After about five minutes of driving, Michael finally pulled the car over and cut the engine, and the sudden silence made her ears ring.
“Here we are,” he said as he exited the car, and Lauren got out, wiggling her finger in her ear.
“I feel like I just left a concert,” she mumbled.
“God, you really got your panties in a bunch today,” he said with an amused laugh as he opened the chain-link gate in front of them and gestured for her to go first.
It finally dawned on Lauren that they were at the community park.
“Why are we here?” she asked as she looked up at him. “I didn’t even think this place was open in March.”
“Well, apparently it is,” he said, nodding toward the open gate. “Go.”
She glanced at the empty park before looking back at him, and he stood there watching her, waiting.
“Okay,” she sighed, walking into the park, and she heard the gate clang shut behind them as he followed her.
“To the slide,” he said, and she walked around the swings to the left and stood beside it, turning to look at him. “Go ahead,” he added, motioning for her to climb it.
She looked at him like he was crazy, but he was watching her, his expression even.
“Um, okay?” she said stoically before she climbed the ladder and sat down at the top of the slide. “Why am I doing this again?”
“Because I asked you to. Go ahead.”
She shook her head before she pushed off the top and slid down to the bottom. As soon as her feet hit the floor, she looked up at him.
The corner of his mouth lifted in a smile. “No, that was horrible. Do it again.”
“Michael,” she said, annoyed. “I’m freezing. Can you just tell me what the point of this is?”
“Yes. As soon as you go down again.”
Lauren pushed off the slide in a huff, and she heard him chuckle behind her as she climbed the slide again.
“Put your arms up this time. And say ‘wheee’ when you come down.”
“No,” she said as she positioned herself at the top of the slide.
“Just humor me, please,” he said, his smile gone. “This is serious.”
She stared at him for a second before she nodded. “Fine,” she said softly, and she pushed off the top and lifted her arms. “Wheee,” she deadpanned pitifully, and as soon as her feet hit the sand below, he burst out laughing.
“My God, that was pathetic. Get over here,” he said, grabbing her wrist and pulling her off the slide.
“Is the point of this to make me look like an idiot?” she said as he dragged her away.
“No, that’s not the point, but it’s definitely a plus,” he said through his laughter, and she reached over and smacked him with her free hand.
“Here,” he said, backing her into one of the swings, and she grabbed the metal chains on either side as he came up behind her, gripping the chains just above her hands. And then he took several steps backward until she was as far back as the chains would allow.
Michael leaned forward so that his chest was pressed against the length of her back, and her breath caught in her throat. “Ready?” he said in her ear, and before she could respond, he shoved her forward with such force that she lost her stomach; Lauren squeezed her eyes shut as she gripped the chains tighter and curled her knees up to her torso.
As she swung back, she felt his hands on her lower back, cushioning her descent and sending her right back up, even higher than before. The cold wind whipped her hair around her face, and as her stomach dropped again, she laughed.
She careened back toward Michael and this time he caught her by the hips, gripping them firmly as he ran forward and gave her a vigorous push as he darted underneath her. Lauren flew up higher than she’d ever been on a swing set, and she screamed, followed by unbridled laughter.
“There ya go,” he said with a smile, walking back over to the swings and sitting on the one next to hers.
Lauren began pumping her legs, keeping herself going as her height gradually lessened, and she looked over at him and smiled.
“You feel better?” he asked.
“I do, actually.”
Michael pushed off with his feet, rocking gently in the swing. “Whenever I’m pissed off about something, I always think to myself, ‘What do I feel like doing right now?’ And then I go and do it, whatever it is. Screw everyone else, ya know?” He looked over at her with a smirk. “And just now, I felt like coming here.”
“Well, I guess that’s better than kicking someone’s ass.”
“Hmm. That’s debatable. It depends on whose ass I’m kicking.”
Lauren laughed and shook her head as she pumped her legs, making the swing go a little faster.
“See, Red? When life hands you lemons, you know what you gotta do now.”
“Wow,” Lauren said. “Yes, Mr. Cliché, I know what I have to do. I make lemonade.”
“No,” he said. “You scream, ‘Fuck you, lemons!’”
Lauren whipped her head toward Michael, her eyes wide, and she quickly scanned the park, forgetting for the moment that it was the dead of winter and no one else was there.
“God,” she said with a horrified laugh.
“And then you throw those goddamn lemons into oncoming traffic, and you go do what you want to do.”
She tried not to laugh, but it was pointless, and as soon as she broke, he laughed along with her. She turned to look at him sitting on the swings next to her, rolling from the balls of his feet to the heels as he rocked himself in the swing.
Lauren wondered if she’d ever stop being floored by these moments. It was almost surreal. He’d been suspended three times in the four months they’d been friends, and two of those were for fighting on school grounds. She’d seen the way others looked at him, the way they avoided him, and she’d seen the way he carried himself around those people. The look in his eyes changed, his posture changed. It was like he was actually someone else.
And it was so strange, because the truth of it was, the infamous Del was just Michael to her, the boy who was quickly becoming her best friend in the world.
And that weekend, as Lauren stood at the edge of the mat chalking her hands, her eye was drawn to the stands, where one spectator stuck out like a sore thumb.
He sat on the highest bench, a sharp contrast to the adults sitting demurely in the rows before him, with his backward baseball hat, his overly casual posture, and his arm draped over the back of the bleachers as he absently drummed his fingers against the wood.
All her breath left her in a rush, and she shook her head slightly in disbelief.
His eyes were scanning the mats below, and when he finally made eye contact with her, she grinned up at him and waved.
And when he winked at her, she knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that from that moment on, she would do anything for him.
She turned then, walking to the other side of the mat as she got ready to make her run, her adrenalin racing because she knew he was watching.
And she couldn’t help but smile at the irony of the fact that the baddest boy in school could somehow always make her feel like the world was good.
October 2011
Lauren couldn’t concentrate to save her life.
She sat in the back of her Psychological Defense Mechanisms class, her pen poised on her notebook as if she was getting ready to write, but her mind was a million miles away.
Actually, her mind was just a few miles away, back at Adam’s office.
Earlier that afternoon, he had suggested a more aggressive stretching routine to counteract the core exercises she was now doing. Lauren had laid on her back as Adam took her leg and lifted it straight up, slowly but surely pushing it closer to her chest, all the while explaining to her how certain hamstring stretches actually release the lower back rather than the legs. As she grew more comfortable, he leaned over and pressed the front of his shoulder to the back of her leg, using some of his body weight to increase th
e intensity of the stretch.
And that was the moment Lauren’s mind kept going back to: looking up at him as he leaned over her.
With her leg propped up on his shoulder.
“…Can be found in chapter six of your textbooks. These two are most commonly confused, and can often exist simultaneously in a person’s psyche,” Lauren heard her professor say as he gestured toward the screen behind him, and she blinked quickly, snapping out of it as she sat up a bit straighter in an attempt to regain her focus.
Two words were projected on the large screen in the front of the lecture hall: repression and suppression.
“Both are Freudian concepts concerned with removing unwanted or unpleasant memories from one’s conscious, but the difference between the two is that suppression involves the cognizant desire to forget, whereas repression happens subconsciously.”
Lauren made a shorthand notation of that on her page as the professor continued, “Now, either one of these methods in moderation can be considered healthy. It’s only when they occur in extremes that they hinder a person’s emotional development and impede their ability to heal from traumatic events.”
She chewed on the corner of her lip, writing that down as her mind shifted away from Adam’s office and back to the place it usually did as she sat in these classes.
Right back to him. Always to him.
“Now, believe it or not, most of the time, it’s easier to work with someone who is suppressing painful thoughts rather than repressing them. Since repression is a subconscious method of protection, oftentimes the subject will not even be aware that the element being repressed even exists, which lends itself to denial. However, with suppression, the subject is well aware of the issue; he just chooses to avoid dealing with it.”
Lauren sighed softly.
It was just so classically Michael.
She’d never admitted it out loud to anyone—in fact, she’d never even officially admitted it to herself—but it was Michael who made her want to go into child psychology. She couldn’t help but feel like if he had been given the tools to deal with his emotional suffering when he was young, if he’d just had access to the necessary coping strategies, so much could have been different.
But instead, he fell back on what worked, on what was safest and easiest for him: he refused to deal with any of it. And it made an already miserable situation a hundred times worse. She hadn’t even been aware of how severely it all affected him until the very end.
Lauren pressed her lips together, looking down as she rolled her pen between her fingers.
Because she realized then that she was guilty of the same exact thing.
As much as she denied still caring about everything that happened between them, as much as she insisted to Jenn that it was years ago and that it was all in the past, the truth was, she’d never gotten over it.
Lauren would have never admitted that if he hadn’t come back into her life; she realized that. She would have gone about her business, choosing to pretend she was unaffected by her past, and if she’d never seen him again, she probably would have been able to believe her own lie. But his reappearance had given her past a voice again.
And as much as she wanted to, she couldn’t pretend it didn’t exist anymore.
Lauren put her pen down, not even attempting to take notes anymore as she thought of her dinner with him the other day. The whole time she sat across from him, she had to focus intently on maintaining her carefully cultivated façade. She could feel how effortless it would have been to fall right back into things with him, how simple it would have been to pretend there were no missed years in between, to pretend that nothing had ever gone wrong between them.
But she fought to stay guarded, because allowing herself to be vulnerable with him again would have been a very dangerous—and stupid—thing for her to do.
So she sat across from him, battling her instincts to let him back in, yet refusing to address what was preventing her from doing it in the first place.
Lauren sighed and shook her head: here she was, a future psychologist, blatantly guilty of suppression.
And just like that, it hit her.
She wasn’t going to avoid it anymore.
She was doing the very thing that caused him so much additional suffering. She knew it wasn’t healthy for him, so what made her think it would be healthy for her?
She needed to talk to him. Really talk to him. She knew that now.
The only thing she didn’t know was why.
What did she hope to gain from talking it out with him? Did she want the answers Jenn claimed she was entitled to? Did she even need closure after all this time?
Or did she just want her friend back?
If it was about friendship, she knew she couldn’t have the latter without the former. They could never truly be friends again without her understanding what had gone wrong between them.
So if she was going to let him back into her life, then she would need answers. They would have to talk about what happened, regardless of how awkward or unpleasant it would be, so that she could move on and not just pretend that she had.
Maybe they could both move on.
A small smile curved Lauren’s lips at the realization that they could potentially rekindle their friendship.
She missed it.
She missed him.
Even when she was pretending she wasn’t hurt, she never pretended not to miss him.
With newfound determination, Lauren picked up her pen and resumed taking notes off the front board.
She could just hear Jenn’s reaction to the idea of forming a friendship with Michael Delaney again, and she couldn’t help but smile.
Because if Jenn considered being an adult and moving on “selective amnesia,” well, then that would be her problem.
“Lauren Monroe?”
Lauren looked up from her seat in the waiting room, her brow already furrowed. It wasn’t the voice she’d been expecting.
“Hi, I’m Dr. Lawrence. I’ll be taking care of you today,” said an older gentleman with a polite smile. He wore light green scrubs, not Adam’s usual dark blue, and his graying hair and little potbelly were the embodiment of what Jenn had pictured when Lauren first told her she had a crush on her chiropractor.
“Oh,” Lauren said, clearly taken aback, and she hesitantly placed the magazine she’d been reading on the table in front of her as she stood.
“Right this way,” he said, turning and walking into one of the exam rooms behind them.
Lauren felt the slight anxiety begin in her chest as she followed this new doctor into the room.
“Um, is Dr. Wells out sick?” she asked with strained casualness.
“No, he transferred you this morning. You’ll be finishing up the remainder of your therapy with me.”
Lauren froze, and Dr. Lawrence must have noticed the look on her face.
“He didn’t mention this to you?”
She shook her head, silent.
“I apologize then. I thought he’d gone over the switch with you. Let me assure you though, I’ve thoroughly acquainted myself with your information and your therapy plan, and I’m well versed in all the procedures Dr. Wells has been using with you. I’m fully comfortable in going forward as long as you are.”
Lauren swallowed and nodded, too focused on her own insecurities to even acknowledge her anxiety over having another doctor work on her.
Had she done something wrong? She honestly thought the flirting had been mutual. Things had never gotten inappropriate; it had all been so harmless.
At least, she thought it had been harmless.
She laid down on the table, her mind so lost in her own self-doubt that she forgot to panic as the new doctor adjusted her.
When Lauren left the office twenty minutes later, she was still in a fog of humiliation. She approached her car, mindlessly digging in her purse for her keys, and she found herself trying to come up with an excuse to discontinue her therapy there.
/> She didn’t want to chance facing him again now that he was clearly trying to avoid her.
“Lauren?”
She froze with her hand in her purse, and she closed her eyes and swallowed before she turned.
He was leaned up against a silver car, dressed in a T-shirt and jeans. It was the first time she’d ever seen him outside of his scrubs.
“Hi,” she said, forcing a smile, and he pushed off the car and walked toward her.
“Listen, I switched you over to Dr. Lawrence’s care,” he said as he shoved his hands in his pockets.
“Yeah, he told me,” she said, the same contrived smile in place as she looked down and continued searching for her keys. She was so aware of herself, of her awkwardness as she tried to ensure that she wasn’t flirting, but at the same time, wasn’t showing her disappointment.
“He’s wonderful,” Adam said. “Taught me everything I know.”
Lauren smiled politely, glancing up as she finally pulled her keys out of her purse.
“You’re in good hands with him,” he assured her. “You only have about two weeks of therapy left anyway, so you’ll be fine.”
Lauren nodded. “Okay, well, thanks for everything,” she said before she turned and started walking toward her car.
Then she stopped.
No more avoiding unpleasant things, she reminded herself, and she turned to see him still standing where she’d left him.
“Can I ask you something?” she asked, straightening her posture.
“Of course.”
“Why did you switch me?”
Adam took a deep breath, running his hand through his hair. “Well, I just thought it would be unprofessional if I asked out one of my patients.”
Lauren blinked, her hand dropping to her side. “What?”
“I know. I could have waited the two weeks until you finished your therapy, but I’ve already waited seven, and it hasn’t been easy.”
She blinked at him again, unmoving, and he smiled his trademark grin.
“So, can I take you out? You basically have to say yes at this point, otherwise I’ve given away my favorite patient for nothing.”
What he was saying finally registered, and Lauren tried not to smile. “So basically I have to go out with you now out of sympathy? Like a pity date?”
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