The Tied Man

Finn picked them up and everything fell apart.

With a desolate howl, he dived from the bed, retching and wild-eyed, heading for the bathroom.  He  crumpled on the floor before he got halfway there.

Blaine observed Finn’s reaction with that same self-satisfied smile she had worn the night before, as if the universe existed simply to provide her with an endless private joke.  ‘Enjoy your morning,’ she said to me, once she’d had her fill.  ‘I’ll see you at eleven.’ A final approving glance, and she was gone.

I dragged the duvet from the bed and wrapped it around Finn.  He still held the photographs so tightly that his knuckles blanched.

‘Give them to me, sweetheart,’ I prised the pictures from his grip and threw them onto the fire.  They flared briefly, then burned away to nothing.

‘Get away from me.  I’m disgusting,’ Finn did his best to push me back, but I caught his wrists.

‘And when Coyle stuck his filthy fingers inside me, did that make me disgusting?’

‘No!’

‘So look at me.’  He gave one last attempt to escape my grip, but there was barely any fight left in him.  ‘Look at me.’ His eyes finally met mine.  ‘What happened was disgusting.  What they did; what they made you do.  But that wasn’t you, do you hear me?  Stay with me, Finn.’

‘I thought you were gone, Lili.  I thought you were gone, so I let them.’

‘No you didn’t.  You just had nowhere left to run, and that’s not consent, Finn.  It’s nowhere near.’ I pulled him close.  I could feel every rib as his chest began to heave.

The first sob came from so deep inside that it bent him double in my arms, then a lifetime of grief spilled to the surface.  There was nothing Finn could do but cry as it consumed him, and there was nothing I could do but hold him close until it ended.  I had no more words, so I sat on the cold floorboards and embraced the thing that I had once feared most in the whole world: the chaos and fragility of a life cast so far adrift that there didn’t seem to be any way to rescue it.

Finn

I needed to stop.  I was making a tit of myself over nothing at all.  I needed to go and hide until I’d sorted my head out, so I could tell Lilith that it really didn’t matter, but I couldn’t form real words;  I needed to do a lot of things, and none of them appeared to be possible right now.

I had never cried, as far as I could remember.  Not once.  There was a certain masochistic pride to be had in that.  Sure, I had yelled out often enough, but this shit with the tears and the snot and the scrabbling for breath was entirely new to me, and I didn’t know what the hell to do.  All I knew was that I couldn’t stop the noise for the life of me, and that Lilith was the only thing anchoring me to what remained of my sanity.

All that time, she wordlessly held me and let me howl.  I cried for me, for the damage that had been done to her, even for my bloody dog, and by the time the worst of it had come to an end, I wasn’t even making proper sounds; instead a strange, high rattle replaced my voice, and my broken chest ached as I sucked in air with a series of ridiculous, hiccoughing sobs.

Eventually I found enough air to murmur, ‘M’okay.’

‘You’re not okay, Finn.  In fact, I’d say you were about as far from ‘okay’ as a human being could get right now, short of being dead.’

I attempted a smile that probably looked more like a gargoyle’s grimace.  ‘Was aiming for that.  The ‘dead’ thing.’

‘I guessed.  And you’ll never know how grateful I am that you failed.’

‘Makes one of us. What the fuck do I do now?’

‘What we’re going to do now is deal with this. One step at a time.  Starting with getting you cleaned up.’

‘We’, I mouthed, and just that word threatened to set me off again.  ‘You can’t, Lili.  Too risky.  You’ve got to stay away…’

‘We tried that one, remember?  We both just spent the last ten days obeying the rules to the very last letter, and I don’t think this can be called a successful outcome by anyone’s standards.’  She sat back on her heels.  ‘Anyway, today’s covered.  All I need to do is to figure out what the hell we do about the rest of our lives, and we’re sorted.’

‘That’s all right then.’  I glanced up at her.  ‘What do you mean, ‘covered’?’

‘I need to run your bath.  I’ll tell you later,’ Lilith said, and I decided I was better off living in ignorance.