Page 55 of My Best Friend Is Broken

“I wouldn’t if I was your bitch.”

“Don’t say that!” The words explode out of me, violent and desperate.

“Yours, then! Yours! Whatever you want to call it! Make me yours. Make me feel...” He trails off, the sentence hanging unfinished in the cold air of the bathroom.

Make me feel what? Better? Something? Safe? Wanted? Protected?

“Just make it stop,” he pleads, and his voice is so broken, so desperate, that something inside me cracks completely.

Make it stop. Not, make me feel good, not, make me happy. Just make the pain stop, even if it’s only for a few minutes.

Some primal, feral part of me responds to that plea. The part that’s been watching him suffer for weeks, that’s been holding back out of respect and care and all the civilized instincts that separate humans from animals. The part that wants to claim him, mark him, make him mine in the most basic way possible.

I want him. I have done so for years. I’m angry and terrified. I love him, and I’m outraged. I’m hurt and panicked. I’m desperate. I’m all of these things and more, and it is too much to contain.

My hands move without conscious thought, yanking at his trousers, pulling them down despite the voice in my head that’s screaming at me to stop.

I watch, like a passenger in my own body, as I reach for the bottle of conditioner on the nearby shelf.

I squirt a big dollop onto the top of his ass crack. The bottle of conditioner falls onto the floor with a dull thud. My fingers slide along his ass crack, smearing the cold gloop down. It soon heats up. Fired by the cacophony of emotions burning through me and the scorching heat of Liam’s body.

Even through the haze of my insanity, I notice that the curve of Liam’s ass is exquisite. I am a monster. I don’t know what the fuck I am doing, but I know I should not be noticing things like that.

My fingers find his hole and smear the conditioner around. He gasps and pushes his ass out towards me. Encouraging me. Coaxing me on.

Maybe he really does want this?

My fingers press against his hole while I hold him against the wall.

Liam whimpers. It is not a moan or a sexy sound of pleasure. It is a small, scared sound that cuts through my daze like a knife through silk.

The sound hits me like a slap in the face and a bucket of ice water all at once.

What the fuck am I doing?

I stumble backward, horrified at myself, at how close I came to becoming exactly the kind of monster I’ve spent weeks trying to help him heal from. My hands are shaking, and I can taste bile in my throat.

This isn’t love. This isn’t protection. This is just more trauma dressed up in the language of caring.

I grab the pill bottle from the floor, because I can’t leave it where he might reach it, and I flee. Actually flee, like thecoward I am, leaving him half-naked and broken against the bathroom wall while I run from what I almost did.

The front door slams behind me before I realize I’ve moved, and suddenly I’m standing in the hallway outside our apartment, breathing hard and trying not to throw up.

I almost did it. I almost took advantage of his breakdown, his desperation, his complete inability to consent to anything in his current state.

I almost became the thing he needs protection from.

The realization sits in my stomach like poison, burning through any justification I might try to construct. I told myself I was saving him, that I was responding to what he asked for, that I was giving him what he needed.

That I was fixing him.

But the truth is simpler and uglier. I was scared of losing him, and that fear made me cruel.

I slide down the wall until I’m sitting on the floor, the pill bottle clutched in my white-knuckled fist like evidence of my own capacity for damage.

Inside the apartment, I can hear water running. Liam, probably trying to wash away the feeling of my hands on him, the memory of being pinned against the wall like prey.

I want to go back in. Want to apologize, to explain, to somehow undo the last ten minutes and handle everything differently.