Free Clearer in the Night by Rebecca Croteau Page B

raised an eyebrow, and I tried not to squirm. I’d been perfectly safe, after all. No sex, just groping. You didn’t need condoms for groping.
    “Apparently not.” She leveled a long look at me, and I met it. I wanted to drop my eyes more than anything, but I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction. “I want you to take some time off.”
    “What? No way, Sarah, I’m fine. The doctors said I’m fine. I went for a run this morning and everything.”
    “Take a week,” she said. “Get yourself together.”
    “I’m together. I’m fine.”
    Another of those long moments, and then she smiled, so kindly. “You can’t bullshit a bullshitter, Caitie.”
    “Don’t call me that.” She flinched at my tone, and I took a deep breath. “No one calls me that anymore.”
    “Sorry,” she said, and she honestly meant it. She laid her hand over mine, and the pressure behind my eyes increased exponentially. “I want you to take a week off, Cait. I have been where you are, and when you start blacking out, things can go downhill fast. Take a week, think about where you are, and where you want to be. If there is anything in the world that I can do to help, I will. You know that, right? Day or night.”
    “I don’t need any help,” I said, and she was graceful enough to just smile and let it go, instead of pointing out how incredibly fucked I was in that moment. “I’m staying with my mom,” I said, in my patented ‘changing the topic’ voice.
    “How’s that going?”
    “She’s really messed up, Sarah. Something’s seriously wrong.”
    She nodded. “I’ve heard some worrying things.”
    “I’ll help her get things straightened out. Okay? And then I’ll be back.”
    “Ever hear of securing your own oxygen mask first?”
    I rolled my eyes like a kid. “Good-bye, Sarah. Love you, take care, and call me if there’s an emergency, okay?”
    “No,” she said, as she stood up and hugged me. “See you in a week.”

    The bus ride home was awful. That twisting and turning had resurfaced, and I tried to ignore it. It was like ignoring the sun. I was going to shake right out of my skin. I curled up into myself and tried not to look any more like a drunk needing a fix than I had to.
    There were things that Sarah and I didn’t talk about, not exactly. She never told me to stop dancing, stop sleeping with strangers. I never felt like she disapproved, or looked down her nose at me. I did feel like she knew where I’d been, and that she had somehow gotten past it. I thought that was awesome, and sometimes, I wished I could do the same. It wasn’t that the sex was bad. The need for it, though. The sense that I was only myself when I had some stranger throbbing into me. The truth that, more and more, I couldn’t feel anything unless I felt someone else all around me. I’d think of how Sarah had gotten free of it all, somehow, and I’d tell myself that I could do the same thing. I could think of myself as worthwhile.
    And then I’d have a night where I was itching out of my skin with thoughts that I wasn’t allowed to have—about my mother, my father, my sister, my life—and what the hell else was I going to do to numb myself? Because it wasn’t possible to co-exist with my mind sometimes. I’d shatter into glass fragments, and no one would be able to put me back together again.
    But the way she’d looked at me in her office, with those sad, soft eyes. It made me nauseated and scared. And like I might burst. Or collapse.
    The ride into town had been short; the ride back took ages longer, it seemed. When I got off the bus and walked back to the house, my legs were cold, and my joints were full of ground glass. All I wanted was to crawl back into bed and sleep until tomorrow. Or the next millennium. Either would be fine.
    At home, I pulled open the front door, and Mom descended like a whirlwind. Her sharp hands clutched my shoulders and shook me, hard, twice. “Where have you been? Where did you go?”
    “Hey,” I