Blood rushed to his chest, his body’s attempt to combat the threat in his muscles. A willowy lightheaded feeling threatened to take over Luke’s limbs, but he fought the urge to pass out, even though letting go would have brought him peace and relaxation. He mumbled something he himself couldn’t understand while Charlie dumped her medicine cabinet on the island. He tried to tell her that none of that would help.

“My bag. The front – oh, you fucking [i]bitch,[/i]” he wheezed, pressing both hands to his side. It’d never hurt this bad. He couldn’t even make dinner without having an episode, which made disappointment and anger flood him. The letters on her sweatshirt became blurry. “The front pocket, baby. There’s a shot. Like a…like a…” He forced the words through clenched teeth. “Like an insulin pen.” Mostly slurred nonsense left his mouth.  Luke had only called her “Charlie" before. Never, ever anything else.

His Army bag was still in the corner by the hutch. There were several hundred pockets, but the one at the top had random things like his passport, cigarettes, a ratty pack of chewing gum, several types of medication, his muscle shots, and envelopes that he hoped she either wouldn’t see – or would forget as soon as she saw them. There were only two, one addressed to Samuel McCormick and the other to Charlotte McCormick. Whenever he was deployed, he wrote them both letters in case he never came back. Once he was in Montana, he threw them out.

Orphenadrine. It was in a plastic bag with other pain meds and sleeping pills.

He could do the shot himself. Explaining how and where to do it would’ve been too much for him to explain.

Luke pulled the cap off his with his teeth and put the needle into his left pectoral, through his shirt. It took him a minute to adjust, but the pain blocker was immediate. Numbness crept through his chest and up to his shoulder. Color gradually came back to his face and he relaxed a bit, refocusing.

He gave Charlie a goofy smile, one that only happened when he was drunk. She was slowly coming back to focus, and when he registered how stricken she looked, he reached for her hand, arm, hip, anything. “Fuck the farm,” he mumbled. “You and me – we gotta open a Rite Aid.”

The island was covered in bottles. With the precision of a seasoned alcoholic, he tried to sit up in his seat. “A few minutes. Ten, and I’ll be back to normal. I just overworked everything." A pause. "I'm sorry you had to see that."

Focus ticked back into his brain every few seconds. Soon, he started to put the spilled medicine back into their containers and separated hers from his. Pain, fog, slurring, and then he was back down. The whole process was alarming but brief. It was impossible not to glaze over the bold letters on the sides of the bottles. Fluoxetine. Alprazolam. No bad pills. Nothing truly alarming. When Luke talked to the doctors, he was very insistent on not having opiates. At the end of his mother’s life, he’d seen what they did to her.

Once he was mostly back to himself, he looked up at Charlie. “How about that TV, huh? How do you feel about that? Something stupid.” He grinned, just slightly, unable to help it. “No Yellowstone.”