by Ivy Jordan
“Alright.” He hung up, and I sat there for a few more seconds.
It was highly likely that he would be angry with me for what I’d done. I knew that. He could probably justifiably get angry that I would intervene with his life and poke my nose where it didn’t belong. But I didn’t know that I cared. I could deal with him getting angry at me. I had a hunch about this entire situation, and I was rarely wrong when I got a hunch.
Still, he was going to be angry at first when his father showed up at his door to talk about the thing that neither of them wanted to talk about. They were going to have to have a real conversation and not bullshit one another.
I smiled and put my car in gear. This was extremely off-book for a therapist, but I felt somehow like I’d never done something more right in all my years of practice.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
SAWYER
When I got off the phone with Quinn, I couldn’t help but be a little confused. I was more than willing to let her come over and take a nap. It wasn’t as though she was obligated to be alert when she was over here. Still, if she insisted on staying home, I wasn’t going to push her about it. Sometimes after a long day of work the best thing was going home and going to bed, and I above everyone else understood not wanting to deal with anyone.
We were one another’s exceptions to that, though, I’d thought. I shook my head and set my phone back in my pocket. It was stupid to take this personally. She was tired, she wanted to take a nap, and she was going to meet up with me tomorrow. I would need to deal with it.
I started to consider calling Pete and going out with him. I wasn’t really in the mood for a drink, but I could use some degree of company. Despite my policy of preferred loneliness, I found myself hoping that I could find someone to hang out with. Just as I was about to call Pete, I heard a knock at the door.
Perhaps Quinn had changed her mind, or perhaps she’d wanted to surprise me. I hoped that it was her and walked towards the door, swinging it open, excited and hopeful to see her.
Instead, my father stood at the door. Dad stood back from the doorway a few steps, like he was maybe about to run back to his car.
I stared, confused. “Dad?”
He looked up at me, weirdly surprised to see me for someone who had shown up at my house. “Sawyer, hello. I, ah… I wanted to talk to you.”
“You didn’t call?” I was inherently—and understandably—suspicious of the situation.
“I was worried you wouldn’t let me in if I called ahead,” he said.
“Because I’m the one who’s avoiding you.” I resisted the urge to roll my eyes.
“Aren’t you?” he asked.
I shook my head, unable to comprehend what was happening. My mother must have put him up to this, or else he’d decided he was finally going to let me have a piece of his mind. Just like before, when he shouted and shouted at me, only then I couldn’t absorb it. Now I worried about how much I would care about the things he could say to me.
“Heaven’s sakes, Sawyer, could you let me in?”
I stood to the side, holding the door slightly. I wasn’t sure why I let him in; my conscious thoughts were telling me to slam it in his face. Maybe I knew that the hardest thing to do was also the only right thing to do. If I slammed the door, I’d hear about it later.
“I wanted to talk to you about what’s happened,” Dad said. “Do you mind if I sit?”
I motioned to the couch, still speechless. He sat down, and I couldn’t help but notice how he looked older all of a sudden. When I’d first gotten home, I didn’t think he’d changed at all. Now, he looked a million years older, and I wasn’t sure why that had changed in my eyes.
“I’m sorry that I didn’t call first,” he said. He spoke slowly, diplomatically, the way he did when I was little, and I was being scolded.
I sat down across from him in a chair.
“I want to say I’m sorry for what I said last week,” Dad said. “When you told me you’d found a house, I meant to say that I’m glad you’re moving on. You’re finding your place and making progress. And what I said was… well, much different.”
“It made sense,” I said. “Since I’ve been such a horrendous burden on the family name.” The bitterness came off my tongue before I could stop it.
Dad stared at me incredulously. “See, that. I don’t understand that. I don’t understand why you’re mad at me. Shouldn’t I be the one who’s upset?”
“I don’t see how you could be,” I said. “I’ve done everything I can to prove myself. I went to the military for six years, came home with the intention of turning my life around, and when I come home, you’re avoiding me, you won’t talk to me, it’s like I never did anything to fix it.”
Dad nodded slowly. “I guess I did avoid you. But I only avoided you because I didn’t know what to say. You left so soon, and I know you did it because you had to, I know we said…” He shook his head. “You left so soon, and then you didn’t stay in touch. I had no way of knowing that you still cared. Maybe it would have been hard, but you called one time, and then we just had to hope that everything was alright.”
I stayed quiet. It hadn’t occurred to me that maybe my dad was trying to get a feel for what I was thinking as much as I was trying to get a feel for what he was thinking. We were both terribly quiet people. Perhaps the overlap here was what caused so much trouble.
And his other point stuck out to me the most. “I know that I did something wrong,” I said. “I know I really, really messed up.” I shook my head. “It makes me sick to think about it, Dad, it really does.”
“I know.”
“No.” I shook my head again. “No, I mean it makes me sick. I made Mom cry. I stole from you. I did everything I could to destroy my relationship with her, my relationship with you… and I tried to blame it on Stacy, but I couldn’t.”
“You were an adult,” Dad said. “That was my concern, too. You seemed to be thinking that it was Stacy’s fault and that there was no more conflict. But I need to know that the change has happened in you, whether or not she’s around. She doesn’t matter.”
“No,” I agreed. “I… I think it was easier to blame it on Stacy. I didn’t want to take responsibility for all that. Especially when it’s… it’s so much. I wanted it to be someone else’s fault, at least a little.”
“I think it’s her fault a little,” Dad reasoned. “If she hadn’t come around…”
“Who knows?” I shrugged. “And frankly, it’s not a question I find is worth asking.”
“You think about it a lot?” Dad asked.
I glanced at him and looked down, swallowed and tried not to look as unnerved as I felt. It felt like I still might get in trouble for the things I said if I gave him new information or a new reason to hate me. This wasn’t safe, like talking with Quinn or talking to Pete. This was dangerous. I didn’t want to have this conversation. Why was he even here?
“We don’t have to talk about this,” Dad said, and he set his hands on his knees like he was about to get up.
“Yes, we do,” I said. My jaw tightened. “If we don’t, what then? We used to get along, Dad. We used to go fishing and build birdhouses and do things together. We used to be a team.”
I thought I saw my father’s eyes glistening. “I miss it,” he said. “I miss when it was you and me. But Sawyer, you took that away from us.”
“I know.” I closed my eyes, unsure whether I could fight down the lump in my throat. “I know, and it’s not something I’ll ever forgive myself for. I was selfish and inconsiderate, and I let the entire family down, in front of God and everyone. And then I left, and I didn’t even think to fix things here before I left.”
Dad leaned forward. “I was too hard on you, too,” he said. “I should have given you a chance when you got home. I’m sorry we let this get so out of hand.”
“I don’t expect you to forgive me,” I warned him. “This isn’t… it’s not like I crashed your car or something.”
&n
bsp; He cracked a smile. “I wish you’d just crashed my car.”
I smiled, too, and rubbed the back of my neck. “I don’t know if we can ever be like we were. I think it might be easier to call it off. I can stay out here and mind my business, and I won’t ever hurt you or Ma again.”
“Don’t you talk like that, Sawyer Gains,” Dad said sternly. He had a deep furrow in his brow. “You made a mistake, and you cost us a fortune, and you publicly embarrassed us, but you are our son, and we love you. I love you. Nothing is going to change that, no matter how much you try to prove otherwise.”
I stared. “You can’t forgive me for what I’ve done.”
“Sawyer.” Dad set a hand on my shoulder. “We already have. You just need to forgive yourself.”
I didn’t cry; I refused to cry in front of him, over this, in general. I sucked in a breath and looked down at the floor, focused on the grain of the wood. Things were going to be alright. I didn’t know what to do with my father’s forgiveness, where to put it or what to do with it. I could compartmentalize it like I did with everything else, but I got the feeling that I was supposed to use this particular gift to the best of my advantage.
Dad left shortly after that, and I watched his truck peel off. Part of me wished I hadn’t moved out, but I was also glad that I had so I could have the space to think about what had happened. It was all so strange, like something out of a dream, and yet his words were still reverberating in my skull.
When I understood what had happened, it hit me like a truck. I went back to my phone and then realized Quinn and I had spoken over the phone, and I couldn’t double-check what she’d said. Still, I remembered how odd it had been for her to cancel so suddenly, for her to insist that I stay home. She’d had a hand in this. I didn’t know whether she’d instructed my dad to come over here, or whether she’d given him the entire script.
But what my father said hadn’t been scripted. I knew when he was trying to appease me; Mom had told him what to say to me plenty of times in the past to avoid confrontation. What he’d said was genuine. That meant that Quinn had talked to him, gotten him to open up, somehow. The questions of when, how, and why burned in my mind as I walked to my bedroom.
The only plausible reason why was that she cared about me. She cared about me enough to pursue my father, to make us have this conversation, even knowing that I might get angry and that it might go poorly. Even if everything went well, she had nothing to gain from it except knowing that she’d help me and my father make amends. It was a completely selfless act and one that I would still be at odds with my father without. She’d had to do this.
How had she known? How had she been so many steps ahead of me, and still so patient?
She’d done everything for me. I closed my eyes and sat down on the bed. I couldn’t begin to repay this debt to her. I couldn’t even fathom how I might begin to repay this debt to her.
I leaned back, let my head hit the pillow, stared at the ceiling, and tried to understand the things that had happened during the day. Really, I was trying to understand how I could be falling for Quinn so hard, and so unbelievably quickly.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
QUINN
I looked down at my notes and determined what the rest of my day looked like. I had everyone come in that day, but my next appointment scheduled was Sawyer, and he’d stopped coming in a long time ago. I couldn’t count on him being here today. Not that I minded—I wasn’t charging his mother the late fee, and we’d made an arrangement that worked for us—so I started to put my things away to go home.
I’d been worried all day about what I’d done the day before with Sawyer and his father. Marching into his father’s office and taking matters into my own hands had been an uncharacteristically bravado thing for me to do, and yet I’d done it, and now I hadn’t heard back from Sawyer. I worried that things had gone poorly, or perhaps they hadn’t gone at all. Maybe Eugene said what he thought he needed to say to get me out of his office, and then business carried on as usual.
If things had gone poorly, that would be very much my fault for egging on the process. As the hours of the day ticked by without any notice from Sawyer, I dreaded that outcome more and more. It had been wrong of me to interfere where I wasn’t involved. It had been wrong of me to take matters into my own hands. How would I ever make it up to Sawyer if what I’d done had ruined his relationship with his father? There was nothing I could do to save that. There was nothing I could do to compensate for that.
As if on cue, I heard a knock at my door, and I straightened up. I wasn’t expecting anyone else to come in; I grew suspicious that maybe Stacy had come back to bother me. But then, she would either hide out in the waiting room or come straight to the door. She’d never been one to be polite and knock.
“Hello?” I asked.
The door opened, and Sawyer stood in the doorway. I stood up in surprise.
“You’re coming back for your appointment?” I asked. Or, maybe he’d come to settle a score with me. I could only imagine how angry he was.
But there was no anger in his face. Sawyer walked up to me and kissed me before I had much of a chance to protest, and when I thought he might back me up against the wall, he let me go.
“Thank you,” he said. He sat down on the couch, apparently having gotten his greeting out of the way.
I was completely out of sorts and egregiously confused. “What?”
“Thank you,” he repeated. “For what you did.”
He had to be talking about what he’d done with his father, but I couldn’t be sure. “I’m not sure what you mean,” I said.
He raised an eyebrow. “Did you not tell my father to come by yesterday?”
“I did.”
“He did,” Sawyer said. “And we talked. I think everything is going to be alright between us.”
I barely remembered to pick up my clipboard. I couldn’t hide the sigh of relief that I issued. “I was so worried something went wrong. I hadn’t heard from you, and I thought maybe something had happened, and it would be entirely my fault if something had happened…” I shook my head. “But tell me more. What did he say?”
Sawyer rubbed his wrist. “He said he thought I was ignoring him. He thought I didn’t understand what had happened, or how important what had happened was to us. We just didn’t communicate with each other.”
“Do you think the whole thing was a miscommunication?”
“Sort of. I think we’re both quiet. I got my quietness from him,” Sawyer said. “Even when we spent time together when I was a kid, we would always just be quiet. We never needed to say much. So when things went wrong, we were still quiet, but there were things we needed to talk about.”
I made a mental note of this. If there was ever a problem between Sawyer and I, I would need to bring it up. It seemed being non-confrontational ran in his family. It was strange to think of Sawyer, a Navy SEAL, as nonconfrontational, but there he was on my couch having told me recently that he’d rather go his entire life without talking to anyone before dealing with conflict.
“Would you say that you’re both nonconfrontational?” I asked.
Sawyer scrunched up his nose. “I might not say it, but it’s probably true,” he admitted. “That’s how he and Mom stay out of fights. If there’s a problem, he just takes responsibility and deals with it. They don’t really argue.”
“That’s not always healthy,” I mused aloud.
“Well, they disagree.” Sawyer sat up a little. “They have different opinions. But they don’t argue. The only thing they’ve ever argued about was how to deal with me, and I guess that was because the stakes were so much higher than usual.”
I nodded. Often in those situations when people were used to getting their way, they could get thrown off by someone who used to be a doormat suddenly taking a stand because the issue was important. For married couples, this was often a child in the case of a mother speaking out. I’d seen plenty of mothers draw the line at what a husband
did to their children.
“Your mom was the one who didn’t want to kick you out,” I recalled.
Sawyer nodded. “You know, I think it’s for the best that my dad wanted to.”
I raised an eyebrow. This was certainly a dramatic change of pace.
“I mean, maybe not for the best. And I’m glad Mom talked him into letting me stay for a few weeks. But I needed to get a kick in the pants. I needed the push.” Sawyer ran a hand through his hair, and I couldn’t help but wonder how he kept that habit when his hair was so incredibly short.
“Maybe,” I offered. I didn’t like to think of Sawyer on the street, though, and that could have happened just as easily. Now it looked like he had his life together. Everything was coming to a close.
And where did that leave us? My job as a therapist, and as whatever we were outside of this office, was to help him. He was reaching the point where he no longer needed my help, a point of independence that I was grateful he’d achieved and yet frightened regarding its implications. If he didn’t need me, I didn’t know if he’d want to keep me around. We got along well, and I certainly felt that we had plenty in common besides just the fact that I helped him with his personal issues. But I could have also thought all of that up in an attempt to sate my need for intimacy.
Surely everything wouldn’t be over now, just because he was doing well. I gripped my pen, suddenly concerned. He had no use for me anymore. When everything was going well, would we still have anything to talk about? He liked the outdoors, and I liked the city. He liked sitting alone, and I liked to be around people. We were different, weren’t we? We had little in common. I knew that opposites attracted, but not complete opposites with nothing in common besides a high sex drive and a need to talk about personal issues.
I was at his mercy, then. I wasn’t going to end this relationship. I didn’t have the guts. Sawyer would have to do it when he saw fit, and I would have to prepare myself for the moment that he no longer needed me. It tore at me in an unexpected way, and I began to wonder whether my feelings for him were wandering too far for me to reign in.
