He turns his head and sees Jody, sitting in the passenger seat. Of course, he knew that.

“Yeah, what’s up?” He clears his throat and pulls his hand back. He scratches at his wrists, suddenly uncomfortable with the hoodie sleeves touching them.

His fingers brush against aging scars and he clenches his jaw.

“Are you going to get some gas?” Jody asks.

Colt blinks and he’s looking at her again. He must’ve spaced out for a second. He swallows, feeling sick. The smell in the air catches in his throat. He pushes up his sleeves a little, but they just slide back down.

“Actually, do you mind getting it for me? My, uh, back kinda hurts right now. I don’t really feel like standing there waiting.”

He was lying. They talked about his lying. He wasn’t supposed to be hiding things from her anymore. That was the whole deal when they got back together. No more big secrets. If either one of them were feeling insecure or hurt by something, they need to communicate it. Colt especially. She was very stern about that.

But if he could disguise one hurt with another, maybe she won’t question it. Then when they get home, he could make up some excuse for feeling gross, maybe not showering yesterday, escape to the bathroom, and have a panic attack. In private. She won’t have to know.

Jody would know. She’d at least know something was up. She was too smart and sweet to him. She’d know in an instant.

He swallows again. The faint bitter taste in his mouth is really going to make him vomit.

“Okay,” Jody says. She looks at him oddly. She clearly already knows something is up, but isn’t saying anything. “I’m going to get something from the shop too while I’m up. Did you want anything?”

“Water.” He replies far too quickly. “Uh, yeah. A water would be nice.”

Jody nods, still not saying anything. She does smile at him, however, and presses a kiss to two fingers to tap against his cheekbone. That gets a small smirk from him, and a flush.

She leaves him there, the door shutting behind her. Colt feels he should shut his door too. Maybe that would help with the smell of the place.

But suddenly with Jody gone, walking around to insert her card and grab the pump, he finds it hard to get his body to move. That causes a stab of fear in his chest, stomach plummeting to the ground.

He shuts his eyes tightly. Stupid choice of words, his dumb internal monologue.

“What was that?”

Curse his inability to stop talking to himself too, while he’s at it.

“Nothing, nothing.” He waves Jody off. “Just talking to myself. Back just hurts.”

“Do you need your pills—”

“They’re at home,” he interrupts her, stopping her from finishing. “Let’s just get going. I’ll be fine.”

“Okay…” Jody sounds off. She definitely knows it's more than just his back bothering him. He just hopes she doesn’t ask. “I’ll be right over there. It’ll be done by the time I’m back, so just…sit tight, okay?”

He gives her a thumbs up and smiles a little when he hears her scoff. Once he’s sure she walked away, he drops.

Colt folds in on himself. He leans across his lap, arms crossed with his elbows firmly planted on his knees. His leg starts bouncing, jostling him slightly, but it doesn’t stop him from hiding his face in the crook of his arm. His fists clench, unconsciously rubbing one of his wrists against his knee. He could feel the pulse point pumping at jack rabbit speeds against the scars.

It was that smell. The overtly strong smell of gasoline. It was suffocating. It was—it was just bringing him back to that night.

He was so afraid that night. The torture was one thing. It hurt, but it was familiar. It was pain he knew well. He can take a punch, a kick, head in the water, taser to the neck, anything. It hurts, it always hurts, but he can take it. He was trained to take it.

Colt wasn’t trained to watch two men get dragged off a boat and shot dead in front of him. He wasn’t trained to hear that Tom Ryder had tried killing him before, and almost succeeded the first time. He wasn’t trained to handle real gasoline getting thrown into real wounds, stinging and soaking through his clothes. Getting in his mouth and his eyes.

He had been shot at, thrown around, pretty much everything you could think of, all that night. It was just something about the gasoline that had his head spinning.

No one really knew this because why would they? Why would they care? But Colt almost died twice from his fall. The first time was when his back had snapped, almost paralyzing him. The excruciating pain, the days in the hospital, the painful weeks of recovery that turned into months, and then years of just more pain. Pain that was never going to go away. The fall itself almost killed him. It very nearly did.

The second time the fall almost killed him is when he was having a horrible pain day and couldn’t see himself coming back from it. He knew there wasn’t a future without it.

So he took too many pain pills and had to get his stomach pumped.

Tom Ryder almost killed him three times. Once with the fall, once by gasoline, and once by his own stupid decisions. Not including all the shooting, drugging, beating, throwing, drowning, burning—

Colt’s breathing hitches. The bouncing intensifies. He can hear the sloshing of the gas pump as it fills up his tank.

What he’s trying to say with all this is that he’s been through a lot. He’s almost died a million times at this point. He doesn’t know why a little gasoline is freaking him out this much. He’s had worse.

But maybe it wasn’t just the gasoline. Maybe it’s everything. It’s been months now. The movie had officially finished reshoots with their new star, editing it all that needs to be done now. They were both back home in LA, Colt spending more time at Jody’s apartment than his own. They were going on dates regularly, staying up all night talking, shedding tears as they spoke about what to do now. They were starting over, for real this time. No more lies, no more hiding.

Yet Colt was still hiding. He hasn’t told Jody everything about those few days. He knew he should, but his mouth would go dry and his heart would pound, and he wouldn’t be able to get the words out.

Maybe everything just came crashing down on him with just one whiff of a less-than-secure gas station pump.

He should get up, get his head out of his arms. Jody would be back any second and he can’t have her seeing him like this. He’s tired of worrying her. It hurts more than anything else to see her eyes searching him and speaking to him in that concerned tone.

Still, he knows he can’t move. He can’t muster anything more than too fast bouncing of his leg.

He swears he can still taste it burning down his throat. He threw up so much after. He barely made it out of the water after the boat crash before he was doubling over and vomiting everything he had unwillingly ingested. There was only a moment for him to worry about the blood he had spit up before he had to move.

There’s a click and a jolt where the pump automatically cuts off. It makes him flinch.

Colt feels a hand land on his shoulder and he jumps, quickly sitting up and shoving his hands in between his knees, pressing his wrists together.

He sees Jody and smiles, laughing a little breathlessly.

She doesn’t look as pleased to see him. “Colt, what’s wrong? You’re—you’re shaking.”

“Jody, um,” his voice is tight and it’s painful to get out. He swallows, but that makes him gag at the phantom taste in his mouth. He ignores it. “Hey! How’s it going?”

“Colt,” Jody’s voice turns dangerously serious. She says her next words firmly and without any wiggle room. “What is wrong?”

He breathes a little heavier. His wrists hurt. He quickly pulls them from where he was pinning them together between his legs. Instead, his hands rub up and down his thighs. He doesn’t look at Jody. Picking a dried oil spill on the ground to his left, he stares at that instead.

“Mm…” he hums shortly. It comes out cracked and broken. Then he shakes his head. That’s all he could do.

The guilt suddenly hits him now. He should’ve told her everything. He should have told her about the burning alive thing. Maybe then they wouldn’t be in this mess. Or maybe she would know what to do without him having to talk about it. He doesn’t want to talk about it.

“Colt—Colt, would you look at me, please?” Jody calls for his attention and he’s vaguely aware that she’s been talking to him for a minute now. He doesn’t know how he forgot.

He does look at her, but he doesn’t feel like he’s really seeing her. Everything is fuzzy in his head. There’s a film over his eyes that makes everything blurry and doubled. He has to force himself to focus on her, but it doesn’t last long.

“Can you talk to me?” She asks.

“I just—” Colt breaks off with a grunt. He shifts in his seat, the thumping of his boot against the edge of the car’s frame was distracting his words, but not enough to distract from the— “It just really smells. Like a lot. Like gasoline.”

“Like gasoline?” Jody repeats. He could imagine her in his head, raising perfectly tweezed eyebrows at him. He would be able to see that right in front of him if he could just focus. “Well, we are at a gas station. That would do it.”

“That’ll do it!” Colt mimics her and suddenly it hurts to keep breathing it in.

His inhale cuts short. He squeezes his eyes shut and rubs his shaking legs over and over again, reminding himself that he’s perfectly capable of moving them. The scars on his wrists burn from the friction. Shit, he was making this worse.

“Well it’s all done,” Jody says and there’s something weird in her voice. “We can head home now.”

Colt perks up a little at that. He forces on a smile. “Yeah, yeah. That sounds perfect.”

“Can you drive?”

“What?”

“Can you drive like this, Colt?”

“Like what?”

Jody doesn’t say anything, but he could tell by the tense silence that she is not impressed with him. He’s sure if his eyes weren’t closed, he’d see it too.

Why were his eyes still closed?

He opens them, but for some reason that just makes him face the dried spots of gas staining the ground. He wasn’t looking at Jody, he was looking at his dirty, torn up jeans and the indents on his wrists. They burn against his sleeves. They aren’t zip tied together anymore, but it feels just the same.

He growls and pushes up his sleeves all the way to his elbows. He had more scars from doing reckless crap. Even more from those few days. Yet, the only ones that bug him now are the rubbed raw indents on his wrists.

Colt only gets a second to scratch at them before much smaller and softer hands interrupt him.

“No, no, don’t hurt yourself!” Jody scolds him, easily pulling his hand from his wrist without any fight. “You could just—here, get out.”

Colt frowns. He still can’t really focus on her. “What?”

“Out of the car,” she orders. “Out! I’m driving us back to your apartment. Clearly, something is wrong.”

He’s pulled carefully out of the car. He refuses to admit it out loud, but he always liked it when Jody would manhandle him around. It made him feel breakable and precious, two things he never was. Except, of course, when he is fragile like this—legs wobbling and almost kneeling over as soon as his feet hit the ground—it’s the worst feeling in the world.

He feels that urge to push Jody away, straighten up, force himself to stop shaking. Smile, give her a thumbs up, move on. Like nothing ever happened.

She’s gentle with him as she leads him over the front to the other side of his truck, and opens the passenger door for him. Her touch is firm as she guides him to take a step up and into the seat. Both her hands leave him for a mere second, coming back quickly to touch his trembling knee and reaching up to soothe his cheek.

Colt melts right there. He doesn’t know why he fights it. He wants to be treated gently like this by her.

“I love you,” he tells her, and it hasn’t been nearly long enough in their new relationship for him to be saying this to her, especially when he hasn’t been respecting her like she deserves. He’s been hiding this from her, he has no right to say this now. “I do. I really do love you.”

Jody smiles at him and it’s the first thing he sees again, past the scars and the stains that cover him. She steps up onto the frame of the truck and leans in to give him a kiss. One that he returns just as softly and overflowing with passion.

She pulls away, but still with a smile. “I love you too. Don’t think this will get you out of the conversation, though. Once you are feeling better, we are talking about this. Everything.”

Colt thinks about each attempt on his life, all those that were pathetic, reckless, and stupid. He thinks about pain pills and scars on his wrists and the taste of gasoline.

He doesn’t want Jody to be privy to that part of him, but he knows she should be anyway. He nods and sighs.

“Everything.” He agrees.

He holds his hands carefully in his lap as Jody heads back around to the driver’s side. She pulls herself in and works on adjusting the seat. She asks for the keys, inserts them, and starts the car, ready to head back home.