Page 16 of Sucker Love (Sugar Pill Duet #1)

LUCA

Amelia is a laid back dog, but she does not appreciate hue and cry.

She doesn’t like noisy children, for instance, or gregarious people, especially drunk people.

She tends to side eye and skirt and grumble whenever exposed to these particular situations, targeting me with accusatory glares as if it’s my fault for bringing such turmoil into her life.

She never signed up for this when I adopted her, after all.

She just wants a nice couch or bed to plunk down on and a couple walks a day in her well-deserved retirement.

For these reasons alone it surprises me that she takes to Noel at all. Tonight he is chaos, embodied and defined. He has swung between emotional extremes I didn’t know were possible.

I’m not complaining, though. Her presence has single-handedly yanked him back from whatever ledge he worked himself up to, looked over and then contemplated throwing himself off of.

They sit side by side on the kitchen floor like two peas in a pod as I rummage around for the first aid kit amongst my yet unpacked boxes.

His hands aren’t gushing blood by any means—the cuts are not deep—but I’m playing it safe.

My luck he would manage to get a crazy infection of some kind, and then I’d be responsible for that, too.

Like I am finding myself responsible for this , somehow, whatever happened tonight.

Which I did not sign up for anymore than my dog signed up for our one drunk neighbor back in Revere who would occasionally accost us during our evening walks, hollering obscenities at passersby.

I thought I was getting a college-age roommate who I would have occasional sex with.

I did not expect to be babysitting emotional breakdowns.

But I sort of don’t mind it, taking care of him.

I extract the kit and bring it back to them. Amelia’s lying at his side, curled around him almost protectively, though her tail whips the floor at my approach. Maybe she’s missed her calling as a therapy dog. I scratch her briefly behind the ears as I sit before Noel, and he offers me his fingers.

“Sorry,” he sniffles. “Luca. I’m sorry.”

I don’t say anything. Still processing whatever the hell just happened.

I focus instead on cleaning his cuts with the alcohol wipes and applying the appropriately sized bandaids to each one.

It might be overkill, but hey, he’s an artist. He can’t afford to fuck up his hands. I know that well enough.

“Thanks.” He opens and closes his hands experimentally, the bandages crunch around his digits as he does. “Good thing it’s just critiques tomorrow.”

“It was a well-timed meltdown.” It’s a dry quip, perhaps inappropriate, but it escapes my lips before I can rein it in.

He gives me a twisted smile that doesn’t quite reach his eyes and hooks his hair behind his ears.

“Yeah, that’s how I plan my psychotic breaks.

Around my school schedule.” He tilts his head at me, almost impishly.

If it weren’t for the bloodshot eyes and generally disheveled appearance, it would almost be like his aforementioned freak out never was. “Don’t you?”

“I don’t tend to have them,” I say. “Generally speaking.” Not since I was very, very small, I was sure. I couldn’t imagine how badly my father would’ve beaten my ass if I behaved like that in any capacity.

“Lucky you.” He pulls his sleeve over his hand and pats Amelia.

Worried, I guess, that the bandaids will bother her.

It’s a good call—she isn’t a fan of strange textures, but much like she bears the indignity of her sweaters and jackets, she would’ve tolerated it.

Still, it makes me appreciate the forethought.

I can’t help but like a person who treats my dog with that kind of courtesy.

I watch them both for a moment, chewing on the inside of my lip. “Are you okay?” I ask him. “That was pretty intense.”

Noel shakes his head. “I’ll get over it.”

“I mean, in general.” I pause. “Is that something that happens to you a lot?”

His hand goes still on Amelia’s head before he withdraws it to his lap.

He’s not looking at me or the dog, his honey-brown eyes fixated somewhere on the wall.

I suspect it is nowhere at all, not here, not present .

“I don’t know if I can explain it,” he says, and even his voice is faraway sounding, as if he’s not even physically here in the room anymore.

It sounds, almost, like I’m hearing him talk down a long hallway.

The effect is eerie. “To someone like you.”

“Like me,” I echo. I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean.

“I feel things very strongly, I guess,” he says in that same faint voice.

“All the time. There’s no equilibrium, just extremes.

Big highs and lows. But I’m good at pretending that I’m, you know, on an even keel or whatever.

That I’m normal and things don’t hurt. Most of the time it’s fine.

And then something will...set me off, I guess. And I kinda lose the plot.”

“What, like bipolar or something?” I don’t know anything about bipolar or mental disorders in general, but it sounds vaguely applicable.

“No, I’m not bipolar.” He hesitates. “Have you heard of borderline personality disorder?”

“No.” But it doesn’t sound very good at all.

“Well, that’s what I’ve got.”

I wait a beat before I ask, “You’ve seen a therapist for this stuff?”

“I was in hardcore therapy for a couple years.” He starts petting Amelia again.

Her tail thumps a few times. “I used to be way fucking worse, if you can believe it. I’m practically cured compared to how I used to be.

I had to stop going, though. Too expensive.

But when I graduate and get a real job I want to go back,” he adds.

At first I think it is hard to envision something worse than what I just witnessed, and I almost say as much until I realize that isn’t necessarily true.

My own father’s rage when he walked in on me with my first—and last—serious boyfriend.

It comes back to me in bits and pieces, like flipping through the pages of a book and making out only snippets: the red-faced screaming, the veins standing out on his forehead and neck.

Arin, dear Arin, scrabbling for his clothes even as my father advances on him without a shred of mercy.

The crack of a fist on bone that reverberates through my entire skeleton even though it’s not my bone that’s cracking.

Shouting my throat raw as I put myself between them but I’m too slow, too late.

I feel myself almost physically recoiling from those images before I snap that particular book shut in my brain and rouse myself back to the here and now. To the heartbroken boy before me. “I’m sorry,” I say, because I don’t know what else to.

“Not your fault. I’m the one with the broken brain.” Noel shrugs one shoulder, raising his chin. The gesture is almost elegant, incongruent with both his words and his behavior this evening. “Souvenir of a shitty home life. That’s what my therapist said.”

“Oh, Noel.” This is the most personal bread crumb he’s dropped for me. “I?—”

“Forget it,” he cuts me off. “I don’t want to talk about it. It doesn’t matter, anyway. ”

That doesn’t seem true, the not mattering .

I don’t need a licensed professional to tell me that it does, in fact, matter.

It matters a lot. I know it does because I know it personally, the way my own experiences have shaped me, even the ones I have boxed out of my brain.

They are influencing me to this very day, the way I cannot, even in my thirties, tell my own family that my marriage is over because I’m too scared.

And it goes far beyond the imminent disappointment.

I can’t help the way my heart constricts for him.

I find myself reaching for him, touching his hand where it rests on his thigh. “Noel,” I say softly, “if you ever do want to talk?—”

Abruptly he brushes me off and he gets to his feet, and Amelia rises with him. “Have you even finished unpacking?” He steps around me, walking through the tiny living room to peer into what is to be my bedroom. I hear him cluck his tongue. “Oh, Luca. Your bed frame’s not even done.”

I want to say that I’d like to see him construct an entire bedroom worth of IKEA furniture in one day, but I don’t. In the event that he can and has done that. I, too, climb to my feet. “I’ll finish it later,” I say. “Tomorrow. I’ll just sleep on the mattress tonight.”

He turns and gives me a bewildered face.

“Have you ever slept on a mattress on hardwood floor? It’s awful.

You’ll wake up with the worst back pain of your life.

” When I protest it’s just for a night—and I’m over thirty, I’ve already got back pain—he talks over me.

“You can just sleep in my bed, Luca. Least I can do. ”

“Making good on your initial threat, I see.”

He flashes me a smile over his shoulder. “You hungry?” he asks. “Let’s order in.”

That’s how I wind up sleeping in Noel’s bed the first night.

And for a long time I lie awake, first watching the ceiling, watching the window, and then at last watching him.

He’s out almost the moment the lights go off, exhausted from his succession of meltdowns over the course of the evening.

In repose he seems almost a fragile thing, his fair skin like porcelain beneath the moonlight that snakes through the blinds.

It’s a stark contrast to how he was earlier: the embodiment of fury, the sheer, unadulterated rage, the single-mindedness for destruction.

On the heels of that, desire. Or some form of it.