Page 5 of Someone Like You

“Yeah, and I do,” came his muffled reply. I heard something clink ominously, and then a mutedfuck.

“Jordan.”

“Yeah.” He kept tinkering around in the guts, and I had a feeling he was only making things worse.

“Jordan!”

“What!” He finally pulled his head out and looked at me.

“While I appreciate your persistence, I think we’re just gonna have to call it. Or—no, better yet, is there someone else we can call? Do you know anyone? Or know someone who knows someone?”

He wiped his hands with one of our dish towels, and I made a mental note to toss it in the garbage when he was done. “I mean, Miguel might know someone. I could ask him.”

“Ask. Please,” I added. The last thing I wanted to do was take my car back to Big Boone’s. To even risk seeing Brody again.

Christ. I couldn’t believe what happened last week. I’d immediately made an appointment with my on-again, off-again therapist, Dr. Varu, and while Ithinkit helped, I still felt completely unsettled in my own skin and generally out of sorts. Like the world was slightly tilted, and I was trying to carefully navigate a new landscape that I knew but didn’tknow.

I was so fucked in the head. It wasn’t like people didn’t touch me. People touched me a lot. But they didn’t stir up an amalgam of feelings that tilted me from one end of the spectrum to the other with a dizzying intensity. They didn’t make me question things about myself that I never wanted to question. They didn’t make me feelsafe.

But I’d asked him not to, I’d told him not to, and he did it anyway. Andthatwas why I’d gone crazy.

I would have flipped out no matter who it was. If I asked Jordan not to touch me, and he did it anyway, I’d still freak out—even though I knew he would never hurt me.

PTSD didn’t give a shit about what you knew. My brain was hard-wired to link every occurrence of those kinds of scenarios to what had happened to me in high school, facts be damned.

“Miguel says his brother can look at it,” Jordan said, and I wondered how long I’d been lost in the maze of my own thoughts that he’d already talked to Miguel. Hope bloomed in my chest at his words, until he killed it violently when he said, “but he’s on vacation and won’t be back for two weeks.”

“Who the fuck can afford a two-week vacation?” I said.

“He said he’s spending a month in Rio.”

“What the fuck!” I started pacing back and forth, tugging at my hair. Slightly panicking.

Jordan’s hand came down on my shoulder, and I stilled. I trusted Jordan. I knew Jordan and trusted him, and he was aware of my issues. I didn’t care if he touched me. Hell, it was even fine when strangers did it—accidentally. Momentarily. Butthe way Brody had grabbed me at the auto shop…I’dtoldhim not to touch me and when he did it anyway, it brought me right back to when Ethan?—

“Isaac!” I don’t know how long Jordan had been saying my name. My eyes snapped to his brown ones that were full of concern, and my shoulders sagged. “Hey, man, what’s going on with you?”

I laced my fingers together behind my head, then broke them apart on a long sigh. “I had a fucking episode last week.”

Jordan stepped closer, brows drawing together. “What? What happened? Are you okay?”

“I’m fine, I just…it was that Brody guy. You know, Jamie’s roommate? He fucks with my head, Jordan. I told him not to touch me, and he just—he just keptdoingit, and I fucking snapped. I—I attacked him,” I admitted, rubbing my hands down my face in a poor attempt to dispel the guilt. The image of those four lines of red on Brody’s face wouldn’t leave my head

“Dude, what the hell…Iknewthat guy was a fucking creep!” Jordan was angry now, had his phone in his hands, his thumbs peppering the screen with hard little punches as he typed something out.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m asking Jamie if he’s home so I can go over there and kick his ass,” he said. I snatched the phone from his hands, ignoring his protestinghey!and walked back up the front path to the house.

“No ass kicking,” I threw over my shoulder. I heard Jordan’s boots as he stomped up the path behind me, and then we were walking through the door. He followed me to the kitchen, where I grabbed two bottles of water from the fridge, tossing one to him. He caught it and chugged half of it before throwing a glare my way.

“Why no ass kicking? If ever a situation called for a boot in someone’s ass, it’s this one, Isaac.”

“Because I don’t want you to! I’m fine! Everything is fine! He apologized to me and that’s that.” Even I didn’t believe my own lies. “I’ll just avoid him ’til we graduate. It’s fine.”

“Quick question.”

“What?”

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