“You can’t,” Silas put all the vehemence he felt into those two words, willing himself not to care about her reaction to him backing away. It was for her own good really, as much as it was because he needed space. “You got your cousins to worry about, and EJ, you can’t help me with my shit too. That’s too much.” Not the best or brightest way to voice his own concern about how she was running herself ragged, but he was cornered and he wasn’t thinking straight. “I’m not saying you’re stupid either, just, it’s not like the fucking movies.” Where people went through the steps and came out better at the end of it. Hell, he didn’t know how long it would take for him to be better, if he could bring himself to start. He wasn’t as strong as people thought.
But fuck, if this was gonna lose Rae for him, he needed to try.
He sucked in a breath at her words, and god, why wasn’t she just getting outright angry at him? Sure, her words were sharp, but they were nowhere near what he thought they should be. “What if all the help you can give me is to let me do this myself?” he schooled his voice down to a softer level, but couldn’t make the edge of his words go away completely. “I love you, Rae. But this isn’t something you have to worry about.” Why wouldn’t she just believe that he had it under control? Why did she keep insisting she wanted to help? It all would’ve been better if she hadn’t found him. “What you can do is let me work through it how I need to work through it.”
He shook his head, cringing at her tears. “I am a fuck up, Rae. All you see is the man I made myself into, but I’m still a little fucked up under it all.” It was truth to him, whether she wanted to hear it or not. He might be a better man now, but he still carried everything that he’d done with him, still carried all the things that labeled him a fuck up. “It is my fault. Don’t blame the docs, they thought they were doing their job,” he argued. “They switched the drugs out a couple of times, ‘cause morphine was the best for pain management.” And he’d hated the pills they’d tried to give him; he did better with the shots. “It doesn’t matter who gave me what, I still took it, which makes it my fault. I could’ve stopped it and I didn’t.” Because he wasn’t strong enough, and why wouldn’t she see that?
Fuck. Rae was in as much of a fucking state as he was. And she too tired to be trying to deal with this shit. He saw that, even if she was trying to cover it up, he had eyes, even if he’d been in his own head for a while. “I know you do. But…” he trailed off, mentally debating between staying where he was and moving closer, but his feet were stuck in place. “It’s my shit to defeat.” Not theirs, as much as Rae wanted to think that his problems were hers and vice versa. His problems were only hers in the fact that they effected her as much as they did him. “Believe me, if I could get someone else to work it through, I would.” But he had to ownership of his addiction and he had to be the one to make the decisions and suffer through the withdrawal, as a reminder of all the reasons he’d stopped in the first place.
“Don’t fucking apologize,” he said sharply, but not angrily. His anger was slowly edging away. “You’re not making it better, but you got nothing to apologize for. I just need to be in my own head for a while, babe.” He had kept things from her so much, she deserved at least a little honesty. “I love you, but you can’t sort my head out for me, and you probably shouldn’t sit with me while I do it.” There was twisting in his gut again, and the regret that slowly washed over him. This was exactly why he hadn’t wanted her to know. It was hurting her and he’d never wanted to see her hurt. “I love you,” he added quietly to the end, like that would make up for the rest of his words.