“It’s to help me… focus. Sort of,” Quinn mumbled, reaching to extract the bottle from Rafe’s fingers. Or at least he tried to, but Rafe closed his hand before Quinn could grab it. “Give it. I don’t like—it helps me be… normal. Focused. Kind of.”
“Nothing not normal about you, Q. It’s your normal, and if this shit helps you, then great, but I’ve got to ask you one thing.” Rafe shook the bottle. “This stuff. Do I have to be worried about it?”
“Worried how?”
“If this stuff’s addictive… I can’t have it in the house, Q.”
Rafe’s face was cold, a mask of indifference Quinn knew he was hiding behind. Despite the chill in Rafe’s expression, Quinn could see the pain and fear in Rafe’s soft brown eyes.
“I just… can’t, babe. I can’t trust… me.”
“I didn’t think about that. Shit. I thought you were talking… never mind what I thought.” Quinn tapped the bottle’s top. The marble was cold through his clothes where Quinn leaned against the bathroom counter, but all he felt was the hot length of Rafe’s body pressed up to his side. “It’s not addictive. Not controlled in any way.”
“And it helps you how?”
Quinn dug down into everything he knew about reading faces and the lessons he’d learned fucking it up, but nothing in Rafe’s face held any judgment. He was curious, concerned a bit, but for the most part—wondering more about the how of the pills and not the why.
It’d been so fucking long since the why of the pills wasn’t important to someone, and that person’d been Miki St. John, not exactly a poster child of stability himself.
“The dosage I take’s just enough to help me edge off the… spiders in my head. Like coffee but better.”
“You’re the only person I know who drinks coffee to calm them down, Q,” Rafe murmured, brushing Quinn’s hair back from his forehead. “How does it make you feel? Taking it. Not what it does to your body but… you? Are you okay with it? I don’t think I’d be.”
“It’s usually okay. It just gets… old,” Quinn confessed. There he was, standing in a bathroom about the size of his father’s study, digging his soul and heart out about the one thing he never spoke about, then handing it all over to Rafe, of all people. Oddly, the whispering secrets, the heat of Rafe’s hand, and the gentle push of his voice brushed away the sharp edges prickling Quinn’s thoughts.
“Talk to me, Q.” Rafe’s smirk was gentle and teasing. “Just you and me here.”
Quinn’s fingers seemed to find Rafe’s waistband of their own accord, and he hooked two into a belt loop, tugging on Rafe’s jeans as he spoke. “Truth? It’s fucking shitty because it makes you… makes me feel like I can’t be normal unless I take something. And then I get used to it until one day I get mad again. Then I don’t want to take them. So, most of the time it’s okay, and then it’s not.
“I guess sometimes I hate it. I hate it because the family’s always saying shit like ‘Did you take your meds?’ Especially if I’m grumpy or pissed off about shit they do. Because I can’t be mad or pissy. Like it’s a magical little gumdrop I just forgot about, and if I take one, it’s all better, and I won’t cause any problems.” He tugged again, staring at the denim loop, unwilling to look up into Rafe’s face, afraid of what he’d see there. “And I love them, but they’re always there, always in my face, and sometimes I just want to be normal so they don’t handle me like they do. They treat me differently, and I hate it. All because I need ten milligrams of a fucking drug to help me even things out a bit.”
“It was worse before, right?” Rafe stepped in closer until their hips brushed. His breath was hot on Quinn’s cheek, a warm kiss of wind in the bathroom’s slightly cold air. “I remember…. Q, it wasn’t a good time for you before. Does this shit help with that?”
“Some. Mostly better now that I’m out of puberty. That shit didn’t help. Some behavior modifications worked. Tools to focus on things I forget.” He made a face, mostly at Rafe’s chest. “There’s no instructions, you know? I have to stop and remember what to say to people or try to fix their names to their faces, and I can’t recall their faces.
“It’s worse if they talk to me first because I answer automatically, but then the follow-through—like asking how they’re doing—that doesn’t always follow. It’s worse when I’m tired because I forget. And if I don’t control everything—every damned little thing—something falls through the cracks. I panic, and it swings so high or low, cutting into me, and I can’t stop that feeling.” He shrugged, trying to ease away the rising helplessness inside of him. “So, there’s the why for the pills. To keep everything from swinging too far. To keep me from going SuperBall in my brain.”
“People joke about better living through chemicals.” The heel of Rafe’s hand ghosted under Quinn’s chin, forcing him to look up. “For me, not so good. For you, maybe okay.”