If- Nina G. Jones Page 0,75

a huge smile. I sighed, such a great relief rolled over me that I thought I would cry. But that would really make me look unstable, so I choked it back.

She had dressed up for me. Red lipstick, her hair pinned up on one side, a floral dress. It was a lot like how she looked on Thanksgiving. The ECT also had another strange side-effect—it made me horny. I don’t mean a normal horny. I mean an insatiable, throbbing internal ache that needed to be addressed when I found myself alone. I hadn’t had a chance to relieve that yet today, and seeing her made the temperature rise from my neck and down below my waist. I had almost forgotten about how her presence literally made me hot.

My inability to swallow her in my arms and see her moans reminded me how much I needed to get out of here. I wanted to own myself again. Most of the people here were certifiable. I mean hopelessly insane, pulled off the street for everyone’s safety. There was lots of rocking back and forth, mumbling to oneself, and random outbursts throughout the day. One could see it as entertainment, but seeing someone scream about the Mexican cartel out to get them for the fiftieth time was also becoming a monotonous routine. I was not one of them. I know it might have seemed that way a few weeks ago, but I was not one of them.

Bird walked over and embraced me. I took in the smell of her tropical shampoo and her signature lavender scent. That scent made me feel like Ash again. I had forgotten what it was like to smell anything but the unpleasant faux sterility of a psych ward. I felt Bird quiver in my arms. I saw the thin waves of her tears. I felt like shit that I was making her cry. But unlike Sarah, she was alive. I could still fix this.

We pressed our foreheads together and we kissed. It was tentative. “I missed you so much,” she whispered, hugging me again.

“I missed you too, Bird. I’m so sorry,” I breathed into her sweet-smelling hair.

We sat at a white Formica table. Everything about this place was cold. There was so much to say and yet this room stripped us of intimacy. Getting comfortable in here would be like warming up a car in the freezing cold. I wanted to be on the roof with Bird, where we felt the freedom to have our most open conversations.

“How are you doing?” was the first thing she asked.

“Good. I feel normal and I just want to get the hell out of here.”

“You sound like yourself.”

I nodded.

She looked me over with her bright hazel eyes, at first pleasantly, but then she jolted. “What happened?” she asked, grazing her finger against the faint scar just underneath my hairline. I was hoping that she didn’t notice since it wasn’t too big of a cut. The lump that was there for a week, on the other hand, was huge. Head wounds bleed like hell though, even the small ones. “Did the police do this to you?”

I looked down. “No . . . I, uh, did it to myself.”

She lowered her hand away from the scar slowly. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

I had thought about that a lot, lying in my bed, staring up at the ceiling while the occasional patient’s howl carried down the hall in the middle of the night.

“Things were going so well. I thought I could do it. I thought you wouldn’t see that side of me. I lived most of my life just fine. I convinced myself that the last breakdown was a fluke and I could be the old Ash. And I wanted to just live in my art again. I missed my abilities, the synesthesia. I just wanted a taste of what it would be like to have you and just be me. I didn’t want to scare you away.”

She laughed. “Did you honestly think you could scare me away? Ash, you were living in an alley when we met.”

Her joke flooded me with intense gratitude. How did I find this person who could see past all the barriers I erected to isolate myself? How did I get the girl with laughter as warm as melted butter?

She made me feel like maybe I did deserve another chance.

“You should have told me. If you had been honest I would have been better able to see the signs. You