesn’t let me out of his sight for the first three days. Neither does Jon, who takes shifts sitting in the doorway of my old room at the clubhouse like he thinks I might disappear again.

Nobody tells me how bad it’s going to get. Maybe it’s because they don’t know either. If you haven’t lived through it, I don’t think you could have any idea what it costs a body to give up something it’s leaned on this hard for this long, all while every rib Cullen’s men cracked is still knitting itself back together as well.

The bruising turns green and yellow at the edges before it starts to fade. Every breath still catches somewhere on my left side. It’s sharp enough that I’ve learned to breathe shallow without having to think about it consciously.

My wrists sport a matching pair of raw, healing lines where the rope bit in. Some mornings I wake up and forget why they hurt before the memories rush back all at once. The warehouse. The cold. Cullen’s voice telling me alive doesn’t mean comfortable.

That’s just the physical part—the part I know how to survive. I’ve survived worse.

The other part is harder to name.

“You don’t have to babysit me,” I tell Jon on day four, voice still rough from a throat that spent too long screaming into nothing.

“Yeah, I do.” He doesn’t look up from the deck of cards he’s shuffling for the sixth time in an hour. “Last time I gave you space, you disappeared for months and drank yourself halfway into the ground before anybody could get near enough to stop you. Then, when you finally surfaced, you ended up tied up in a warehouse getting the shit beat out of you while a rival club tried to steal our corridor.” He pauses. “Knox put a bullet in Cullen before he got the chance to turn that gun on him instead. So forgive me if I don’t trust you with space anymore.”

He’s not wrong, and we both know it. I let the silence sit there instead of arguing with him. It’s easier than admitting he’s right out loud.

Days blur together after that, one shift of babysitters trading off for another, and somewhere in the haze of it, the alcohol starts to leave my body for good—whether I’m ready for it or not.

The shakes are the worst part, or at least I think they are, right up until they’re not. Nobody warns you how bad it gets, coming off the amount I’d been drinking. My entire body turns traitor, sweating through sheets that need changing twice a night. My hands are too unsteady to hold a cup of coffee without spilling half of it down my shirt.

I catch myself flinching at sounds that shouldn’t earn a flinch, a door closing, a chair scraping, the metallic click of a lighter. Every time it happens, I hate how much of Cullen’s warehouse is still living somewhere inside my mind.

But underneath the shakes, underneath the sweat and the nausea and the way my hands won’t hold still, there’s another thing. The one thing I’ve been trying to outrun since the funeral. Since before the funeral, before the last morning I woke up next to her not knowing it was the last morning.

Grief doesn’t drink. It waits.

It waited through every bottle, every motel room, every mile I put between myself and Ashbourne. It’s patient as anything, and not that the whiskey’s finally leaving my system for good. Now that it’s got nothing left to compete with, it comes for me full strength, undiluted, every hour of every day, and there’s no bottle left in this room to dull the pain.

Knox sits with me through the worst of it. He doesn’t say much, doesn’t need to. He just stays, solid and unmoving.

“You know this isn’t just about the drinking,” he says one night, when the tremors have finally quieted enough that I can string a full sentence together.

“I know.”

“You’ve been trying to disappear since the funeral. The bottle’s just what you picked to do it with.”

I stare at the ceiling, my throat tight. “I don’t know how to keep existing in a world she isn’t in.”

“I know.” His voice softens in a way I’ve rarely heard from him. “But you don’t get to check out. Not on us. Not on yourself.”

“It feels like I already did check out.”

“Then it’s time to check back in,” he says. “Raven wouldn’t want to see you this way.”

I don’t have an answer for that. I don’t think there is one.

That night is the worst of it, fever-sick and sleepless, my body finally too exhausted to keep fighting whatever’s clawing its way out of it. I lie in my bed alone in the dark, shaking too hard to sleep, too wrung out to stay fully awake.

Somewhere in the gray space between the two, I find her.

Morning light spills through our bedroom window. I open my eyes and find her already awake beside me, propped up on one elbow, watching me with an expression I haven’t seen in longer than I can stand to count.

“You’re staring,” I say, voice rough with sleep.

“I’m allowed. You’re the one who fell asleep mid-sentence last night.”