Problems

|| Chapter 21 ||

"Hello, Alexander."

"Hi, Dr. Evie."

"How have things been?"

A beat of silence.

"...Bad."

"Okay-bad how?"

"I can't feel anything." This had been spoken in an almost robotic voice, completely and totally numb.

"Okay. Well, the good news is that we can fix that."

John's going to die.

Alex was tangled around his snoring boyfriend, staring into the darkness, unable to sleep.

John's going to die and you're going to be alone again.

Alex scrunched his eyes shut.

No, he's not.

He opened them.

Yeah, he is.

Intrusive thoughts sucked.

Alone, alone, alone.

Alex slowly untangled himself from John and sat up, swinging his legs over the edge of the bed.

Nothing's going to happen to John and you know it.

You said the same thing about Nicholas.

A breaking point.

He picked up his phone almost mechanically and scrolled through the contacts before tapping on one and bring the phone to his ear.

"Is the offer to talk still available?"

It was currently 3:24 am and Alex was sitting in the passenger seat of Laf's car, watching moonlight bounce off of the cars going past from their view in the empty Starbucks parking lot.

"You wanna talk about it?"

Alex shrugged and watched a silver Honda roll past, dulled rap threatening to burst out of the doors. "My head doesn't want to shut up."

Lafayette nodded slowly beside him. "What's it saying?"

Alex twisted his fingers together and then broke them apart, "Stuff."

"Specifics, Alexander," Laf said patiently.

"Everyone's going to die," Alex whispered. "And I'm going to be alone again."

"That won't happen."

"How can you be so sure?"

"Because you're strong," Laf said, and looked over at Alex. "You'd be fine. And you're never alone, Alex."
"Everyone else said that too. And look what happened," Alex mumbled, and Laf's heart shuddered for a second.

"A recurrence of an event twice is hard to come by, much less three times. I think you're safe," he reassured him, and Alex scoffed.

"Yeah? How about the fourth, then? Or the fifth. Because those both definitely happened."

Laf stayed quiet.

"My cousin and my brother," Alex finally said, "And..."

A boy, shaking dark hair out of his eyes and laughing at something Alex had said.

"...And Nicholas." He blinked away the prickling tears forming behind his eyes.

"My cousin died a few weeks after my mother. We were living at his house. He shot himself-James was the one that found him," he said. "James was adopted a week later. Both of them, gone. Just like that." He snapped his fingers, the sound loud in the small space, and shook his head.