“Parents, plural. They’re…,” he started, took a sip of his beer, and then pushed out the words he’d never admitted to anyone before. “Emotionally abusive.”
“Always, or…?” she prodded when he went quiet for a while.
He kept drinking his beer, and suddenly he’d finished the first bottle and was almost done with the second then. “Do you want more wine?” he asked, getting to his feet.
“Yeah, bring me a whole glass while you’re at it.” She grinned, emptying her glass and giving it to him.
Mark started toward the bar and Stuart watched him approach with a sheepish expression.
“Look, I’m—”
“No, it’s fine. Or maybe it’s not, but bygones, okay?” Mark waved dismissively. There was no need to make things any more awkward, after all. “Can I get a double whiskey, something better this time, another beer, and a glass of whatever Evy is drinking?”
“Coming right up,” Stuart replied, his whole posture spelling out his relief. Mark figured the man didn’t upset people often, so the earlier conversation might’ve shaken him more than Mark.
He carried the drinks back the beer dangling from between two fingers, and Evy tsked at him. “You should’ve taken a tray.”
“Nah, don’t need one,” Mark replied, and almost dropped the bottle when he was putting his own glass down.
Evy just smirked. Mean girl.
Once they both had their drinks and had sipped them for a while, Mark took another, bigger mouthful of whiskey and waited for it to burn on its way down. As if gathering strength from the sensation, he sighed.
“They’re extremely homophobic, for starters. To a point where I couldn’t draw as a kid, because it was girly. I could only watch certain cartoons, and boy did I get flak for asking if I could play an instrument,” he spoke, looking at the amber liquid in his tumbler.
“Toxic masculinity. You said both of your parents are like that?”
“Yeah. I feel like my mother tried, for a while, when I was little. Like she’d hide my drawings or the fact that I’d listened to classical or pop music while Dad was at work. See, they wanted a bunch of kids, but when I was born something happened, and they couldn’t have any more. I think that changed them.”
“All their expectations fell on you and things escalated from there,” Evy stated, all too perceptive.
“Yeah. I had to be the ideal son, the jock, instead of anything I’d wanted to be really. It’s… It was literally beaten out of me in my teens. Couple of times. Not… nothing like constant physical abuse.” He took another gulp from his glass. “It’s just… I went to the academy to get away from them. Then I took jobs in big towns to live up their expectations and….” He swallowed hard, against the sudden tsunami of emotions trying to drown him. “The things I saw there….” He shook his head, covered his eyes with one hand, and tried to keep breathing.
“Take your time. You don’t have to talk about anything you don’t want to.”
Mark chuckled “I know, this isn’t a therapy session, after all.”
She huffed with clear amusement in her tone. “No, no it’s not.” She clearly wanted to add something and it wasn’t hard to decipher what that might’ve been—that he should actually come see her in a professional setting—but at least she didn’t push.
“I was a beat cop. First one to a lot of scenes I would’ve rather avoided. Not… not the regular stuff. Not even the gang stuff we saw sometimes. Just… domestic calls and abuse… and… and then there were the bashings.” He could just about get the last word out without choking.
“That couldn’t have been easy.”
“No,” he whispered. “To some twisted part of my brain it was what they deserved. For flaunting it, like my parents would say.”
“Jesus, Mark….” She reached over again, taking his hand and squeezed it. “You do understand that you’ve been indoctrinated with the stuff?”
“Yeah, but—”
“No, Mark, there’s something you need to understand right now, okay? The first thought you have is rarely your own. In those situations, when you thought those things, did you think ‘they deserve it’ and leave it at that? Or did you think it, and then immediately felt bad about it?” She was so serious, squeezed his hand so hard, that he had no option but to listen and think about her words.
“I felt bad. I berated myself immediately after,” he said quietly.
“Then that’s the real you. When we’ve been taught something, it sticks. Our brain makes it the first connection, every time. The second thing we actually come up with is what we really think. You’re not a bad person.” Her voice was still earnest and serious, and he nodded back, doing his best to believe her.
He swallowed hard. “Thirteen,” he murmured.
“What?”
