Free He's Come Undone by Theresa Weir

direction of my loft. I could see no other choice but to take him home with me. I’d come back later for my bike.
    It wasn’t easy getting him from the car to the warehouse building. Once inside, I leaned him against the wall while I punched the elevator button. Then it was a ride to thefourth floor and down the hall to the thankfully empty apartment and my room where he collapsed on the bed. He was dead weight as I struggled to remove his leather jacket, tossing it aside as he tumbled backward.
    In the dull lamplight, I saw he was still pale. I picked up his wrist and felt for a pulse, checking the second hand on the wall clock as I counted, realizing I had no idea what a pulse rate should be. His wasn’t fast and didn’t seem that slow either.
    His cell phone buzzed, and I retrieved it from the deep pocket of his coat, thinking to hand it to him, but he was too out of it. I looked at the screen. I couldn’t help it.
    A message from a girl named Valerie. And she was asking where he was.
    So, he’d had a date. And he’d gone drinking instead.
    And I thought I was a mess.
    At the same time, I struggled to reconstruct my idea of Julian. There was something going on here. A piece of the puzzle was missing. The pain in his eyes when he’d looked at me in the car? That pain had been very real and very bad. The thousand-yard stare. What had put something like that in his unguarded eyes? And the other day at the café. When I’d mentioned my mother’s death, a look of pure panic had come over him.
    I covered him with a quilt then spent the next couple of hours trying to read a book. Really, it could have been upside down for all I absorbed.
    As time passed, the rhythmic sound of Julian’s breathing finally convinced me that he’d be okay and that I didn’t need to take him to the nearest hospital. Exhausted, I removed my bra without removing my T-shirt, slipped off my jeans, and crawled under the covers next to him, turned out the light, and went to sleep.
    * * *
    Sometime in the middle of the night I felt Julian shift in bed. That dip and shift was followed by fingers on my arm, then fingers on my head. An obvious Helen Keller move.
    “Hello?” came his voice out of the darkness.
    I switched on my small IKEA lamp with the blue shade, then turned to see him with his head braced by his hand, elbow on the bed.
    “Oh, hey,” he said, surprised. “It’s you.”
    “Were you expecting someone else?”
    “No. I just… I just have no idea how I got here.”
    I gave him a brief account of the evening.
    “Did we… do anything?”
    “Sex? Are you talking about sex?”
    “Yeah.”
    “No.”
    “Oh.” He seemed disappointed. Then he took a deep breath and dropped back on the pillow. “Jesus, I feel awful.”
    “You should.”
    “What time is it?”
    I checked then replied: “Four in the morning.”
    He soaked that in for a minute, then let out a small gasp. “Valerie.” With that, he began the phone search. I plucked it off the bedside table and handed it to him. He scrolled through the text, making an oh, shit face.
    “Too late to call,” he mumbled. He replied to the text, waited, didn’t get a response, so put his phone aside. “Would you care if I took a shower?”
    “Door on the right at the end of the hall.”
    He left the room, and I tried not to think about what was going on down there as he stripped and got in the shower, but I’d seen his bare chest and I could fill in the blanks.
    A lot of people were on anti-depressants, especially college kids, I reasoned. I’d certainly had my fling with them, so it didn’t mean anything—as in didn’t mean he had any serious issues. This is what I told myself, even though my gut was screaming something completely different.
    I heard the shower shut off, and then he was back, this time wearing nothing but jeans slung low on his hips, his hair wet and dripping on his shoulders.
    “You shouldn’t drink if you’re taking anti-depressants,” I told