Two Punks In Love

The Purple Couch

Okay, here it is. This chapter is huge...dramatically and in length. Settle in and buckle up...

Kat

The sunlight, the air, the scent on the breeze—they are all different now. I don't mean that the breath of Italy is different than I remembered it. Bali felt different than I thought it should, too, although I had never been there before, so I had nothing to compare it to.

But when we got to Italy—a place I truly love—that's when I really noticed.

Everything is different. Diffuse. Hazier. Less inspiring.

This change in the weather didn't happen because someone posted a teaser of my sex tape on Pornwheel before we left Bali. Not the entire tape—just a ninety second trailer of Trace telling me to take my bra off and fondling my bare breasts as he talked dirty to me, while I purred like some insipid sex kitten. The change didn't happened because the tape ended with a graphic that promised more Torrid TrayKat to come, in celebration of our wedding day.

No, the change had happened a long time before that—months ago— but in the aftermath of our sextape trailer, I began to recognize the change for what it really is.

When Marcy called us with the bad news about the sextape snippet, and Trace—who was fucking up already by being fairly drunk—lost the half of his shit that remains available to him, the other half taken from him by his meds—anyway, when he lost half his shit and viciously berated her, then called Riley and cussed him coldly for his failure to contain this situation too, and I didn't feel a thing about his actions? When I just stood there—alternately watching the clip and watching Trace pace and cuss in his new detached way? When I didn't try to talk him down from his mistreatment of his management, but simply walked out on the beach and left his winter storm to wear itself out?

That's when I knew the truth.

The sun is not less bright. The atmosphere is not muted. The world is not different.

I am different.

I am depressed.

Still, when we got to Italy? It took me three days to admit the truth to Marley.

Once I did, she confirmed my self-diagnosis. I'm clinically depressed, she says. She explained that changes in my life and changes in my body have led to changes in my brain. She says I can't think my way out of clinical depression. She says it won't go away on its own. My body and my brain won't let it go away.

She says I need medication.

She says it's safe.

Kade agreed. Sort of. He said some depression medications are safe for pregnant women to take.

Marley called him, put him on speakerphone with me so that he would reassure me. But I heard the hedging in his voice as he explained to Marley that he wasn't comfortable doing what she asked. No, he wouldn't prescribe me something remotely and ship it over here—probably illegally.

She calmly took up her phone and left the room to finish their conversation in private. I followed to eavesdrop. She should have taken him off speakerphone, but she was too pissed at him to think straight.

"I can't believe you're doing this to me right now, Kade. Kat needs pharmaceutical intervention. Not in a few weeks after the wedding. Now. You know perfectly well, there are anti-depressants that are approved for pregnancy. You're seriously not going to help?"

"Marley, you know perfectly well, there are risks versus benefits to consider when medicating a pregnant woman with anti-depressants. Especially when her pregnancy is already high risk. I am not a psychiatrist nor a fetal specialist. So many times I've skirted my ethics when it comes to SCIC—because they are my friends, and because I think these rock stars are too stubborn and too...narcissistic...to get the treatments they really need from strangers they don't trust. But not this time. This is not a few stitches after a drunken mishap, or an antibiotic I call in on gut instinct without a proper diagnostic, or even an urgent crisis I'm compelled to handle—like a drug overdose in a hotel suite. This is a child. Two children. And their mother, who needs way more help than a dose of Zoloft."