Page 33 of Carry On (Love Doesn’t Cure All #4)

LINCOLN

Help me,” I whispered into the phone. Like the living room, my bedroom had a balcony. I stood on it, pulling in unsteady breaths and trying to use the cool air to ground me. It wasn’t working, but at least I attempted to.

I hadn’t meant to tell Nash about my first marriage.

I hated talking about Chris and did my best to avoid discussing him.

There were feelings there that I’d learned how to detach from.

They were things I didn’t need to feel and didn’t want to.

There was no point. Our relationship may have been the foundation for all my fucked up ways of handling shit, but I didn’t dwell on my feelings.

Okay, maybe I just refused to deal with my emotions. It felt pointless. There wasn’t a damn thing I could do about any of it.

And I was fine—I was. At least, I had been. The combination of seeing him for the first time in years and telling Nash about my marriage had fucked me up in the head.

“Please,” I practically begged of Dean, the one guy I knew who was as fucked up as I was.

He was the one who didn’t run away or judge me for it.

We weren’t the kind of friends who went for a beer and watched the game.

We’d met in a domestic violence support group for men.

For a long time, we were the only two in the group besides the woman who ran it.

Eventually, we quit the group and decided to keep up with each other instead.

We helped each other through things that no one else knew about.

We both intimately understood shit that most others couldn’t begin to understand.

“Talk to me, bud,” Dean said. I didn’t know where he was from—that was one of the many personal things we didn’t talk about—but the slight twang in his voice brought me comfort after hundreds of conversations. “What’s going on?”

“Fuck,” I muttered. I hated feeling like this. I hated the rush of crappy, unsteady emotions I worked so hard not to feel. “I saw him again, and I just…”

“Shit. Hold on.” There was a loud clang and swearing that made me frown. Dean was a paramedic. If there was banging and swearing, it probably wasn’t a good thing.

“I can let you go,” I offered.

“Nah, it’s all good,” he replied. “I’m just cleaning shit. That’s all. Think of it as you’re saving me from treacherous hours of scrubbing blood and vomit.”

“That sounds…” How the fuck was I supposed to respond to that?

“All right, tell me what happened, Lincoln? Are you safe? I’ll steal a goddamn fire truck to come fuck some shit up. Say the word, and I swear I will.”

“No, no.” I chuckled slightly, the sound heavy in my chest. I was immensely grateful for his slightly feral nature.

He struggled with protecting himself, but he’d go to war for me if I said I needed it.

I couldn’t understand that notion. I wasn’t deserving of that.

I wasn’t any better than him. “I, uh… I had to go to pick up a client at his precinct. I’d hoped I could get in and out without running into him. ”

“What’d he say?”

“It doesn’t matter. I just… it just got in my head, and I just…

I need a distraction, Dean,” I admitted.

I didn’t want to sit around and talk out the same bullshit I hadn’t been able to talk about for years.

I wanted to pack it all back in the right boxes, not deal with it, and get out of my head. “Distract me? Please?”

“I held my very first set of live intestines today,” Dean told me. Yeah, that would certainly do the trick.

“I’m sorry… you what?” I demanded.

“I held my first set of live intestines today,” he repeated. “It was actually a really rough call. It’s been a hell of a day, but there were no casualties, and we saved them.”

“You saved them.”

“Nah, I just held the intestines in place.”

“I feel like you’re underselling just how important of a job that is,” I retorted.

Also, disgusting. I wasn’t sure I could do something like that, even if a situation arose and I had to.

I was no one’s hero. Not like Dean. “I couldn’t touch anyone’s intestines.

I’d make some awkward fucking joke about not having the guts to do it. ”

His deep laugh melted through me, bringing a wave of comfort with it.

While admittedly, my relationship with Dean blurred the lines of what was socially acceptable for platonic male relationships, it was forged out of companionship and probably some intense trauma bonding.

We kept each other sane, and we managed to do it without ever learning each other’s last names.

“You crack me up, Lincoln,” he said, “But you’d make a terrible paramedic.”

“I don’t like needles, and blood makes me queasy, so yeah, I’d make a crappy paramedic,” I replied. “Are you okay after… going through that?”

“Oh, I’m fine,” Dean assured me. “I mean… I’m not fine, but I get through just fine. And everyone survived. No matter how much blood I see, it’s a good day when everyone makes it out alive.”

I recognized his need to rationalize the bad shit.

“It’s okay to feel something,” I reminded him softly.

“I could say the same to you.”

“You could,” I sighed, “but then I’d have to lie and say I’m okay.”

“And then I’d have to lie and say I believe you,” he agreed.

“We’re really fucked up, aren’t we?”

“Only on days that end in y,” Dean answered.

That was the thing about us: we never really solved anything when we talked. But that wasn’t what we needed. He had a therapist, and I had… well, I had my system. We both needed someone to stop the spiral when it reared its ugly face.

That was more valuable than getting answers. Sometimes, I just needed to know I wasn’t the only one going through this shit. Dean always gave that to me.

“You good?” he asked quietly.

“As I’ll ever be,” I promised.

“That’s all we can do.”

“Have you ever thought about dating again?” I continued before I could filter that thought out. Where my situation sucked, Dean’s had been horrific. He had the physical and emotional scars to prove it.

“You couldn’t pay me all the money in the world to date again,” he admitted honestly. “I’m good with just me and my right hand. Sometimes my left hand even likes to join the tango.”

Or sex workers. Maybe it wasn’t savory to some, but honestly, it staved off a little bit of the loneliness that came with avoiding attachments.

“In all seriousness, Lincoln,” Dean began, “I don’t think I could ever trust anyone to get that close again. It’s too hard. I don’t think I could ever look at someone and trust them with… well, me. I’d rather be alone than risk that hell again.”

I nodded slowly, as if he could see me. He made sense.

Hell, most days I felt the same way. That version of me thought I was nuts for what I was suggesting Nash and I do.

I wasn’t just cracking open the door slightly to let someone in.

I was obliterating the door and inviting him to waltz all over my chaos.

Trample on it. Immerse himself in it. Judge me for it.

Fuck.

I wanted nothing more than to believe that this wouldn’t blow up in my face—that Nash wouldn’t be like that. But getting my whole brain on board with that was hard.

Not hard.

No, it was damn near impossible.