After The End: Book 1

22. Nostalgia and a Masochist

Louis POV

Things seemed to be going well considering the circumstances. Harry didn't sleep the first night in his room at all. After dinner, he had planted himself on the couch to "watch a movie" but the Netflix logo just stayed on the screen for an hour before I'd retired to bed. I'd asked him when he planned on going, and he'd waved me off and said soon. I found him passed out on the couch at 7 am. He had sent me a text at 4am telling me he was thinking of getting a cat and wanted my opinion. He had literally never mentioned a desire like that to me in the years that I'd known him. I was fairly certain he didn't even like cats. I deduced that he hadn't slept much.

Since he had woken up in the hospital something had been weird between us and I didn't know exactly how to navigate it. Maybe it had been there before the hospital. I wondered if it had manifested when I had met his eyes in the bedroom, the moment he'd realized that I was high on cocaine for the first time. I knew that night had changed me and that the way I viewed Harry was now skewed irreversibly by trauma. I thought that Harry must have experienced similar feelings about me. As he'd regained some clarity, I could see in his face that he was petrified of upsetting me in almost any interaction. I had expected him to ask me for assistance in the Lux situation and was shocked to find he'd chosen to comply with her instead. He hadn't actually asked me for anything aside from assistance with paraphernalia disposal since returning home. I knew he still believed there was a potential for me to change my mind and kick him out. I wasn't going to. I'd made my conditions clear. He just needed to stay clean.

When we were at the hospital, we had talked at length about sobriety more than once. He'd given me the book to read without clarifying whether or not he couldn't or just wouldn't read it himself. He had never been much of a reader. I had read the entire thing in a night and then talked to him about setting boundaries, goals and repentance and all the other things in the book. I was embarrassed by how little I actually knew about recovery until after reading through the pages. My google searches had not turned up for me the way the book did. While I'd explained all the things in the book and read him particularly important passages in the hospital, Harry had just nodded along. The only thing he had been even remotely willing to comment on was the subject of relationships. The book said he couldn't date or initiate sex and Harry had loudly exclaimed that he thought that was absolute bullshit. Aside from that, our discussions had largely consisted of me talking at him and him saying yes to everything.

He went to the meeting everyday at the hospital but hadn't told me anything about it, what his plans were, or anything of the sort now that we were home. He didn't want to talk about his mental health or how he felt. He didn't want to talk about what had happened, what he had done, or the lingering deficits his brain may or may not have. He didn't want to go back on his medication and he didn't want to talk about it. He just wanted to clean out his room and then apparently stare off into space and also cook two times a day while making small talk over the kitchen table as if it were required of him.

I had spent days staring at slashes a crossed his arm, and I couldn't even ask him about that. We had never been like this before. Harry's determination to stay clean, apparently without my help, was something I'd never considered before. We'd always been able to talk about things even at the most tense of times. I had no idea how to approach this barrier with him.

I left him asleep on the couch and chose not to push it. He wasn't even being dishonest, just evasive. Being evasive wasn't a crime.

He was clean and he was sober and he was cooking for me and he was going out of his way to avoid conflict. He'd been home for more than a few hours without having a melt down. How could I possibly have a problem with that?