Page 74 of This Might Hurt

ANDREW

THREE MONTHS LATER

Groaning, I drag the large decorative hall table out of the back of our wheelchair van and prop it awkwardly on my shoulder. Jude loves calling me princess and carrying heavy things for me, so I’ve become even worse at physical labor than I was before.

“Hurry, I want to see!” Lena calls, cruising up the sloped sidewalk to the front door without a care in the world.

Her impatient stare doesn’t make it any easier to drag the solid wood antique into our half-furnished apartment.

I’m panting and red-faced by the time I plop it down in the front hall, on the exact spot we marked out with masking tape.

I stand back next to her and cross my arms as we both study it in discontented silence.

“I don’t know,” she muses finally. “It looked less…boring in the antique shop.”

“What if we put the blue vase from the kitchen out here?”

Her face lights up. “Yes! And fill it with daisies! Go get it, and text Jude to bring daisies.”

Your sister wants daisies, I type on my way to the kitchen. My phone vibrates three times in my pocket on the way back, but I don’t bother to take it out and read his complaining.

Once I’ve tested the vase in every possible placement, we both agree that the table has potential.

Our next quest is a couch for the living room, which I will not be carrying, so Lena parks under the window and dictates measurements into her notes app while I crawl around on the floor ineffectually brandishing a tape measure.

“How do you think his appointment is going?” she asks when I’ve given up and flopped spreadeagle on my back on the carpet.

“He said they would give him a mood stabilizer to try. We should be ready to take good care of him.” I tip my head back, studying the sunny treetops through the apartment window.

If I stood up and looked out, I’d be able to see the edge of Montana State’s campus.

“And they told him to be careful making so many big life changes at once, because it might trigger his hypomania again. He’s supposed to get plenty of sleep and not drink too much caffeine. ”

“We’re gonna be the healthiest, most emotionally regulated household in Bozeman at this rate.

” She stretches out an arm with an appreciative smile, and I reach up to tap our fingers together.

I called my family’s local doctor and got recommendations for the best mental health professionals in the area.

Scheduling therapy for all three of us, getting Jude in with a psychiatrist, coordinating academic advisor meetings for Lena, and establishing her at a new physical therapy facility has been overwhelming.

I took responsibility for it all because I’m the only one of us with nothing else going on.

Groaning at the memory of how much time I’ve spent on hold this week, I roll over onto my face.

“I’m going to take a nap. Do you need anything?

” Now that she has an accessible home and her motorized chair, Lena is much more independent, but I got a fucking earful the one time I left her alone all afternoon with her favorite cookies on the top shelf of the cupboard instead of on the counter.

“I’m good. I’ll just start the early reading for my classes.

” She flashes me that brilliant grin, an exact copy of Jude’s.

“Thanks for being my decorating buddy.” We discovered early on that she and I share a love for detail and aesthetics that Jude can’t even process.

She introduced me to this fascinating channel called HGTV, and when Jude is busy, she and I drive out to various antique stores.

I originally planned to visit a high-end furniture showroom and outfit the entire apartment in one purchase, but this has been much more interesting.

I wander down the hall to Jude’s and my bedroom, shut the door, and consider the rumpled bed no one bothered to make this morning.

We moved from Ramona’s house to our new apartment in Bozeman a month ago.

Every day has been brighter and more remarkable than the rest of my life put together, but sometimes my world feels like it’s growing too fucking fast. It’s not just about an apartment in Montana instead of a house in Rhinebeck, or Jude and Lena instead of Colin and Archie.

It’s the entire fabric of my reality changing, things I didn’t even know existed—a cheap dishwasher that keeps breaking, college students everywhere in leggings and hoodies carrying shitty mass-produced coffee, a grocery store where I barely know what I’m searching for, let alone where to look.

The only one going through as much culture shock as me is Sid, in his rustic boarding stable on the edge of town, but he’s a fucking horse so he doesn’t give a shit as long as someone feeds him.

Burying my arms deep in Jude’s laundry hamper, I scoop out a load of his dirty clothes and throw them on the bed, shoving them around until I’m satisfied with the shape. Then I strip off my shirt and jeans and curl in a ball in the middle of them with my nose resting in a pair of his boxers.

As soon as I lie down, I’m not tired anymore, so I take out my phone.

Below Jude griping about the daisies, followed by Jude asking increasingly frantic questions about what daisies look like, I have a text from Grant.

He quit his job with the Innes Group, since I was the only thing keeping him there.

A month later he found a personal security gig for some celebrity in Wyoming that he’s not allowed to talk about.

I keep asking if he’s bought a cowboy hat yet.

He won’t tell me, which means the answer is yes.

Do you want to hear the news? I study his words, feeling that familiar flicker of anxiety that used to follow me everywhere.

If he’s asking, that means things aren’t going well for the Innes Group.

I always wondered what would happen if Colin and Archie lost their shared goal of destroying me and had only each other left to fight for power.

I think they would burn down everything around them before they realized they were standing in the rubble.

No, thank you. I send it before I can change my mind.

Ever since I finished the resignation process and sold the remainder of my shares, I’ve refused to look up a single headline about them.

The one thing they’ve always had over me is control, and I don’t think it’s safe for me to give them even the two seconds of thought it takes to type their name into a search engine.

Sometimes I catch myself wondering, but in the breaths where I’m entirely present—helping Jude cook dinner, arguing with Lena, taking Sid trail riding—when I truly, truly don’t think of my family at all, I know I’m doing the right thing.

My heart leaps when I hear the front door slam, endorphins flooding my tense body.

I can’t make out what my boy is saying, but his voice pitches up at the end the way it does when he makes an especially cheesy joke, followed by Lena’s hysterical laughter.

A minute later, Jude comes bursting through the bedroom door, slamming it again behind him.

His too-thin body has filled out over the last few months, and there’s something about his face that looks less like he’s tethered to the earth by a single thread that could break at any moment.

I can barely fathom how beautiful he is, how alive.

He smells like the summer earth in Ramona’s new garden, and he tastes like safety, and my obsession with him is so out of control now that I should probably be worried.

But he’s seen the sickest depths of it, and he just smiles.

He doesn’t mind. I know I don’t have to be scared.

If I feel like I’m drowning, he puts me on my knees until I’m quiet and full of him.

He tells me it’s okay to feel like this, because I’ve done a hard thing and unlike him and Lena, I haven’t found what I want in life yet.

The world is too big, but he’s the center of it.

I watch eagerly as he strips off his Orville Peck t-shirt, then his jeans and boxers.

He drops down on the bed with a groan, flashing that cute tooth gap at me in a crooked grin.

By the time he leans back against the headboard with his knees spread and his soft cock exposed, I’m vibrating with the effort of not throwing myself on him.

He pats his leg, so I lie down and rest my head against his thigh, drinking in the smell of his sweat. Humming in approval, he strokes my hair gently, slowly. “I saw the new table,” he murmurs. “It looks good. You carried it in for her, didn’t you?”

I nod, grateful that he noticed. He always does.

“You did perfect,” he breathes, brushing a thumb along my cheekbone. “You’re so fucking good for me. You’ve been taking care of everything.”

“Because I have no purpose.” I rub my stubble along his skin. “What else am I supposed to do?”

“Okay.” His voice goes dry but very patient.

“I should have done this before I started talking.” He takes my head firmly in his hands, moving my face from his hip crease to his cock.

Just like every afternoon, I open my mouth and let him press softly onto my tongue.

He slides one leg out so I can prop my head against it and go limp, with his shaft cradled carefully between my lips.

He never gets hard by accident anymore, only on purpose when he wants to bully me.

I close my eyes and breathe through my nose as he pets me tenderly.

“So first I went to my appointment. He asked a couple more questions, then gave me a prescription to try. He thinks I have bipolar II because I’ve never had, um, I forget what he called them, but basically I’ve never lost touch with reality when I was stuck on fast forward.

And,” his voice warms with amusement as he scratches the back of my neck, “at the end he noticed my ring and asked if my wife would like any resources about bipolar.”