“Nope, but I’m coming tonight. I get two hours.”
“Yeah, that’s great. Your mum’s trying, too. Need me to take you?”
“Mum or Luke has to.” Kai would have to drive past my house to get to Holly’s but there was no way I was going to question Mum in case she changed her mind.
Melanie ushered me into her study when I got there and Kai went off to find his dad.
“How are you?” she asked as we settled down on her big, sink-right-into-it armchairs.
Every time she asked that I fought the urge to just tell her I was okay. This was a place I was supposed to be honest. “I’m better than I was last week but everyone is still crowding me.” She tilted her head. “I know, I know. That’s totally all my fault but it’s not helping me move on.”
“Have you considered it might be helping them?”
“Briefly. I can’t see that it would be, though. Sure, right now it might help but by watching me twenty-four-seven they’re not moving forwards.”
“Perhaps it’s a little too soon for your mum to be thinking about moving forwards.”
I hadn’t thought of that, I just assumed we all wanted to move past it right away.
“Maybe. But then where does that leave us?”
“Time, patience and honesty is what’s going to heal this, Tegan.”
I didn’t think very highly of any of those things at the minute.
“She’s letting me go to Holly’s tonight.”
“Well, that’s a big step and it can’t be easy for her.”
“No, I guess not. I want her to trust me.”
“You’re scared you’ll do something that will break that?”
“Yeah. It’s already pretty non-existent and I worry that I’ll snap under the pressure of having Big Brother watching all the time and that’ll be it.”
She leant forwards, tilting her head. “How do you mean?”
Oh God, not her, too. I felt like getting a tattoo of ‘I will never OD again’ on my forehead.
“Not like that. I don’t want to hurt myself or worse. I just mean that I’ll say something or run out.”
“You can control that.”
“See, there’s the thing, I don’t feel like I can control a lot anymore.”
“You’re more in control of your emotions than you give yourself credit for.”
Alright, sure, I was good, or used to be good, at pushing everything and everyone away but it exploded sometimes. I’d ignore and ignore and ignore and then everything I was shoving away would boil over suddenly and I was left wondering what the hell was going on.
“I don’t know. I’m sick of feeling I’m on a never-ending rollercoaster.”
“Life is a lot like that. When something happens that’s out of your control it’s not about getting off the rollercoaster but about learning how to ride it and see it through.”
“Only to have it stop and be launched onto a new one. Life sucks.”
She laughed and leant back. “Often it does, yes. But you don’t have to allow it to suck forever.”
I nodded. “Learn to ride the rollercoaster. What if I don’t know how to do that?”
“Some things can’t be learnt in a day.”
I was worried that it’d take years.
***
After my session Kai took me straight home. He was so strict about that. I wanted to hang out for a while but my sessions lasted an hour a time and Mum would question me if I was back late.
“How was it?” Lucas asked as I flopped down on my bed next to him. He was laid out on my bed watching a show about really big lorries driving on ice.
“Good.”
He rolled onto his side and traced patterns on my hip. I tried not to let it affect me because he’d been very hands-off recently but I couldn’t help my blood pumping that little bit faster. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” I replied breathlessly as his hand dipped a bit lower. “I love you, Lucas.”
Groaning, he rolled on top of me and his hands and lips were everywhere. For the next hour we made up for all those nights he laid beside me and didn’t touch me. And when he dropped me off at Holly’s that evening I was feeling a hundred times more positive about the future.
Holly opened the door and pulled me into a tight hug. I hadn’t seen her in two weeks. “Come in,” she said and pulled me into the house. I checked out her bump, it was so cute.
In the living room Sophie and Mark were kissing on one of the chair. They didn’t even notice I had walked into the room and no way was I interrupting that face-eat fest to say hi.
James shouted ‘hey’ as he whisked past me to go into the kitchen. “I’ve got him on drink duty,” Holly said, following him into the kitchen.
Kai looked up at me from the recliner he sat on and gave me a lopsided smile. “Hey,” he said, shifting over and patting the seat. I didn’t need asking twice, I sat down and laid back in the chair.
“Hi.”
“I’m tired and hungry.”
Rolling my eyes, I replied, “Poor you.”
“Kai, order the pizza,” Holly shouted from the kitchen.