Losing Control : His Madness, His Cure Chapter 192

Xander texted me around noon asking if we were meeting for lunch. I didn’t see it until three hours later. I’d been keeping myself busy at his place.....literally cleaning drawers, wiping down windows, scrubbing like the devil himself was watching. Then I tried to cook, which turned into a disaster.....burnt the damn thing. First time in forever. The smell still hangs in the air like failure. I tried not to smoke after that. Really tried. But then I was out the door and on my way to the store, lighter in my hand before I’d even realized what I was doing.

That’s when I saw his text. Then another one, from about an hour later, *“I'll take the silence as a no.”*

He would.

Now I’m parked a few yards shy of the place where memories sleep beneath the dirt. The land that doesn't give back what it takes. Close, but not close enough to see the gates. Never am. I’ve stopped here more times than I can count, stranded between wanting to go a step further and not having the guts. Today’s no different. I lean against the bike, back to the road that leads there, cigarette burning between my fingers, smoke curling in the air.

It feels like I’m walking backward through time, every step undoing the fragile progress I’ve scraped together.

I glance at my phone again, at his name on the screen. I could text him back. Tell him I didn’t see his message because I was too busy falling apart. But what good would that do?

Adam’s words from this morning keep looping in my head, and I hate that he’s right. Still, knowing what I should do doesn’t make it any easier to do it. Because I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want to think about it. I just want Xander. I want things to quiet down when he’s near like they used to. I want him to stop digging, stop pushing, stop trying to make me bleed for closure that won’t come. But he keeps trying to drag me through the wreckage like there’s something worth finding there. There isn’t. Some things don’t get fixed, they just settle.

Why can’t that be enough?

Why can’t he just let it be? Talking to some paid stranger won’t rewrite the past. It’ll only rip it open again, and I’m barely holding it shut as it is. So why does he keep insisting, knowing damn well I’m not okay with it, knowing damn well I’m coming apart because of it?

It’s stupid and petty....an angry itch that wants to prove something to him and to myself. I imagine cutting across the street to The Pit just to see the way Xander’s jaw tightens when he finds out, or stumbling into some bar and letting my fists decide what I can’t say.

The craving is ugly and precise, like a cold animal pawing at the hollow behind my ribs, like a clock that will only stop if I break something. It smells like iron and adrenaline and every night I thought it was the only thing that kept me sane.

Then Xander’s voice cuts through that fog, the soft, infuriating insistence in it, and suddenly the rebellion tastes like ash. The want doesn’t disappear, it snarls and claws, but it’s overlaid now with something heavier....a tether I didn’t know I’d let him loop around me.

I feel caged in a new way and this can’t be how it goes on. I'm starving for the violence that used to fix me, even if just for a few hours, and I'm refusing it because Xander has put me up against a wall and told me to pick, even if not directly....him or the thing that keeps the black from swallowing me whole.

So his ultimatum feels like punishment, not rescue. It makes me furious in a way that has nothing to do with him and everything to do with a life that keeps handing me impossible choices. I want to scream that he’s asking me to amputate part of myself to prove I love him, and love shouldn’t be a test that steals the rest of me. But the sound that leaves my mouth is quieter and worse ..... guilt, because he’s right about half of it. He’s trying to save me. He’s trying to save us. And that only deepens the cage.

This isn’t helping, I get that he wants me whole. And I want him to know that I want that too. I just don’t know how to get there without tearing out the parts of me that have kept me alive this long. There’s no clean way to do it. Just an edge I keep circling, knowing if I cross it, I won’t come back the same.

And that’s the truth, to become what he needs, I’d have to carve out everything I’ve built to survive. I’d have to lose myself completely. And somewhere deep down, I already know I can’t survive that kind of loss twice.

Eventually, I head back home, though the word feels hollow when he’s not in it. The walls are too quiet, the air too still. I drop onto the couch and lean back, eyes on the ceiling for a moment before they fall to my phone to check the time.

I drag a hand down my face, squeeze my eyes shut, exhale through my teeth. It’s pathetic, probably, this kind of longing. But it’s the truth. I miss him like I’ve lost something vital, like my pulse forgot what to do without the rhythm of his voice anchoring it. It’s not just want....it’s need in its rawest form.

The kind that gnaws.

The kind that never quiets.

I tell myself to wait it out, to keep busy, but the apartment’s too full of him....his scent still clings to everything. The smallest things feel loud in his absence. Four hours, that’s how long till he gets off work. It feels like a sentence I don’t remember being given.

My leg starts bouncing, restlessness crawling through me until it’s unbearable. I get up, pace the length of the living room, stop, turn, pace again. Finally, I just stand there, hands on my waist, head tipped back.

Screw it.

I grab my keys....maybe it’s desperate, but I’ll drop by the shop. Just for a few minutes. Just to see him. Just to breathe something that feels like peace again.

My bike’s right where I left it, quiet and waiting. I slip the key in, thumb over the ignition, ready to leave before my thoughts start eating me alive again when a cab pulls up across the street.

I don’t think much of it until I see him. Xander.

He steps out, says something to the driver I can’t hear, and then he turns....and stops. His gaze catches mine, and everything in me goes still. For a second, the street fades out. Everything dissolves into this charged kind of quiet that makes my pulse trip over itself. He’s standing there, close enough that I can see the tension in his jaw, the way his shoulders shift like he doesn’t know whether to come closer or not.

I swing my leg off the bike slowly, like any sudden move might shatter the air between us. Neither of us says anything. We just look. And it hits me again, just how much I’ve missed him. How no matter what’s happened, no matter how angry I’ve been, my body still finds its way to him like gravity.... or punishment.