"I never want to talk about what happened."
Harry didn't had to ask Cybil what she meant by that. For months after the incident she would call him, her breath quick and ragged from a nightmare she had awoken from just moments before her trembling hands dialed his number. "Am I going crazy? I am so, so scared. When will this stop?" Harry glanced across the bedroom where his baby daughter slept soundly in her crib, he would silently thank god that if everything went as planned, Heather would never have to deal with such awful dreams. (Cybil would snap his neck if he ever mentioned that the majority of their conversations in those first few months contained uncontrollable sobbing - on both their parts.)
During that year, Cybil had manged to visit his apartment on a few occasions. She would walk in without knocking, smelling of sweet perfume and cigarette smoke; for some reason the scent always put him at ease, he had told her this once and she must of liked it as she had thrown her head back and laughed.
They often ended up in the kitchen or on the couch in the living-room, joking halfheartedly and discussing pointless things. Although sometimes they would speak of politics, classic literature and most often psychology. Studying psychology seemed to bring Cybil some peace; she had told him it was the only way she could truly begin to understand why she was feeling the way she was, trauma and such were obvious causes but specifics helped. (She confided to him once that she had begun to experience frequent panic attacks; she was considering medication.)
Whenever Harry would pick up Heather for a bottle or diaper change Cybil would visibly flinch and begin to tense up. "...Are you scared of her?" She would look down at the infant and then back up at Harry, silent for a moment as if she wasn't sure herself; she would chuckle softly and shake her head "I just don't like kids very much." As Harry rocked his daughter in his arms, trying to sooth the child back to sleep, he resisted the urge to tell Cybil that she was a terrible liar; she was terrified of his daughter.
Things would often become somewhat intense between him and the blonde, it wasn't uncommon for them to end up in some odd corner of the apartment, her lips hard against his, both their hands trying desperately to undo straps, belts and buttons. The act itself was almost always hard, rough and fast. It wasn't about intimacy, it was desperate attempts to feel something, anything and maybe claw their way into some sort of normality and sometimes - it was just for the hell of it.
Was this their way of coping?