A/N:
The above song is one of my favorite acoustic songs of all time. I love the lyrics, they're perfect for this chapter.

If you don't like dark and messed up stuff the next few chapters are probably not for you.

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Here I am, sobbing like an idiot as I clutch onto Monica's naked body for dear life. Whatever the hell just happened between us or more likely just happened to me, has me completely fucking lost. There's a wall in my brain, one that I've built up nice and high, a giant dam of emotional avoidance. This situation is causing a deep fissure straight through it. Straight through me. I can only imagine the bad shit that's going to happen when it eventually bursts, letting all of the pain surge forward.

"It's okay. You're okay, Sean." Monica murmurs into my neck as she places a seemingly never-ending number of kisses there.

She's been doing this, comforting me, for I don't even know how long. Apparently, it's been enough time for me to go completely flaccid though. Enough time has passed that I've also made her a soaking wet mess and not in the way that I prefer.

My tears stop as I take a few ragged breaths. I'm trying to get myself under some semblance of control again. The numbing sensation the vodka had provided is now gone. The beautifully blissful orgasmic state of pleasure I'd reached has also diminished. I've officially cried every defense mechanism away.

I know it's coming. I know it's about to smack me like a fuck-ton of bricks right in the face at any moment now. I can feel it. I hate feeling things. I'm too restricted, too confined right now. The comforting feeling is gone and now it's like I'm trapped inside of Monica's soft arms. 

A slow chill creeps up my spine, then into my brainstem and finally spreads thoroughly throughout my hippocampus. My eyes snap shut as my memory starts to play like a painful movie reel. I shudder as the images play one, by one, by one, by fucking one. Some people are grateful for their visual memories, not me. 

Ask someone who endured trauma if they like their visual memory, chances are you'll get a resounding fuck no. This is why I don't want to feel things. Because feeling things means having to feel that and oh yes, that and that.

I need to get out of here. I need to go. I need to... I can't breathe. I can't  fucking breathe. I fucking hate this. Jerking my body upwards, I pull my shaking form away from hers. Monica's limbs leave my skin and the moment they do I can feel the hollowness begin to spread throughout me. My breathing accelerates, my heart rate soars, there's even tiny dots that start covering my vision. Funny though, because I'm not really paying attention to anything in the real world.

Memories... There they are, all of them. Images one, two, three and all the other fucking hundred of them. All of them just rapidly searing my line of vision. Stop. Just stop. Stop! Fuck. Just fucking make it stop. But I know nothing will, because I'm just too fucking damaged.

I stumble around the room as I hurriedly try to put my clothes on. All the while, Monica is talking, no, she's yelling, telling me to calm down. If she could only feel the sense of impending doom radiating throughout me she wouldn't be telling me to calm down. If she could only see the things I'm seeing. I shudder just at the thought.

By the time I get my clothes on I'm practically shaking from head to toe. She can't see me like this. I can't let her see me like this. I can't let her see what a fucked-up wreck I truly am. Just fuck this entire situation right now. I'm fucking appalled at myself for letting things get so out of hand. 

I don't say anything as I make my way to her door. I don't even look at her. I can hear Monica telling me to stop, to wait, to talk about this but I'm not fucking listening. No, I'm not listening to anything at all. I'm tearing open her door as if my life depends on it and getting into my apartment as fast as humanly possible. 

Once my jittery hands are done opening my door I run to the bathroom. I practically rip off the shower curtain before putting the water on to a skin-scalding temperature. I strip off all of my clothes and wash away any remnants of intimacy. I wash it all away, all of what just happened between Monica and me. 

There is no way anyone could care about me. No, no way anyone could show me that much affection. There's no way I am anywhere near capable of showing that much affection. But I had shown it and so had she. 

We had made something that I haven't felt in a very long time and I cannot even begin to let myself fathom that word. My dead heart beats inside of my chest wildly but it's not long before the floodgates burst open and the demons come raging out stronger than they ever have before.

-&-

The water had run cold a good twenty minutes ago. I'm currently leaning onto the shower wall in front of me with both of my hands pressed flat against the cool tiled surface. My head is hung between my shoulders as I let the water flow through my hair, over my face, and down to the drain. I'm just staring at the metal circle, looking at the tiny little holes.

Those little holes that let all the water flow straight through them, breaking them into smaller streams so it's not one giant torrent. They split the water into little sections in ways I wish my brain had just done. No, that shit, those demons hadn't just slowly drained out of me. They'd rushed through my internal pipe work and swamped the septic system of my soul with an ungodly amount of traumatic sewage.

Some of the demons are there still but they became more subdued the rawer my skin had gotten from each and every scrub. Flashes of my haunting past still come dancing into my field of vision every now and again but I guess this is as good as it's going to get. There's only so much that water and a sponge can really do.

I sigh loudly as I reach forward to turn off the faucet. Once the steady flow of freezing water stops, I step out with a possible case of hypothermia. I wrap my towel around my waist, feeling somewhat numb but not nearly as numb as I need to be. No, I need to be much more anesthetized than this.

I walk out of the bathroom and directly  over to my kitchen table. "Fuck my life." I say as I  pick up the bottle of vodka off it. I let out another exasperated breath before I place the spout to my lips and begin guzzling it.

"That's not going to fix whatever is going inside of you, Sean." 

I nearly choke on the liquid making its way down my throat. Even though I don't choke on it, I ended up hunched over the table in a coughing fit. 

"Fuck!" I'm able to get out once I can finally get air into my lungs again. "Christ Monica, how the hell did you get in here?" I run the back of my hand over my mouth, wiping away the vodka I'd spattered onto my face.

"You left the door unlocked."  She shrugs in nonchalance as if that's a reason to just go walking into a person's living space.

"So, you thought you'd just let yourself in then? Doors unlocked so fuck it, it's a free-for-all?" I glare at her in utter irritation because I just want to be left alone.

"After you made love to me, something I honestly wasn't sure you were capable of..." I shoot her a malicious glare this time. Yeah, I know I'm not capable of love. Thanks for pointing out my obvious malfunction. She takes a hearty gulp before continuing, "Sean, you broke down in there." She gestures in the direction of her apartment. "You completely lost it."

I grit my jaw and look away from her. "Yup."  It was the truth, I had turned into a crying little bitch.

"You ran out like you were on fire, Sean." She continues like she's trying to get me to iterate what exactly was going on. "You, you were..."

"Yup." I cut her off thinking everything should be answered vaguely at this point in time. "I'm aware, Monica. I was there." She doesn't need to know all the sordid details. "I'm fine." I turn away from her, grabbing the bottle off the table and toss back a hearty swig.

"This shit," Monica rips the bottle out of my hand before I even realize what she's doing "this poison isn't going to help you. Sean, you need to deal with whatever is going on. Let me help you, please. I want to help." Her eyes are pleading with me, begging me to let her but what she doesn't realize is there's no helping someone like me.

There's no helping someone as fucked up as me, sweetheart.

I don't say what I'm thinking though as I step around her, heading to my dresser. I rip open the drawers and pull out some clothes. There's no way I can stay here and listen to any more of this shit. I can feel her sad eyes on me as I get dressed but I don't fucking care. I just need to get the fuck out of here. 

"Sean," my name is a plea on her lips as she begins to walk towards me "please."

"Monica, you need to stop." I run my hand along the length of my face. "I'm completely wrong for you in every conceivable way. Every single way, Monica. I'll never be that guy."

"No Sean, you are. You're..." she reaches out for me but I jerk away from her.

"Don't you get it?" I shout "I'm toxic. I will ruin you, all of you until there is not one good ounce left inside of you, Monica. My dark will snuff out all of your light. I can't love you. I'm not capable of it. I can only consume you."

And at the rate that I consume things, it's surely the last thing she'd ever want.

"That's not true and you know it, Sean!" She throws the words back at me. "What about tonight, huh? Sean, you were so gentle with me and you were..." 

I hold a hand up, cutting whatever it was that she was about to say right the fuck off. My brain can't process that type of information right now. "Tonight meant nothing. You mean nothing to me."

Those words were a complete falsehood if I had ever heard one in my life. The truth is much more eye opening than that and it scares the absolute fuck out of me. Also, it makes my inner demons want to jump out and consume the feeling, twisting it into some dark tainted thing. Which is exactly what had happened previously when I lost my complete shit and acted like a fucking psych patient who needed hydrotherapy.  

"You're lying." And there's no doubt that she believes what she says because she knows it's the truth. "I know what it's like to hurt too, Sean. I know what it's like to struggle with things beyond your control."

"Do you?" I ask incredulously. "Do you really fucking know, Mon?" I hate people trying to sympathize with me. Hate when they act like they know me and what I've been through. Better yet, when they act like they've been through the same horrible hell that I've been through.

"Sean, I just want to help. I just want..."

"You want to relate to my darkness, sweetheart? You want to know why I'm such a fucking head case? Is that it?"

"No, that's not it." She sighs in frustration.

"So then, what is it? You want to tell me that you know what it's like to watch your father smack around your mother? You want to tell me that you know what it's like to have your parent repetitively beat you and if not with their fists, then with inanimate objects? Or how your mother continuously tried to kill herself? How you found her in the bathroom covered in her own blood because she'd cut herself? Or how after they revived her pill ridden corpse she went completely fucking insane. Then they just, just stuck her away in some mental institution because she was bat-shit crazy?" She looks shocked but that's funny because I haven't even finished with the horror that has been my life.

"Sean, I'm so sorry." Monica is now crying and saying words I loathe more than the horrible actions themselves. The words I'm sorry are fucking useless. "What you've been through is terrible but..."

I hold up a hand and have to look away at how fucking disgusted I am by the next one. "Do you know," I gulp and stare at the floor painfully "do you know what it's like to just want to push all the pain away, to trust people..." I have to take a moment to pause because of the bile in the back of my throat. I want to fucking vomit everywhere. "I want you to think about that guy who drugged you and I want you to think about what it would feel like to wake up in the middle of something, something you didn't want, only to be knocked out again and not by a drug, but by the fist of someone you thought you could trust. No, you don't know the feeling of waking up in a foreign bed, in a foreign place, and feel foreign things... to feel so fucking dirty... so fucking disgusted that you can't even describe..."

And there they are, my biggest demons of them all. It is the only time I have ever said any of this shit out loud. There are still many, many more horrid little things but these, these are the ones that eat away at my capability to give her what she wants from me.

"Sean," she sobs my name "I'm so, so sor..."

"Don't you fucking dare say you are sorry." I spit out. "I don't want your sympathy or your fucking pity. I don't want any of it. The next time you tell someone you know their pain, don't. Everyone's pain is different, makes us all different, it can turn us into things we never thought we'd be."

"But Sean." She's trying to speak through an absurd number of tears. "You, you need help. I want to help you. I can help."

"You think I fucking woke up as a child and dreamed I'd be this way? Dreamed I'd be an addict? Do you fucking think this is what people like me want?" She's just starring, blinking through the tears. "Yeah Monica, people like me just dreamed to be damaged and fucked-up. We just wanted to be a bunch of broken, shattered, fragments of people.  DO YOU REALLY THINK THIS IS WHAT I WANTED!?" I scream the last part not being able to reel in my emotions. I'm losing the last bit of control I have left.

"Sean..." Monica's sobs are loud and never-ending, but I can't find it in me to sympathize. 

I've already cried my fair share of tears over these things.

"Do you not think that I know that I have a problem, Monica? Do you not think that I know I'm incapable of controlling myself? Here's a newsflash for you, I fucking know and I don't fucking care. Do you want to know why?" I don't give her time to answer. "It's because no one should care about someone who's never been cared about. A piece of shit like me is useless to care for."

She reaches out for me but I storm past her, grabbing my keys off the kitchen counter. It's time to fucking drown my sorrows and then smother them into oblivion with amphetamines. Time to go get fucking bent.

"Sean, don't do this. Don't go." I look over to Monica, who is standing next to my bed sobbing. I am the worst thing on the planet for this woman and I could never make her happy.

"I'm never going to be the one for you, Monica. I'm so fucking tainted. I'm so fucking damaged that there's no way I'd ever be good enough for you. I'm no good for anyone, I'm slowly fucking killing myself every single day. I won't do the same to you."

She's crying even harder, clutching her arms around herself. I leave her like that, slamming the door on my way out, knowing it's about to get worse than it ever has before.

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A/N:

Anthony Green is my spirit animal. If you haven't listened yet, go listen to the song in the beginning. Seriously, you'll better understand Sean's character if you do. Also, there's another song by the same artist below. I think the video perfectly portrays how Sean's demons
'drown' him.

I also want to say that just because someone begins to have feelings for someone doesn't mean that in a snap of the fingers that person is fixed. Trauma is called trauma for a reason and internal wounds can be some of the hardest to fix. No matter how many flowers and chocolates we throw at it, some damage just can't be undone. 

[There should be a GIF or video here. Update the app now to see it.]