by Tracey Ward
“Jenna is the only good thing about me,” I told him fervently.
“That’s sweet, but it’s not true. You’re a good man, Kellen, but you’ve always been blind to that. I think this is a good opportunity for you to take a good hard look at yourself and your life and decide what you need to get to a place where you feel fulfilled and content. You need to see yourself through your own eyes and not everyone else’s. You’ve taken two huge steps tonight breaking off the engagement and effectively giving me your notice at the firm, but you’ve got a long way to go. So, with that in mind, what’s your next move?”
I looked at him without hesitation or question. “I’m going to go to therapy.”
“I think that’s the perfect place to start,” he replied quietly.
When I left that night, the tears I’d expected from Laney came from Karen instead. She cried quietly against my chest with Dan standing stoically behind her, but his eyes were worried. We all were.
I worried what this would mean for me and my family, because that’s what they were. My family. Dan had never tried to become my father, Karen had never once assumed herself as my new mother, but they were as close as blood to me. I loved them that much, and as I climbed onto my bike and saw them disappear into the dark behind me, I could only hope they loved me that much as well.
Chapter Thirty-Four
The next day I made an emergency appointment with a therapist. My hands shook through the entire call and when it was done, my skin felt like it was trembling.
It was terrifying.
I did it for a hundred million different reasons, but the biggest one was that I’d lost control of my life. I was off the rails. I could blame my messed up relationship with Laney for only so much before I had to start acknowledging the number that’d been done on me by my past. There were demons bigger than the animal and the anger hiding in the dark doorways of my mind and they were never going to leave on their own. I had to cast them out, and I knew I needed help finding out how to make that happen.
When I arrived at the doctor’s office, I was surprised to find it in a strip mall. My insurance had chosen him for me and they’d said he was highly recommended, but if that were true then what was he doing in a friggin’ strip mall? It didn’t instill a lot of confidence.
His office was small and warm, both in colors and temperature. Everything was neutral, the music was quiet, the plants were perfectly green to the point they looked fake. It smelled like nothing and the blinds were drawn to keep the outside world out with everything tuned in to a very mellow channel that actually made me a little nervous.
An older man came out of a room down the hall, his white hair bushy and wild. He had thick rimmed glasses and a bright smile that looked surprisingly natural.
“You’re Kellen?” he asked, offering me his hand.
I shook it firmly. “Yes. Dr. Phillips?”
“Call me Ben.”
“Alright.”
“Are you ready to get started?”
I stopped myself from taking a step back. It felt like this was happening so fast. I got anxious about what would be expected of me in that room once I went down the hall. Would he want to start at the beginning? Talk about my mom right off the bat and then dive straight into the foster care?
My mouth watered with the first signs of vomit on the way and I felt my hands curl into fists.
Ben calmly noted it all. “What’s upsetting you right now?” he asked gently.
“I don’t think I’m ready for this.”
“Why not?”
“What are you going to ask me when we get into your office?”
“That depends on what you want to talk about.”
“Can I tell you what I don’t want to talk about?”
“It’s your session. You can do whatever you want.” He gestured to a chair in his waiting room, inviting me to sit. When I did, he went to the front door, pulled the curtain down over the glass, and locked it. He came to sit down across from me in another chair. “What topics would you like to avoid?”
“My mom,” I said without hesitation. “Pretty much all of my childhood, actually.”
“Okay. I won’t bring it up today. We’ll set these boundaries every session and if you decide one day that you’re ready to talk about those things, we’ll talk. Until then, let’s talk about what happened recently that brought you in. You sounded distraught on the phone.”
I let myself ease back into my chair slowly. “I broke off a four year engagement last night.”
“And why were you engaged for four years?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you led with that. ‘I broke off a four year engagement’. The time frame is obviously important to you. Tell me why?”
“It’s a long time to be engaged.”
“It is,” he agreed amiably. “Why did it go on that long?”
“Because I drug it out. I kept pushing the date back.” I shook my head, muttering quietly, “I never wanted to marry her.”
“Why did you get engaged to her?”
“Because I’m in love with her sister,” I said bluntly, throwing the words out before I could try to bury them.
Ben opened his eyes wide in surprise. “Oh my. Let’s start there.”
I let my head fall back on the wall, feeling exhausted. “How much time do we have?”
“Forty five more minutes,” Ben said with an amused smile.
“I’ll give you the condensed version.”
I laid it all out for him. How I had met Jenna when she was just a kid. How we’d bonded immediately and she’d quickly become the closest friend I’d ever had. How she saw me, the real and true me, and she never cast judgment or asked for more. She let me be. She let me breathe.
I told him how I’d first loved her – simple and innocent. Then she’d grown and so did the way I felt about her. I explained feeling guilt over looking at her and seeing the woman she had become and the arousal that inevitably followed because I was too much of a dirty, sex crazed piece of shit to leave even her alone. That I couldn’t tell her all of the things that made me the mess I was inside, the mess that would ultimately break her heart someday. I laid out my stupid plan of dating Laney again to create that buffer between Jenna and I that would keep her safe from me because I knew I wouldn’t be able to stop myself otherwise and I needed to let her move on. I needed to hide behind a relationship with Laney so Jenna would give up all hope. I told him how one depressed, fever ridden night that lie of a relationship had spiraled into an engagement and at that point my world ran away from me, taking on a life of its own and leaving me straggling behind.
“Can I make an observation?” he asked as our time and my story were winding down.
“That’s why I’m here, right?”
He grinned briefly. “Do with this what you will, but I’m not sure you continually returned to a relationship with Laney to avoid your feelings for Jenna.”
“Not at first, no. Initially I stayed with her because she didn’t care that I’m closed off.”
“And we’re not speaking about why you feel that you’re closed off?”
“No.”
He nodded. “That’s not even my point. What I’m saying is that you’ve mentioned her father, Dan, quite a bit. He’s obviously been a mentor to you.”
“He saved me from destroying my future. He helped me get into college.”
“He set an example of the kind of man you wanted to be.”
“Yeah, exactly.”
“So much so that you chose to go into his profession and made endless attempts at maintaining a relationship with a woman you felt no connection to, but who you clearly see as a carbon copy of the woman Dan married.”
I stared at him, my face blank. “You’re saying I wanted to marry Karen?”
“No, I fully believe you do not want to marry Karen or her daughter, but you tried to make it work with Laney because you were imitating Dan’s life. You were walking in his shoes and follo
wing the trail he blazed, and marrying a society woman accustomed to money in a way you’ve never been is a large piece of that life.”
“That’s insane,” I said sharply.
“I could be wrong,” he replied easily, unbothered by my attitude, “but tell me this. When you were house shopping with Laney, what neighborhood was it in?”
“Palos Verdes,” I answered grudgingly. “Near her parents.”
“When you imagined marrying her, did you envision building a family?”
“Of course I did.”
“Two daughters maybe?”
I stood up from my seat. I didn’t go anywhere because I didn’t know where to go, maybe because there was nowhere to hide from this.
How had I not seen that? It seemed impossible because suddenly it was so, so very clear. Laney was exactly like Karen. They were peas in a pod and that horrible comment about marrying a woman like Karen being my worst nightmare hadn’t been an attack at Karen at all. I’d been referring to Laney. To how similar they were and how desperately I didn’t want to marry her. And Dan – I saw him with his success and respect and loving family, his house on the other side of the world from the ghetto we’d both grown up in, and I’d wanted that. It had never been a noble effort on my part to be a lawyer with a heart of gold that would help people the way I’d been helped. I wanted the life. All of it. So many things that I’d never thought were possible for me until Dan showed me they could be real, and I was so afraid of missing out on any of them that I didn’t bother finding my own way. I took his way, only it wasn’t right. It had never been right and my body had been trying to tell me that for years.
“I just blew your mind, didn’t I?” Ben asked seriously.
I stared down at him, nodding slowly.
“Yep,” he grunted, standing up. “That’s what I do.”
“I’m a sociopath,” I whispered. “I’m single white femaling him.”
Ben laughed, putting his hands up in the air to call a halt to my freak out. “No, now wait a minute. That’s not what I’m saying. You’re very sane, Kellen. Very lucid. You’re not trying to insert yourself into Dan’s life and take over. What you’re doing is imitation, and it is the sincerest form of flattery. He’s someone you look up to so it’s only natural that you trust his judgment. You have faith in the man and his life choices. His path feels safe because you know where it ends. The only problem is that that’s not how life works. We all have our path, and you’ve been fighting against that. It’s time to quit the fight. Relax. Let the tide take you where it will, not where you think it should go.”
“What if it takes me somewhere I shouldn’t be?” I asked nervously.
Ben smiled, clapping both of my shoulders solidly with his hands. “Can it really be worse than where you are right now?”
Chapter Thirty-Five
After my first therapy session, I hit the gym. It was still a little early, I was still pretty weak, but it felt amazing. Just stepping into Tim’s felt like coming home. The colors, the sweat, the shouting – all of it wrapped around me in a warm hug that left me smiling like an idiot for hours. I showed Tim my hand and told him what had happened to it. He listened intently, nodding occasionally but never saying a word.
Finally he told me, “We’ll deal with it. Now, grab a rope and jump as long as you can. Let’s see how weak you are.”
No pity. No apologies. That afternoon we found my basement and we started rebuilding from there. It was a completely different kind of therapy, one that made me feel whole even though I was running on empty.
The session with Ben had been draining and a little soul crushing. It was definitely something I’d needed and I had made a follow up for two days from now, but I was still nervous about going back. He’d promised we would only talk about the things I was comfortable with, but I still worried. So much of my past was wrapped up with my present that it didn’t seem likely I’d be able to avoid the topic for long.
Then there was Jenna. I hadn’t called her and she hadn’t called me and it was the fallout from that fateful night all over again. I vowed that this time I wouldn’t suffer the same knee jerk reaction and start digging my grave blindly, not stopping until I passed through the center of the earth and landed upside down in China without a passport or a clue as to how I’d gotten there. With no idea how to get home. I wouldn’t run to the bottom of a bottle either. In my head I wrote her texts and called her a hundred different times, but I never knew exactly how to say what I meant because communication had never been a part of my skill set, but I was hoping Ben could help me with that. I just needed a little bit of time.
When I got home that night, I took the stairs up to my apartment even though I was exhausted. I’d need to go to bed soon, right after I showered and ate dinner, probably from the new Teriyaki place down the block that delivered and had—
“Oh, shit,” I muttered, freezing on the last step.
There at the end of the hall, leaning against my apartment door, was Laney.
“I don’t have a key,” she told me coldly. “I’ve never had a key to your place. Not even when you were up at Cal.”
“I know.”
She arced a perfectly sculpted eyebrow. “So it was deliberate.”
“What does it matter now?”
“It matters because you’re a dick.”
I shook my head, gripping my keys hard in my hand as I made my way slowly toward her. “Here we go.”
“You know it’s true. You never let me in.”
“You never asked.”
“We were engaged! I shouldn’t have needed to ask.”
“It was never how we were. Why would that have changed?”
“You’re unbelievable.”
“Why are you here?”
She stepped back from the door, gesturing to it. “Are you going to open it?”
“Not until we’re done talking.”
“You want to have this talk out here in the hall so all of your neighbors can hear it?”
“No, I wanted to have it last night outside when we were alone, but you walked away.”
“I didn’t think you were serious.”
“Well, I was. I am.”
She rolled her eyes. “Can we go inside already?”
I put my keys in my pocket, crossing my arms over my chest. “No. We have a routine, one I don’t feel like engaging in anymore.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Yeah, act like you don’t know how we solve all of our problems. It’s adorable.”
“What? By fucking? Yeah, and it works.”
“Does it?”
She glared at me. “First time I’m hearing you complain, baby.”
I bristled. “Don’t ever call me that again.”
“You’ve been so weird since the accident,” she snapped.
“I’ve been weird since the engagement, you just never bothered to notice.”
“Oh, now it’s my fault!”
“It’s no one’s fault, it’s…” I rubbed my hand over my eyes, feeling my pulse pound behind them. “It’s over. That’s all. There’s no final score.”
“Dad said you’re quitting the firm,” she accused.
“Yeah.”
“What are you going to do instead? Be a boxer?” she asked sarcastically, gesturing to my workout clothes.
I dropped my hand angrily, looking at her hard. “I’m getting back into it, yeah, but not as a profession. I’ll do something else, something that lets me have free time to do it.”
“Like what?”
I didn’t answer her. Partly because I didn’t know, but mostly because I didn’t feel like it. It wasn’t her business, just like it wasn’t my business whether or not she went running into the arms of the other guy.
She rolled her eyes again, shifting her purse on her shoulder. “God, you’re impossible. You’re ruining your life, you know that right? You could make serious bank working for my dad, but you’re going to walk away from that because you
just don’t feel like it anymore? I won’t do this with you. It’s stupid.”
“It’s good we broke up, then.”
She glared at me hotly. “You’re seriously doing this? After all this time waiting for you to set a date and now with the wedding months away, you’re honestly doing this to me?”
I sighed deeply, keeping my cool. “Laney, we shouldn’t get married just because we’ve come this far.”
“This is so humiliating,” she whispered, closing her eyes tightly.
“I’m sorry,” I said gently. “I care about you. I never set out to hurt you, but I’m not ready to get married to anyone right now. You and I haven’t been good for each other from the start. We were easy, that’s all. Easy doesn’t make it right.”
She shook her head, opening her eyes, and I wasn’t all that surprised to find them dry. She lifted her hand, flashing the ring at me that she’d picked out. “I suppose you want this back,” she said scathingly, grabbing it with her other hand to yank it off. “You can give it to the next girl you screw over and lie to for years.”
“Keep it. Wear it. Sell it. Do whatever you want with it. It’s yours.”
“Oh is it?” she asked sarcastically, dropping her hands. “Thank you so much, Kellen. The money from this will probably buy me half a burrito on the way home. You’re so generous. Such a great guy!”
She stormed past me, her designer heels snapping loudly on the hardwood floor. The rock on her finger flashed in the fading evening light with perfect twenty-four thousand dollar clarity.
I was happy to see it go.
***
A couple days later found me at the gym again. I spent the entire afternoon there slowly running through my workout routine. I was dedicated to finishing it, no matter how long it took or how many breaks I had to take. So far something that had taken me a matter of three hours was going on six and half. I had made it through the run, the jump rope, and was working on the bag, but that’s where I was stalling out. My hand hurt like a son of a bitch every time I threw a punch, and I refused to pull any. Every hit my left hand landed, my right hand did the same. It slowed me down and drug the painful experience out, but I was going to finish. I had to finish.
