Free Blue Rose (A Flowering Novel) by Sarah Daltry

something about Lily, and now, I’m standing over his barely conscious body with his RA. Technically, they’re not supposed to drink in the dorms, but the RA just seems uncomfortable and I get the feeling he’s not going to report Jack if he can just go back to his room and let me deal with the mess.
    “Wake the fuck up,” I tell Jack and I kick him. His eyes open, but they’re not focused. What the fuck did he do? I think, but I turn to the RA and tell him that we’ll be fine. Jack’s alive and he’s sort of conscious, so anything that comes next is going to be shit I’ve seen before.
    The RA leaves us and I bend down and shake Jack. “Get up, get your shit together, and tell me what happened.”
    He starts rocking and shaking, letting out some kind of agonizing moan. It looks like one of my panic attacks, but Jack doesn’t usually have the anxiety that I do. He’s more of a drunken stupor or wall-punching rage kind of guy. Not the fetal position seizure freak-out that I usually go for.
    “Tell me,” I plead.
    He slurs something about someone named Derek, but I get the rest of his incoherent rambling. They broke up. It hasn’t even been a week. I really thought she loved him. The way she looked at him, the way her eyes lit up when she mentioned him in the lobby, they made me think that she was going to be good for him. But this is a mess. I worry it’s my fault, that I scared her away, but then I figure that, if she was that scared of me, she’d be terrified of Jack’s past.
    I get my arms under him and I pull him up, leaning him against his desk. He’s hysterical and he’s shaking. I hold him and don’t say a word. I know exactly what these attacks feel like. I always have mine when I’m alone, like it’s an ironic reminder of my fear of abandonment, but I don’t think another person could help anyway.
    He grabs a plastic knife from his drawer and snaps it in half, cutting his palm with it. He bleeds a little, but then he gets pissed at the knife, in more typical Jack fashion. Probably for not being sharp enough. I think of all the times that I asked him not to ask me about my scars; maybe Jack and I have more secrets from each other than I’d thought.
    He begins to hyperventilate and then he clenches his fists, punching the floor with all the agony that’s coiled in his muscles. I just rub his back and remind him to breathe. Eventually, his breathing slows and he leads me outside, after snapping at some poor kid in the hall. We make it all the way to the parking lot before he speaks.
    “I need to go for a ride,” he tells me.
    “Jack, you are in no condition to be driving. Get in my car. I’ll take you wherever you want to go, but you’re not driving.”
    I don’t know what he was thinking, because he can’t even stand up without help. I manage to get him into the passenger seat, and then I get in the car. I turn the heat up, because I’m always cold and he can deal with it. I’m annoyed that he’s this much of a mess over Lily already. He’s been through so much worse, but this is what sends him over the fucking edge?
    “Get your shit together ,” I tell him. “It’s been a fucking week. You can’t lose yourself like this over a fucking week. What if whatever you’d hoped would happen had happened, and then a year went by and we were here? How the fuck would you survive it?”
    “It’s not Lily,” he replies. “I know what it looks like, but it isn’t just her. I don’t know how to explain it. A few hours ago, I stood in the shower and I could actually feel tomorrow. I wanted there to be a tomorrow, and a next week, and a next year. I wanted to be present. I wanted to be alive.”
    “And now you don’t? You don’t want to be alive because of a girl you fucked a few times?” The words kill me. I knew a week ago that I’d lost him, but whatever he’s doing right now brings me right back to the hospital, to waiting to hear if he’d live, if he had gone too long without