His family had flown home last night, and despite how much I wanted to spend the night with him, I had declined when he offered for me to stay with him.
I wanted to say it was because I was being ‘normal’ and felt like the relationship was moving too fast to be living with my boyfriend after only a month, but that would have been a lie.
Honest answer: I was scared of what would happen if I had a nightmare and attacked him again. And I felt like I was becoming too attached. I’d survived the last three years sleeping alone, so why the fuck did I feel like I needed him to fall asleep? It was ridiculous and made me feel too weak, too vulnerable.
It was on my mind as I entered Sarah’s office and took my usual seat on the insufferable leather couch that deserved to be burned in a pyre.
“Hi, Emory,” she greeted with a smile, crossing her legs. “How’s it going with stopping the self-harm?”
“Just going straight for the throat I see,” I snorted. “Yeah. Fine,” I eyed the letter opener on the desk behind her like I had every week in the last two months. “Just might wanna hide your sharps because apparently I steal shit now.”
Her lips pursed with a nonverbal noise of interest and I rolled my eyes.
“Yeah. I stole from my friend. Crime of opportunity, I guess. It was fucking stupid and I wish I hadn’t but…desperate times and all that shit.”
“Have you been hurting yourself to cope?”
“No. I haven’t. Hence the desperation. I feel like—”
I cut myself off, stomach flipping as the realization stole my breath. Fuck, is that what it was? I felt like I could understand him?
“You feel?” she prompted.
“I feel like I can understand to a veryminordegree some of my father’s actions. Though I can’t say I’ve gotten high and watched my daughter get raped in the blood of her brother, beside his freshly killed body. But—” I cut myself off at her audible gasp and moved my eyes away from the letter opener to gauge her expression. She quickly snapped her mouth shut and cleared her throat.
“I’m sorry. Go on.”
In the three years I had been sporadically coming to Sarah’s office, she’d never once acted surprised or startled by anything I’d said. Not even when I told her I’d killed someone. So, this was…new.
“No, nothing. I just can kind of relate a little to him I guess and it feels pretty gross. I don’t want to feel like this. Like I’d do anything, like I’d turn off my moral compass just to get that feeling, that escape. I hate it. It reminds me how weak I am, how much like him I am, and I want nothing to do with him. I’d prefer it if I got amnesia and forgot he even existed.”
Sarah took a deep breath, waited to see if I was finished before commenting, “Sounds like you’ve got a lot of resentment?”
I scoffed, “Fucking yeah I do. That motherfucking cumwipe shitstain cocksucker was a piece of shit father and even shittier piece of shit human being. I’m glad he’s fucking gone. He’s the reason Javier and I had to join that fucking gang in the first place.”
“Who’s Javier?” she asked, back to her neutral expression of slight interest. “That name is on the bottom of your fear list.”
“Don’t even get me started on that fucker. He…” I shook my head, my hand going to my coin to squeeze it.
“We don’t have to talk about him today, we can continue working on apologizing or talk about cutting your hair. Or something else. It’s up to you.”
I sighed heavily, foot tapping the floor.
“Javier was my brother. I think he might have been a psychopath, or sociopath, I don’t really know the difference. And I know, I know, I can’t diagnose someone with Google but there wassomethingwrong.”
She nodded slowly, “Well, tell me about him. Why did you think there was something wrong with him?”
“I didn’t think there was anything wrong, which was probably part of the problem. I mean, when you trust someone so deeply, why would you have a reason to ever suspect that they were lying to you?”
“What did he lie about?”
“Everything,” I scoffed. “He lied about everything, and I didn’t know it until it was too late. I trusted him, he was my brother, he was…my everything. My friend, my father when I needed it, my mentor, the person I looked up to, the only person in the world I trusted implicitly. He said jump, I said how high. I would’ve done anything for him, and I did, for seventeen years.”
“Do you blame yourself for being lied to?”
I shrugged, “I blame myself for being so naïve. For not questioning things sooner, for convincing myself that my brother loved me like he should have. I just wish he was still alive so I could ask him the questions that I will never have answers to. It’s hard to let go, to move on when there is so much unknown left to wonder, to run circles in my mind at three in the morning.”
“That sounds incredibly frustrating. What would you ask him if you could?”
