“They don’t agree with my choice. Are you all right with it?” he asks me.
God, I’m all right with anything he does, that’s how much I trust, respect, and love him. I know he’s asking about his choice to use natural means to control his illness. It probably takes him double the effort that it would take him to medicate; it takes discipline and an entire lifestyle devoted to his well-being, and, frankly, it’s not like he’s making a political stand out of the issue. It’s his life and he’s trying to live it, and I want to live mine with him. Everyone who has ever been sick or has ever been on medication long-term knows that when you fix one thing chemically in your body, you give something else up. Look at the list of side effects. There is no magic pill for health.
We are works in progress, and health is not a static place. It is a goal that is always moving and needs to be chased, daily, and forever. Remington will always fight this fight . . . and I will always fight it with him.
“I’m okay with your choice, Remy,” I say to him, holding his gaze so he knows that I mean it.
The smile that appears on his face is oh so tender. “We’re going to have a little someone who depends on us. You have to tell me if it’s too much for you, Brooke.”
“I’ll let you know,” I agree.
He takes my little hand in his big, callused one, and we both watch our hands as we interlace our fingers. “Then give me your word you’ll tell me if I ever get out of hand and you’d like me to medicate, and I give you my word I’ll do it the instant you ask me to.”
“Remington, I give you my word,” I say, squeezing his hand.
“And I give you mine.” He tugs me closer and wraps me in his arms, and I slide right in, absorbing his strong, protective embrace as he spreads his fingers on my round stomach and ducks his head over my shoulder to look at the swell. “I will protect you until I die,” he whispers against the back of my ear. “Nothing will ever hurt you two. If she’s like me, I’m going to hold her up like they never did. I’m going to show her she can still thrive. It’s still worth it.”
I’m completely melted as I turn my head to bury my nose in his sweaty chest, not wanting to be anywhere else. “It’s going to be a he. And he’s got this. Like you do.”
EIGHTEEN
BLACK
They triggered him. His parents. They’ve ignored him his whole life, and the times they come see him, all they do is hurt him. It didn’t take but a couple of hours after their visit in Austin for Remy to go full-blown black.
I know it was thanks to them. Pete knows it. Riley knows it. Coach and Diane, they know it too.
The morning after their visit, he could barely get out of bed, and it’s been like this for days now. Remy is down and out. It hurts to see him like this so much, I feel as if I’m getting kicked in the stomach, daily.
“He up yet?” Pete asks me from the living room today. The team is scattered across the couches as they watch me close the door of the master bedroom behind me. I shake my head in despair. Remy has sunken down so far, he is completely closed off like I have never, ever seen him.
He barely looks directly at me. He barely eats. He barely talks. He is in a bad, bad mood, but he seems to be fighting not to take it out on anyone, and therefore, he says nothing, absolutely nothing at all. All I can see of his inner struggle is those fists of his, curling and uncurling, curling and uncurling, as he fixes his gaze on a spot and keeps it there, for minutes and minutes and minutes, as if whatever he sees is inside him.
“Shit. It’s a bad one,” Pete says, dragging a hand down his face. He keeps calling it a “bad” one.
The faces of Diane, Lupe, Pete, and Riley look the way I feel: wretched.
“Did he at least take the glutamine capsules?” Coach asks me, his forehead furrowed all the way up to his bald head. “Otherwise he’ll lose the muscle mass we’ve worked so hard to put on!”
“He took them.”
He just took them from my hand, shoved them down with a gulp of water, and plopped back down on the bed.
He didn’t even pull me to him like the times he’s manic.
It’s like he doesn’t like himself . . . and he doesn’t like me.
Quietly, and feeling as gray as if I have a thundercloud above me, I go and sit on a chair and stare down at my hands, and I feel everyone’s eyes on me for a long, awful minute. They bore into the top of my head, like I’m supposed to know how to deal with this shit. I don’t. I’ve spent two nights holding a big, heavy lion in my arms, crying quietly so he doesn’t hear me. The rest of the days, I have spent rubbing his muscles, trying to bring Remington Tate back to me.
Remington just doesn’t realize he is the one who holds us all together. Now we’re all scrambling to hoist him up. We are so codependent, we are somehow all depressed with him. I know for a fact, after seeing everyone’s faces for almost three days, none of us will smile until we see two dimples again.
“Does he say anything?” Pete breaks the silence. “Is he at least angry at those ass**les? At something?”
I shake my head.
“That’s the problem with Rem. He just takes it. Like a punch. And he keeps standing but he takes it. Sometimes I wish he’d just say what he feels, damn it!” Pete stands and begins pacing.
Riley shakes his head. “I respect that, Pete. When you open your mouth to say something, it makes it real. Whatever’s running through his head, the fact that he doesn’t voice it means he’s fighting it. He’s not letting it matter enough to spill it out.”
I drop my hair as a curtain and blink back the moisture in my eyes, refusing to let them see how all this affects me. But it does. I was depressed once in my life. It’s a big, black, dark hole. This was not some light depression where you’re sad and have PMS. It’s the overwhelming feeling that you want to die. And wanting to die is completely against all our survival instincts. Our normal instinct is to kill to protect our loved ones, to kill to survive. Just imagining that Remy is feeling all the same mess I felt when my life blew up around me pulls me so deep into the darkness that I worry about being able to get him out, rather than falling right in with him.
Whatever it is he’s feeling, I need to remind myself he can’t control the thoughts his mind is throwing at him. His mind is not him, even though right now it controls his reactions. I want to support, to be steady, understanding. Not emotional, needy, and like I will fall apart at any minute. And god, at six months pregnant, I am definitely emotional, needy, and falling a little apart without him.
“At least he’s coming down to punch those bags. You don’t know how deeply I admire him for that,” Riley adds glumly.
“Do you think he’ll pull through before the fight, Brooke?” Coach asks me. “By god, watching my boy get humiliated last season out there . . . This was his year. This was his season.”
“I don’t think he’ll fight tonight,” I admit.
“So we can say good-bye to a first place ranking,” Pete swears.
“You can’t let him fight like this, Pete! He could get hurt. He could hurt himself,” I burst out; then I drag in a breath and try to calm down.
“It would have been better if he didn’t remember,” Pete says, with an infinite amount of bitterness in his voice.
“What do you mean?”