As I headed back towards the building, I could hear Jay's shoes faintly squeak against the grass behind me. After telling him that I blamed myself for what happened to Grace, he hadn't said another word to me about it or anything else, for that matter. There was only silence as we headed back up the grassy trail that would eventually lead back to a concrete path. I didn't have a word to say, and neither did he, by the sound of it. There was no reason to force a conversation. At least we had that in common.
Then he opened his mouth.
"You have some serious potential with that singing." he continued at his own pace as I ever so slightly sped up. "It's unique. I think people would enjoy it, labels too."
With slowly widening eyes, I stopped myself in my tracks and turned to find him right behind me. Stopping much in the same way I had, his hair bounced backwards and revealed a pair of sharp, cold eyes staring right at what was originally my back. Seconds passed before his eyes slowly traveled up from my chest and back at my own. He remained still, the only movement was the stark smirk spreading across his face.
"You're joking." yet another deprecating smile adorned my face. "Even if I want to be, I'll never have the same talent that you or her have."
"Bullshit. You just a need a little bit of work in places and you're in the studio recording." Jay gave a light laugh, slowly walking past me as his eyes searched the greenery around us. "Guitar isn't that hard once you start picking up the fundamentals."
"Oh, yeah? Then teach me what she didn't." I slowly spun as I followed his leisured movements.
Jay stopped a few feet ahead of me and just seemed to look around him to take in the nature, the fresh air. Dressed in a white tank top and a pair of way-too-tight black jeans, it became clear just how thin Jay was. He was all bone and no meat, just like I imagined a starved child to be, yet he consistently ate twice as much as I did while I had been in this place. Maybe he was just one those people who never gained weight, but he still bordered on looking unhealthy either way.
Grace had always thought I was one of those people, but I wasn't. I just watched every piece of food that went into my mouth, I just watched every last calorie that entered my body. While I never made myself throw up like some of the girls I had heard about at school, I put my body through hell exercising every day to stay in shape for her. Maybe she knew and decided to play the fool, but it hadn't changed the fact that I would've done it either way. No matter what she would've said. It was worth doing if it was for her.
"Sure." Jay's head fell over his shoulder, smiling. "It ain't gonna be easy, though."
Opening my hand, I was just then hit with the realization that it would probably be a couple days before I could touch a guitar as pain blasted through my fist and even a touch into my wrist. While I was pretty sure I sprained my right hand pretty badly, I never actually asked Rebecca. All she had done was go into a bit more detail about what I did to Lucas, and reasons that it may have happened.
She also told me more about the therapy, which started with the breathing exercises. She said that meditation was an option to look into, but told me that she was going to save it for when she had more time to show me. It was in the middle of her explaining the last breathing exercise that her phone rang and she got frantic. After telling me that we would continue a bit later, she pulled me out of her office and took off somewhere with her purse.
That was how I found myself on the dock, alone and trying my absolute best to deprecate myself in every way imaginable. There were points in that past year where I genuinely hated myself for the littlest things, and when everything else failed to work, I found myself back in the arms of the drugs that so openly accepted me. I found myself being taken in and away by heroin, that beautiful feeling of happiness. That feeling of numbness. They became my temporary utopia.
Even if it was fake, it was better than everything else I had.
He turned, looking at the hand I just opened and then towards the building. "Did he deserve what he got?"
"I don't know." I shook my head, looking away. "All I really remember is hitting him."
Jay just looked at me with no other expression or feeling. No smiling or frowning, no happiness or anger, it was just his starry blue eyes and nothing else. As though time stopped and I was the only thing allowed to move, Jay stood erect in the same way without any form of movement. Not a single twitch or blink had come from his face, and his body was the same. He was just a lifelike picture standing in front of me.
"I've never seen an expression like that on someone my age." Jay took a step closer, his eyes narrowed. "You were screaming 'get off of me' while you hit him."
the back of my palm near mindlessly covered my mouth as I remained silent.
"Those eyes scared me. They looked like my mom's eyes after she shot up and came out of her room with some new mark." he hadn't moved his eyes, even after I had long veered my own. "Those eyes were lost. It was like she was looking at nothing, even when I was right in front of her. That's how you looked when the aide pulled you off. You were looking at something else."
"Stop, Jay." I spoke into my hand.
Jay came back until he stood directly across from me, stopping only inches away. Barely several inches apart, the very slight scent of sweat mixed with some kind of faded body spray or detergent invaded my nostrils as a pair of birds chirped pleasantly in the background. In the exact same fashion he was doing minutes earlier, he was looking right at me without any sort of motion. Just a lifelike picture that found itself right in front of me.
Then, like a flash of lightning, I was being constrained within his arms as I was pressed into his chest. Jay was holding me in his arms, hugging me like I was someone he knew much more closely than myself, but it slowly became more and more obvious as I came down from the sudden shock. He was trembling, if only slightly, but I could feel it. It was me, myself, that triggered one of his worst memories.
"All I'm saying is don't bury yourself before you even have a chance." his breath hit the lobe of my ear.
Did I even have a chance? If I wanted to lie to myself with blind optimism, then I might've had one. There was always the chance that I could end up pretending my life away, faking happiness and my reality. It was always possible that I would've found someone else and fooled myself into thinking that I could replicate the happiness that I felt with Grace, that someone could duplicate every feeling she had ever gave to me.
My only real chance at being happy again was to live a lie.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _
"Lynn."
As I came into the facility, I had every intent of scurrying off to my bed and making my presence scarce, mostly because I wanted to avoid the situation that had just stopped me from walking through unscathed. I knew I wasn't going to be able to keep on running away from it, but it wasn't something I was actively going to seek out. Even so, that wasn't going to stop me from delaying the inevitable, but he could and did.
". . .Hey, Lucas." I stopped, turning as I brushed my hair back.
"Look, I'm just going to make this quick. I'm sorry for what I did." Lucas tried to look me in the eyes as he spoke. "I shouldn't have forced that on you, and I really should've just kept it all to myself in the first place."
If the swelling under his right eye and bandage over the bridge of his nose weren't enough proof that it all really happened, the various other marks and scratches only confirmed it. I couldn't give an answer to anyone as for why I did it, or why I didn't remember doing it. Everything about what I had supposedly done was so unlike, well, me. I had never actually been in a fight and hit someone back, yet that was the exact thing I did to Lucas.
Every time Courtney tried to start a fight with me, I let her do whatever she wanted. If she hit me, I didn't hit back. If she spit in my face, I didn't spit back. The most I had ever done to anyone in retaliation was push them away, and even that was rare. Maybe it was just being weak or being scared, but I knew what I was capable of and it never amounted to much. I would've simply been lying to myself if I thought otherwise.
"No. . .you confided in me with something and it should've been just that." I looked away. "Even if you did try to force that kiss on me, the most I should've done was push you away. Not try to kill you."
"Just let me be a man here, or something. I did something I really, really shouldn't have and I paid the piper." he leaned against the couch.
Turning to him, I crossed my arms. I would've been lying if I said I wasn't curious, though he had every right to refuse me. "Did you get your answer, at least?"
"I did. I'm pretty sure I'm gay, especially after that." he smirked as he used his weight to push himself off of the couch. That smirk soon turned into a frown, a serious one. ". . .I have a question, too. Who's Devin?"
Taking a mindless step backwards, my hand decided to encompass my mouth once again. While Joanna and Rebecca knew most of what happened, Nathan was the only one there. He saw it happen and never told another soul after that day in the park. If only a small amount of people knew about it, that meant Grace would've been less likely to find out if she ever got up again - rather, when she got up again.
Grace was strong, even in her moment of weakness. She was going to wake up and bounce back from whatever caused her to do it. When she got back up, she was going to fight back just like she always had. She was going to be standing at the end of the road, and at the end of this long, long road, she was going to be standing. If it was her, I had all of the belief in the world that those feelings would become reality.
"Lynn, sweetie." I turned my head to find Rebecca with a finger pointed behind her. "My office, please."
While it had almost been too coincidental, I was never so thankful to have been interrupted in my life. He only knew that name because I must have said it at some point while I was trying to impale my fists into him. The problem with telling him a lie, was that he would've known right away because of the context I said it in. That and something just told me that he knew how to pick out lies that people spoke. Maybe it was his eyes, buried and unbelieving, that told me that. I wasn't all that sure.
Before long, I had followed Rebecca back to her office, where I had expected her to continue on with the talk about breathing exercises. That much seemed to be completely disregarded as she opened up a folder and let her fingernail do the searching. What felt like minutes passed as she sifted through the pages beneath her, seemingly looking for something that was specific to what was presumably me.
"Lynn, besides us here, is there anyone else besides your friend who knows about you being assaulted?" Rebecca looked up as she clearly chose her words carefully. "Do you think either of your parents or brother have an idea?"
I sat down and slowly brought my leg over the other as I let her question set in. It was only Nathan that knew the whole thing. I seriously tried to tell my mom, but an interruption in the form of horrifying news had immediately ended that thought right away. Instead, a lie came from my mouth. All I said was that I hadn't been feeling good and was going to lay down in my room. That had been the end of that, or so I thought up until this very moment.
"I tried to tell my mom once, but I couldn't get it out." I brought my hand to my neck, not liking the direction the conversation was heading. "Did you tell them or something?"
"I think we should set up a meeting and have you tell them the truth, Lynn. Your feelings, your assault, and how those led into your decision to resort to drugs. Only what you feel comfortable with, of course." Rebecca took a stroll around her desk. "I think it would be good for both you and your family, because they need just as much closure as you do. I also think that honesty and openness is a good first step into the type of therapy we'll be doing together."
"So, you just want me to throw it all away? You just want me to throw away all of this fucking time I've put into hiding it for her?" my nails had begun digging into the skin of my neck. "You think it's a good first step, but then what was all of this for? What were all those drugs for, what was all of this pain for? If she was just going to find out anyways, then why did I do this to myself? Did I put myself through hell for absolutely nothing when I could've just told someone?"
"Good question. What were those drugs for? Why did you do it to yourself?" Rebecca leaned against her desk with a long pause in between. "Excuse me if I'm out of line here, but did you ever stop to think about Grace and how she might feel about not knowing any of this? If your assault and drug use are enough to change her feelings for you, then was your relationship really that strong to begin with?"
Leaning forward, both of my hands ran over through my hair.
I had never stopped to think about Grace at all, it was always about how I was trying to protect her, how I was trying to protect our relationship. It was just me, myself, and I without ever having a thought of how she would feel about being lied to. The assumption I always carried was that she would look at me differently, pretending to care for me in the same way she always had, but I always blew that off as a lie. Yet, had Grace ever pretended to do anything? I assumed the worst, never thinking about how Grace would've felt if I held something so big away from her.
Those drugs had never been for Grace. The pain and tears hadn't been, either. They were for me, they were for me to run away and suffocate the feelings I had inside. I wanted and thought I felt happy nothings, numbness, but I was only ever allowed to run away for a little while. The drugs had never done either of us any good, neither had the pain or tears we both clearly felt at some point. It was just another facade for me, another fake reality. Grace had become my excuse to run away from what I felt, and she never deserved that. Not anyone, but especially not her.
I simply wasted my life and health away, because I couldn't live with myself and the horror he left inside of me. Selfishly, I chose what I deemed to be the right way. Not with her in mind, not with Nathan, or anyone who had cared about me. It had only ever been about how I, myself, felt. I thought nobody wanted me around, that nobody cared if I had even existed, but had it been something else? Had it been me who thought that?
". . .You're the doctor, right?" my heart began to endlessly punch me in the throat through clenched teeth as I locked eyes with the floor.
"Just call them."
ns 15.158.61.12da2
