“What is it like? Is it… like your chest is crushed, and you can’t breathe? Like, you’re choking, and you think your heart will give out, and the fear.” I rub at my chest, my heartbeat accelerating at the memory. “That fucking crippling fear.”
Goddamn. Can’t believe this word vomit. With any luck, with this fever, he won’t remember my question come tomorrow.
“Yeah.” His eyes narrow. “Yeah. You get them too? Since when?”
My hand curls into a fist against my chest. “Kash… How can you stop them?”
“I dunno, man.” He rolls his head on the pillow, his eyes slitted. “I wish I did.”
“But then… what do you do?”
“Self-medication. I smoke a lot of weed. I write in a journal.” A shrug of broad shoulders. “It’s supposed to help.”
A journal. I knew about the weed. I mean, I can smell just like the next guy. But… “So it doesn’t help?”
“I… I’m not sure.”
“Nothing helps.”
“I didn’t say that.” His eyes close. “Being close to Sydney, to Weston… to you. It helps. It calms me down. I haven’t had that many attacks this past year. Nate…”
“Sleep,” I whisper, itching to put my hand back on his face, on his chest, to feel him breathing. “I’ll be here.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Kash
The night rolls me through nightmares I know well—as well as some brand-new ones, where I’m buried under tons of snow, freezing my balls off.
The snow nightmare loops around, returning again and again, even if I wake up from it from time to time to find someone bent over me, holding a wet cloth to my forehead, over my aching eyes.
The snow rolls back over me. I’m so fucking cold. Dying. I’m dying. I scream and scream but can’t get enough breath in my lungs to make a sound. Can’t move, trapped, as I lie suffocating in my ice coffin.
I call for my mom. For my sister. For my dad.
Sadness wells inside me, colder than the ice, drowning me, dragging me deeper, and I thrash, st
ruggling to get free, even though I know it’s too late.
“Kash, wake up. Come on, buddy.” Someone is shaking me pretty roughly, making my teeth rattle in my mouth. “Open your eyes.”
Light penetrates the dark, and I gasp as I surface from the ice, struggling to sit up. A room. My room.
Hands steady me when the world tilts sideways, push me back down on the pillows. “Whoa. Are you okay?”
“Nyet,” I whisper. “Zhizn’ ebet meya. Chto vam nujno?”
“What are you mumbling there? Can’t understand a single word you said.”
Oh shit. Wrong language.
“I said…” I wince as I roll on my side, the covers up to my neck, my head thumping in time to my heart “I said, life is fucking me over.” My gaze is clearing, and I finally get a good look at the guy sitting beside me. I do a—weak—double take. “West?”
“That’s me.” He grins wolfishly at me.
“What are you doing here?” He never visited once since we moved. I always thought it was because of the growing distance between him and Nate.
“Visiting you.” He frowns. “You’ve been out of it for two days, and Nate and Syd work afternoons, so I volunteered to babysit.”