Ryan (Mallick Brothers 2)

I flipped the top off the tiny squirt bottle.

"This is going to burn," I warned.FOURDustyHis hand slid under mine, holding my fingers still as he positioned the travel size squirt bottle of peroxide over my hand. It was the closest thing I had had to holding a man's hand in about three years.

Three years.

So that whole burning warning thing, yeah, that was pointless. Because I didn't feel anything but the way his strong fingers curled around mine; the way his palm was calloused which was at complete odds with his usual impeccable suit-wearing appearance. His knuckles and the top of his hand were all marred with too many scars to count, the way they criss-crossed over each other in varying stages of red, pink, and silvery white age making it impossible to even try.

They weren't the hands of a man in a suit. At least not in the way I understood men in suits. Men who had rough and scarred hands like his were supposed to be construction workers or mechanics or, I don't know, cage fighters.

Not business men.

So maybe he wasn't a businessman after all.

And that, well, it shattered the little origin story I had created for him after so long of seeing him come and go.

In a way, I was happy for the new story.

Maybe because I was getting to experience it somewhat first hand, not conjuring up nonsense in my head, an overactive mind trapped in a stationary body.

Had you told me an hour before that I would find myself thrown over the shoulder of a man I had maybe had more than a handful of sexual fantasies about over the past year, his strong arm crossed the backs of my thighs to keep me in place, being carried out of my building like some freaking hero from a romantic period piece, you know back when guys did heroic crap like that, and then deposited into his car and tended to like my tiny little scrapes were of upmost importance, well, I would have had a good, much-needed laugh about it.

But that was exactly where I found myself.

I won't lie.

In the moment, when I found my choice pulled from me, when I was forced out of a place I hadn't stepped outside in years, it hadn't seemed heroic or sweet or romantic.

In that moment, I had been so desperate to be shut back into my little prison that I had pounded my fists into his back; I had tried to kick my knees into him; I had screamed and begged and, God, cried.

Because my heart had taken up residence in my throat, beating wilder than it ever had before, making my air get caught, impossible to squeeze past, causing me to get lightheaded as I broke out into a sweat and felt the bile swish around threateningly in my belly.

Again, I knew it was irrational.

Of course it was.

But that didn't change anything.

Anxiety wasn't rational.

I barely understood it myself and it was impossible to explain to others.

I had heard it all over the years.

You're so obsessed with your mental illness.

Maybe because it impacts every single part of my life.

It's all in your head.

I know, right? It's sort-of like it's a mental illness.

Why do you let it stop you from doing everyday, normal things?

Hmm, maybe because a mental illness is an actual illness.

After a while, you stop defending it, you stop talking about it, you shut it all up inside like everything else, letting it drive you just a little more crazy every single day.

Until one day, it was all there was left- the crazy, the unstable, the unstoppable wave of adrenaline that you couldn't even fight. Because it isn't just mental. The anxiety causes a physical reaction that causes endless symptoms in the physical body that you literally can not control.

I read in one of my many self-help books that the adrenaline released during a panic attack was linked to a biological fight-or-flight instinct and that those who were more inclined to anxiety attacks came from a strong lineage of people who trusted on those instincts and acted accordingly.

I had ancestors who ran away from their problems.

And that left me with the need to stand and fight my invisible ones.

Too bad I was a crappy fighter.

But once he had deposited me into his seat and turned over the car and reminded me to breathe, the lightheadedness started to pull back slightly. Then when he left me to go check on things, I had managed to pull myself back mostly and get a hold of myself. The car wasn't so bad. It was warm. The seat even warmed up behind and under me. It had a somewhat soothing vibrating as it idled, reminding me of my life before when I had loved endless, pointless joyrides when I had a long day and needed to unwind.