I forced a smirk, leaning back in my chair. “So, you’re diagnosing me with a hero complex?”
Alex snorted, shaking his head. “No diagnosis,” he said with a smirk. “Just an observation.” He sipped his coffee and gave me a look that was too knowing for my comfort. “And a warning. Be careful, Marcus. Just… be careful.”
FIVE
Tyler
The counselor’soffice smelled of lavender and old books, which should have been calming but only made me itch. A soft couch sat against the wall opposite Elena’s desk, and the chair beside it was angled just so. The window behind her desk overlooked the courtyard, where gray clouds pressed low, promising rain. I sat back in the chair, curling my hands into the sleeves of my sweater, the fabric rough beneath my raw fingertips.
“How are you feeling?” Elena asked.
Irritation gripped me. “I don’t know what you want me to say.” There was always a ‘right’ answer—one that meant I could stop talking—but I couldn’t find it.
“You can say anything you want,” she said.
Not helpful at all.
I glanced at my hands, at the edges of my nails where I’d picked at them until they were red and swollen. “I’m fine.”
Her silence stretched, waiting, patient. God damn her.
I sighed. “Better than before, I guess.”
“Before?”
I knew what she wanted me to say… before the roof.
“I don’t know. It’s been three weeks.” The words felt heavy. Three weeks of unraveling everything I thought I knew about myself, about the hatred, the anger, the shame, peeling it back like a scab to find more rot underneath. “I don’t feel like I did then.”
Was I being vague enough?
Her nod was slight, and my overactive brain interpreted it as approval. I felt like a dog that had just been told he was a good boy for sitting.
“What’s changed?” she prompted.
“Talking helps,” I said, searching for more approval. She didn’t have to know I was lying. “Marcus and I talked baseball.”
“Yes?”
“Well, he talked, and I mostly listened, but itwas something. He laughed when I told him I was a Red Sox fan, and he went on a whole rant about how he’s a die-hard Cubs fan and how there was no way I could understand real suffering until I’d followed Chicago baseball my whole life.”
“You’re smiling at the memory,” she observed.
Am I?
It was easy to smile until the guilt hit.
I should tell her about the guilt. Right?
I said nothing, but I could see the cogs whirring. She was pulling at something, nudging me toward a place I wasn’t sure I wanted to go. The way she commented on the smiling was too direct and too knowing, as if she could see right through me.
“Has anything else made you smile this week?”
Fuck. I knew it—this was a theme.
“Marcus told me a joke this morning.”
“He did?”
