Page 10 of The Allure of Ruins

It was his focus, singularly on me, plus the serious tone, that made my flight reflex kick in. And logically I knew he wasn’t going to grab my arm and make me tell him. He wasn’t about to hurt me, but I took two steps to the left anyway, so that my back was to the room and no longer the couch.

“Are you all right?” He tipped his head, and I heard his tone change from questioning to a trace of worry.

“Yessir, I’m fine,” I answered too fast, ending up having to exhale slowly so I didn’t begin either stuttering or hyperventilating.

I was so much better with women, kids, and dogs. And cats. Cats were good too.

Shit.

“Paxton?”

Double shit. He sounded concerned. “If you’ll excuse me for a second,” I said, and tried to slip by him.

He caught my arm, and instantly I felt my face heat, my stomach fill with ice, and a noticeable tremor ran through me. I wasn’t having a full-blown panic attack, but it was close. As usual, even as it happened, I had to try and identify the trigger. I was betting it was his height and his proximity, but I would need to think about it again later when I could breathe.

TWO

Poor Mr. Somerset, he looked terrible as he took a step back from me, but even that small amount of distance helped. Leaning over, hands on my thighs, I closed my eyes and counted.

“Please tell me what’s wrong,” he asked softly, concerned, maybe even a bit unsure, like I might barf on him or his polished hardwood floors. Both, seemingly, of equal concern. For all he knew, I wasn’t house-trained. “Maybe you should come sit down on the couch.”

Sitting was never good. Standing was always better. I’d learned that lesson young. If you were on your feet, you could run, and it was much easier to get away, even without shoes. Sitting was one step closer to being held down.

I was freaking him out, and it was both stupid and not. I learned that in group therapy in my senior year of college. I’d gone to a survivor meeting after watching a documentary in class about the foster care system. Watching the kids and their terrified faces each and every time they were moved, all their worldly possessions in garbage bags…it did something to me. Of course it had. I remembered it all so vividly myself. Logically I understood that those experiences were over for me, and would not, could not, be repeated. But still, seeing it, the helplessness, and hopefulness at times, was too much. The shivering was followed fast by me scrambling out of my seat and making it outside the doorway in time to lose my lunch into a trash can. My professor was kind and walked me first to the bathroom and then to her office. I sat on her couch and sipped on a Sprite until the end of class. Afterward, she invited me to a survivor meeting with her.

“Oh no, I’ll be fine,” I’d said weakly, lying through my teeth.

“No,” she’d replied, smiling kindly. “Not without talking.”

I went because she was my teacher and I wasn’t sure I was allowed to say no, and even if I could, should I? I was technically a grown-up, all of twenty-two at the time, but socially inept, awkward, and jumping at my own shadow. As her concern was palpable, I went with her willingly, walking arm in arm through the snow, off campus to the basement of St. Anne’s Catholic Church. The room smelled musty, the chairs were the really uncomfortable metal folding kind that squeaked when you sat down, and the lighting made everyone look jaundiced. And yet…I felt safe.

My professor started the round-robin of why she was there with the declaration that she’d been raped fifteen years prior by a friend of her husband’s. Most days—because of therapy and group, because of how much her husband supported her, because of her kids, her extended family, and wonderful friends—she was fine. But sometimes for no reason, and other times because she had not recognized something as a trigger, she would unravel and need to spend a day at home in her safe space and regroup. It was, she said to all the people in the room, perfectly okay.

“No one needs to be strong every single moment of every single day. We can give ourselves a break.”

I never did that. Weakness was not something I ever tolerated in myself.

Sitting in the small circle, I heard that there was a difference between self-pity and self-care. The designation had never been made clear to me before.

Later, as I went to more meetings and got my own therapist, the truth I’d always believed since childhood was finally, inexorably, destroyed.

No more hiding.

So many people had it worse than me. I heard them in group, and when it was my turn to share, to confess, I used to feel bad. Like I was complaining. Like how dare you whine about being beat up, or going hungry, or trading in the poverty to become a scary man’s slave, when this woman lost her son that she loved? I’d met women who were assaulted daily, people who sold their bodies for drugs and food, and who had children taken from them. I’d met men who were violated by people who were supposed to love them, who were pimped out at five and six, and others who were abandoned in the streets. There was always a more horrific tale than mine, and I’d gotten it into my head that I needed to man up.

Don’t cry. Don’t be a baby. But the truth was, pain, like most everything else, was relative. I had been hurt when I was a child, and though it stopped when I ran away at sixteen, when I gave myself to another to come in from the cold, with what he did, and allowed others to do to me, those wounds were deep and jagged and still open and bleeding. Nothing had ever been stitched up.

It took me years to realize that the grief I carried around was first for the little boy I had been, and second for what I allowed when I was older. In therapy people told me, no, you’re not being a baby; yes, of course it’s okay to cry. And most importantly, that all my feelings, all of them, were valid because they happened to me.

I never knew I needed someone to simply tell me it was all right to feel broken at times. The stiff-upper-lip thing was hard to carry off on a constant basis.

“Pax?” Winston Somerset’s voice broke me out of my past and brought me into the present. “I really think⁠—”

“Pardon me,” I said quickly, trying to smile. “Sometimes I get caught up thinking about something for a second.”

He squinted at me, the concern there in those furrowed brows and dark eyes. “You⁠—”

“Your daughter and I were talking, and she told me she was going to the movies or something with her friends, and I said that was great, but that she should rethink her outfit.”