Dear Heart

20. Ollie

20

Ollie

He came back to himself with cold water rushing into his cupped hands. He blinked, startled by the bright light in his face and the sharp cold of the water.

Where...?

How...?

"Oh no," he said, aloud, voice a rough scrape through his throat. Panic attacks were their own agony, but dissociating was worse. During attacks, he was filled with fear, and he bolted, or he hid, or made a ridiculous scene in public. But moments like these, total blackouts, yielded very different results.

He blinked and his vision cleared. He was staring down into the basin of an unfamiliar sink: white porcelain streaked with red and pink. Blood – it was streaked with blood. There was pink on his hands, wedged in deep beneath his fingernails.

A soap dispenser was mounted on the wall and he reached his hand out toward it, pumped a big dollop of pink industrial soap into his palm and lathered. Quickly. Sharp, frenzied movements that slopped suds over the sides of the basin. Only when all traces of blood were gone from his hands and the sink did he lift his head and find the mirror in front of his face.

He startled himself. The ashen complexion, the way his eyes seemed flat and dark, like a shark's. His peroxided hair stuck out at wild angles.

He spotted the reflection of someone standing behind him, propped in what was presumably the bathroom door. He shut off the water and turned around, hands dripping all over the tile.

It was Wendy's friend...what was his name? Tate, that was it.

He looked as rattled and uncertain as Ollie felt.

"What–" he started, and had to wet his lips before he continued. The inside of his mouth felt stuffed with cotton. "What happened?"

Tate made a rude sound in the back of his throat and edged back a step, back into the big, light-filled room where...

Where Wendy...

Where Chase Lawrence...

It hit his brain like scatter-shot, discreet, vivid bits of memory. He remembered kissing Wendy goodbye that morning, the sun glinting off the cherry red of the Road Runner, the softness of Wendy's lips under his. He remembered checking Facebook – the photo of Chase outside Braswell. He remembered Wendy, small and vulnerable in front of an easel, hand clenched on empty air. Defenseless against...

It washed over him, then, the proper sequence. He remembered what he'd done, as if he'd watched someone else do it. As if it was a movie he'd seen.

He gasped.

"You stupid fuck," Tate said, voice unsteady. "Were you just going to kill him?"

"I..." What could he say? "Maybe," he admitted. "Not on purpose."

"Right. Wendy's abusive asshole ex shows up, and you beat him unconscious, but it wasn't on purpose."

"It wasn't. I–" Ollie took a step forward, hand stretched forward, pleading, and Tate took a step back. Terrified, going even paler.

Ollie's pulse thumped hard inside his head. Wendy's friend was afraid of him. "I won't touch you," he promised. "I won't hurt you, I swear."

"That's reassuring," Tate said, scowling. "Forgive me if I don't believe you."

Ollie crammed his damp hands in his pockets with a sigh. He felt hollow and shaky, like he always did after one of these episodes. "Where's Wendy?"