Page 9 of Badd Love
PANIC!
ANXIETY!
FLASHBACKS!
Did you know you can experience a panic attackandan anxiety attack at the same time? It's really, really, really fun, ya'll. And to be clear, Dane did absolutelynothingto trigger it. He's innocent, I tell you. It was allgobble gobble gobble,yum yum, ooh taste that sweet, musky precum…and suddenly, for no reason whatsoever, I was thirteen again and Danny Cohen—my shitstain older brother's best friend—had my hair gripped in his fists, and he was ramming his cock down my throat so hard Mia Khalifa would have sympathy-gagged. Once that happens, there's no going back. It was a blip—a fragment of a partially-repressed memory that haunts me like the Ghost of Christmas Past. That's usually when it starts going downhill.
I started sweating, felt dizzy, my heart started pounding, and my breath came in short, sharp gasps, and my lungs felt constricted by iron bands. For the uninitiated, those are the symptoms of an anxiety attack. I tried to breathe through it, but it's hard to breathe when you can't breathe, y'know? Lungs don’t work, and no amount of mentally chanting "breathe, bitch!" will make them inflate. The anxiety swelled and boiled until I was caught in the maelstrom of physical symptoms, and when you can't breathe and can't see straight, and you've got a dick in your mouth, things get tricky, especially when the dick in the mouth is the source of the anxiety. That's when the anxiety explodes into full-blown panic.
Because—again for the uninitiated—-anxiety is the precursor to panic. Put another way, anxiety is Panic Lite™.
That's how you have both at the same time. Because when anxiety turns into panic, you don’t just go from anxiety to panic—oh no. You get anxietyandpanic—when you're me, at least, and suffer from Complex PTSD and Generalized Anxiety Disorder.
When it struck me, I'd locked myself in the bathroom and tried to cope. Breathing. Counting. The usual tricks: five things you can see, four things you can feel, three things you can hear, two things you can smell, one thing you can taste. Tapping. Rocking. Humming. None of it worked.
And then Dane started pounding on the door, demanding to know what the fucking problem was, understandably, since I'd gone from nomming his dong to crying and screaming for him to leave me the fuck alone in less time than it took to tickle the man's balls.
That didn't help.
I felt bad. I felt fucking terrible, honestly. If you've never totally and utterly ruined perfectly good sex with your emotional hangups, you can't know the guilt, shame, anger, and confusion you feel. It fuckingsucks. Compound that with some serious confrontation avoidance issues?
I screamed and screamed for him to get the fuck out, and he had.
He had inadvertently left his white undershirt behind—it had been underneath my dress. I may or may not be wearing it right now, because it smelled like him.
So now you're all caught up: he fucked me until I couldn't walk, ate my pussy like a champion, and then had me freak-out mid-BJ, screamed at him to get the fuck out, got ghosted, blocked, and treated like shit at his own brother’s wedding, and then had me sneak into his room and demand he holdme, naked, in his bed,and thenI ghosted himagainthe next morning.
And the only explanation he got from me was three words:It wasn't you.
Nice, huh? Yeah, I'm a real winner. Wonder why I'm still single.
"Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We're beginning our final descent into Los Angeles. We expect to land in approximately ten minutes. It's a beautiful eighty-five degrees and sunny down there. Please check that your seatback is in its full and upright position, your seatbelt is securely fastened, and that your tray table is stowed. We hope you had a pleasant flight, and on behalf of the whole crew, we thank you for flying with us today. Safe travels."
Out of habit, I took my phone out of airplane mode—it erupted with an avalanche of alerts, mostly missed calls, voicemails, and texts from Raquel. I'm sure I'd have them from Dane, too, but he was still blocked.
Raquel:
WHERE THE FUCK ARE YOU?????
Lindsey, srsly. Answer your damn phone.
Im gettnig seriously pised, Lnz!!!!!!
The misspellings from Raquel were an indicator of her temperament—she's normally a full punctuation, no abbreviations, and checks her spelling texter, who only uses slang, abbreviations, or shorthand when pissed or in a hurry. The six exclamation points were another solid indicator that my girl was gonna murder me when I eventually contacted her.
That's a problem for Future Linz. Today Linz is going to continue to avoid everyone I know. I'm going home, getting on my Peloton, and doing a Cody Rigsby ride until I either pass out or my period starts, or both. And then I'm taking a boil-me-alive hot shower and going the fuck to sleep, and I'm not getting up until things stop sucking or a solution dick-slaps me across the face, or both.
If the dick-slap was from Dane, that might answer both. But then, that's not happening, ever. Right? He's done with me, surely. Going along his merry way to dick-dazzle the lucky ladies of Ketchikan, Alaska with his gigantic, magical peen.
He doesn't want me anymore.
He wouldn't try to find me—not after this all-time great performance of self-sabotage.
The man can't possibly bethatmuch of a glutton for punishment, can he?
CHAPTER 2
Dane
