It was like every emotion he’d had to suppress in order to survive the last year and a half was now crashing into him all at once. Every vulnerability he’d locked away so that he could command the hounds and withstand the hag came screaming back into the open, raw and painful and demanding attention. And now he was having a breakdown in a public restroom because something good was happening for once, and all he could do was imagine all the ways it could go horribly wrong. Eventually, the tide ebbed. He just couldn’t sustain that level of feeling for long.
