Page 47 of Unhinged
Noah shook his head. “No. I’m not giving up my trailer, even if we move in together. I’m not. That’s not up for negotiation either.”
Adam’s eyes widened at the renewed panic in Noah’s voice. “Okay. Call out sick tonight. I’ll have a tow company take your trailer to my dad’s house. He has a garage that fits 14 cars and three boats. I’m sure one small Airstream won’t be a problem. But once the trailer is out of there, so are you. Deal?”
Noah deflated, all the fight seeming to leave him at once. “Yeah, okay. Deal.”
Adam had to pull over for Noah to throw up three more times on the way back to the city. Each time, he’d fall back into the passenger seat and Adam would hand him a wet wipe from the center console like he was a suburban soccer mom. It would have been funny if Noah could pull himself out of…whatever was happening to him.
He tried to push the memories back down, but he couldn’t. Every time he so much as blinked, he was right back in that fucking room with all those people. The dam walling off all those memories had finally ruptured and Noah was drowning.
He couldn’t escape it. Hands touching him, men hurting him, the sound of his own cries and the laughter that followed… It felt like it came from everywhere, like he was trapped in some house of mirrors where a threat lurked in every pane of glass with no way of knowing which threat was the real one.
He could smell that room, not as it was now but as it had been back then. The stench of cigarettes, sweat, stale beer, and men’s cologne…sex. He shouldn’t have known that smell back then. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t okay. Nobody should have had to endure that. But above it all—the strangers, the pain—the thing that was ripping him apart on the inside was his father’s voice. At first cajoling, promising toys and ice cream, then angry, then furious when he wouldn’t stop crying.
How had he buried that? How? What magical part of his brain had covered that up for years? When did he start to forget? How did he make it go back? He needed it to go back. He couldn’t stop crying. Not huge wracking sobs, just an endless stream of tears rolling down his cheeks against his will.
Once they were back at Adam’s house, he wouldn’t even let Noah call his job. Adam made the call, telling whoever was on the other line that Noah was sick and wouldn’t be in, his tone leaving no room for questioning. He removed Noah’s clothes and put him to bed but set up his laptop on the blanket beside him, putting on cartoons like he was a child. He felt like a child. He felt like that child. The child his father had handed over to be tortured and abused.
Holy shit. Hewasthat child. That was him. His father did those things to him. He’d let others do those things, too. Had recorded them. Somewhere, there were videos. Videos other people could see. His stomach heaved but there was nothing left to throw up. Adam had left a metal trash can beside the bed anyway. Just in case.
Noah had known all these things had happened to him, had seen previews of what was to come, had filled in the blanks after seeing the video Adam handed him that night. But it wasn’t real to him, to his brain, just a concept, a thing that he only understood in abstract, like outer space. It was out there, somewhere, but he wasn’t likely to ever experience it. But now, there he was, floating through his memories with no oxygen, just waiting to die.
He tried to focus on the laptop.Darkwing Duck, Noah noted absently. But his real focus was on Adam’s voice. He paced downstairs on the phone, his voice strengthening and receding like waves as he approached the stairs only to walk back towards the kitchen. He was mad, arguing with somebody about the logistics of torturing Gary for the information they sought versus waiting to see what Calliope could find on the hard drives.
The conversation went back and forth, his anger growing to rage, his voice ratcheting higher with each passing minute. Then Adam was just gone, the door slamming shut behind him, leaving Noah alone without so much as a goodbye. Part of him expected it. Who the fuck would want to deal with something like this? Noah didn’t and he was equipped with the necessary emotions to process it. But Adam wasn’t. He didn’t understand how Noah felt. He literally couldn’t. That wasn’t Adam’s fault.
In the silence, the voices in Noah’s head—the laughter, the orders—only grew louder until Noah thought he might scream. He threw the covers off, padding down the stairs in his underwear, heading to the most logical place for Adam to store medications. His bathroom. He had to be quick. He didn’t know when or if Adam would return quickly. He wrenched open the medicine cabinet, making a noise of frustration when he saw nothing but Advil and a box of condoms. There was nothing in the drawers or under the sink either.
He went to the kitchen next, opening every drawer and cabinet except the one over the refrigerator. That would be the last resort. Adam had to have alcohol there somewhere. When he opened the freezer, he gave a triumphant cry. A bottle of top shelf vodka, still sealed. Noah didn’t think twice about cracking it open, taking two heavy pulls, letting them burn their way to his stomach, praying that this would put the lid back on his memories like it had before. He took it back to bed with him, clutching the frigid glass to his chest as he continued to watch cartoons, truly having no interest in anything heavier thanRugrats andTeenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
The more he drank, the more he enjoyed the cartoons of his childhood. By the time Adam’s apartment door swung open, Noah was well and truly drunk. There was a strange rustling sound as he walked back upstairs, stopping short when he saw the vodka bottle. “I see you found my brother’s stash.”
Noah shrugged, body numb. “Which brother? You have, like, twenty.”
Adam snickered. “Archer. Our degenerate gambler. A role he takes a lot of pride in.” He set his two plastic grocery bags on the bed, scooting the laptop out of his way to sit. “How drunk are you?”
Noah held his thumb and forefinger about an inch apart. “Pretty drunk. You left me.”
Adam didn’t flinch at the accusation in his words. “I was mad. Blackout mad. I knew I couldn’t control it, and you were already stressed enough, so I went and drove around and listened to some angry music. Then I called my dad and asked him what I should do about you.”
“Do about me?” Noah echoed, wondering if that only sounded harsh because his brain was pickled.
Adam sighed. “Not…about you. For you? I don’t know how to help you through this. Iwantto help you.”
Noah’s eyes filled with tears at the sincerity in his voice. “What did he say?”
Adam sneered. “A bunch of shit about recovered memories and you needing to process them with a trained therapist and that I wasn’t qualified to deal with what you’re going through.”
Noah’s heart shriveled in his chest. “Oh.”
Adam scoffed. “Yeah, oh. So, I hung up on him and called Calliope.”
Noah swiped at the tears on his cheek, wondering how he had any left. “What did she say?”
Adam pulled out his phone, reading from it like he’d made some kind of list. “She said to wrap you in a…blanket burrito? To buy your favorite things to eat. To hold you if you wanted it. To leave you alone if you didn’t. She said if you wanted to stay in bed all day and cry, I should let you, but that I shouldn’t leave you alone to deal with this. So, I stopped at the store and then came back as fast as I could.”
Noah’s chest ached. Adam had called two people to find out what humans did when other humans were hurting. Was that romantic? What the fuck did Noah know? It felt sweet. “What’s in the bags?”
Adam brightened up a bit. “I didn’t know what you liked, so”—he upended the bags in the center of the bed—“I got a little of everything.”
