As Long as You Love Me

by Ann Aguirre

  Clicking on the woman’s picture to enlarge it, I studied her face. She was in her late forties with glasses, long salt-and-pepper hair caught back in a careless braid. Then I nodded.

  “Let’s do this.”

  Two weeks later, we had our first appointments. Some people might think it was weird to do it back-to-back, but I needed the moral support. It was harder than I expected to walk into the office and dump my crazy on a stranger’s desk. But she was supportive, warm and kind.

  “So, Lauren, before we get started, what are your goals? And what would you say is your biggest challenge right now?”

  Online advice had suggested I prepare a summary of my biggest issue, so I just read that to her, and Dr. Reid nodded. “Social anxiety is a common problem. We’ll work on it. Today, I’d like to get to know you, so why don’t you tell me about yourself?”

  “Like what?”

  She smiled. “Anything you like.”

  By the time I left, I didn’t feel like such a mess. This time, there had been no invasive questions, though Dr. Reid did direct me occasionally or ask for clarification. Avery went in after me, and I read on my phone while I waited for her. She was shaking when she came out, but she mustered up a real smile as we paid.

  “It’s...it was good,” she said, as we went out to my car.

  “Do you think every two weeks is too often?”

  “In my case, it might not be often enough. But I can’t afford more.”

  “Me, either.” We were both doing private pay. So I couldn’t manage tuition, living expenses and therapy on a weekly basis. “Did she offer you a prescription?”

  “Nope. You?”

  I shook my head. “If she had, I’d be looking for someone else. That’s not what I want out of this collaboration, as Dr. Reid puts it.”

  “That’s how I feel, too. I’ve got a lot of anger stashed away.”

  “For obvious reasons. Are you hungry?”

  “I didn’t think I would be, but yeah. Do you want to text Krista and Jillian, ask them to meet us at Patty’s in an hour?”

  “Sure. Do you plan to tell them...?” I didn’t know how I felt about that.

  She shook her head. “Jill’s starting to feel left out because she can tell that you and I have gotten close. The other day, she asked why I moved in with you so suddenly, why I didn’t talk to her first if I was thinking about getting a place. And what can I say? I’m not ready to tell anyone else. It was hard enough to dump it on Dr. Reid, and that’s her job. If I decide to press charges, then I’ll start with telling Jillian. When I think of how long she’s stood by me, even when I was horrible to her, I feel like such a bitch for not wanting to open up.”

  “Wow. I had that same situation going with Nadia.”

  “Does she know you’re in therapy?”

  I shook my head. “I suck. The worse it got at Mount Albion, the less I told her. I got so busy pretending to be happy that I forgot how to be a friend.”

  “I know how that is.” Avery was obviously talking about Jillian.

  “I think she’d just want you to feel better.” From what I’d seen, Jill was a hell of a good friend, loyal to a fault. Which was why she’d been like a pit bull after me when she thought I was cheating with Rob.

  “I hope so. I hurt her feelings, and that sucks so hard. But I don’t know what to do.”

  “So you’re buying her pancakes?” I grinned as I merged onto the highway.

  “Hey, she loves them.”

  “Who doesn’t?”

  In a few minutes, we got affirmative texts from Jillian and Krista, though she warned us her mom was busy, so she’d be bringing Naomi. I hadn’t seen the baby often since the seemingly endless night of her birth. Counting back, I realized she had to be seven months old or something like that. Holy crap.

  “Something wrong?”

  “I was just realizing how long I’ve been home.”

  Avery nodded. “Almost a year.”

  “Wow. I’d say something like, ‘Time flies,’ except then I’d have to beat my head repeatedly against the steering wheel for being such a verbal cliché.”

  “Then we’d spin out of control and end up in a snowbank.”

  “Don’t worry, we’ll live to eat pancakes for dinner.”

  The weather made that tough, however, as halfway to Sharon, the light snow turned into serious weather. It reminded me of driving back to Michigan with Nadia, last year after Thanksgiving. I hadn’t wanted to leave at all, but at that point, I wasn’t ready to admit how bad things had gotten. It took a serious fuckup for me to take stock and admit I had to change everything, or I might self-destruct. This trip didn’t end in a crappy motel, though. I got us safely to Patty’s Pancake House, where Jillian and Krista were already waiting; they had a booth with Naomi in a high chair at the end.

  “This is crazy,” Avery said, bending to kiss her on the head. “How can you be this big?”

  I wouldn’t have pegged her for a baby person, but she talked to Naomi more than the rest of us, even Krista. Jillian had lost a little weight but I didn’t say anything because it always pissed me off when people commented on it with me, like being skinny was my chief goal in life.

  “So what brought on the midweek pancake craving?” Krista asked.

  Avery shrugged. “I just wanted to hang out with you guys.”

  “This isn’t an official girls’ night,” Jillian pointed out. “Does this mean we can talk about guys?”

  “Sure, if you want.” I had nothing to say on that topic, but I was happy to listen, especially if someone had good news.

  Krista handed Naomi a cracker, just before the baby lost patience with our blather. “I’ll start. I just found out that Kenji will be stateside in March.”

  That was only three months away. No wonder she was so excited. “Oh, my God, that’s amazing news. For leave or...?”

  “Nope. He’s earned enough for college, and he’s coming home.”

  In her shoes, I’d be having panic attacks over him finishing his tour. If he were my fiancé, he’d explode in my head, over and over, only days before he boarded the plane, and he’d die, never having seen his baby daughter. That kind of shit burrowed deep into my brain, until I couldn’t think about anything else. Thanks to Dr. Reid, I had some idea how to stop the mind worm, or at least keep it from ruining my life. Not that I was fixed after one visit. There was a long road ahead, but I had the stamina to survive it.

  “Congrats, that’s fantastic. Will he let you keep coming to girls’ night?” Jillian asked.

  “Let me, ha. You don’t seem to understand our relationship. I do what I want, and he loves me.” She grinned as she ate the rest of her bacon.

  That sounds...perfect. Worse, it sounded like how it was with Rob. Pain throbbed through me, a reminder that I’d pushed for a clean break. And I got one. Now the only news I had about him came through Nadia or the internet. Now and then I dug up articles about Hot Property, a few pictures circulating on TV blogs. Like an obsessed fangirl, I’d downloaded a professional one, where he was posed in front of a woodsy backdrop, smiling for the camera. He looked impossibly polished and handsome. Now it was the screensaver on my laptop, though I’d die before admitting that to anyone.

  “Me next.” Jillian rapped on the table to pull our attention away from the awesomely romantic soldier’s homecoming.

  “Go for it,” I said.

  “So I’ve been dating this guy, off and on. He travels a lot...he’s not even from here, but this weekend, he asked me to be his girlfriend.”

  Krista grabbed for Jill’s phone. “Pics or it didn’t happen.”

  Shoving her away, Jillian flipped through her gallery until she found the right shot. “Here, it’s a selfie but you can see more of Ben’s face than mine.”

  A
very leaned over to check him out. “Wow, he’s hot.”

  He was blond and tan, what I’d call a surfer guy, but if he traveled for work, and he was wearing a suit, the look must be misleading. Mentally I rated him as cute, but nowhere near Rob’s level. Of course, I was biased. I hadn’t looked at a guy sexually since we broke up. A few dealership customers had hinted they’d take me out if I gave the go-ahead, but I always shut them down. Mentally and emotionally, I was a mess.

  “Definitely.” But there was just no way I could resist. “So does this mean we get to call you Billian? I don’t think I can stop myself, the train has left the smush-name station.”

  “Whatever.” Jillian flipped me off but she was smiling.

  “Tell us about him,” Avery ordered.

  Apparently Ben was a regional salesman of office equipment, not terribly fascinating, but I wasn’t the one who’d have to talk about his job with him. As Jill ran out of steam, Naomi decided she had been ignored long enough and pitched a fit. Sighing, Krista took her to the restroom to change her diaper. I so couldn’t imagine myself in her situation, and for a moment, I entertained the idea that Nadia might have grabbed the smart end of the stick by coming into a kid’s life after he stopped crapping his pants.

  Avery paid the check while Jillian and Krista were gone. I narrowed my eyes at her but I didn’t argue. It was her way of trying to make it up to Jill, the fact that she was keeping secrets. Maybe pancakes weren’t a magical fix, but her heart was in the right place. Krista hurried out first, baby cuddled against her.

  “This has been awesome, but I need to go. I try not to disrupt her routine too much. So how much do I owe? Are we splitting four ways?”

  I hugged her. “Don’t worry about it. Just take Naomi home. Text us when you get there.”

  “Okay, I’ll get it next time. Say bye to Jillian for me!” Krista hurried out into a night that was rapidly getting snowier.

  “I guess the party’s ending early,” Jillian said, coming back in time to see Krista back out of her parking space.

  “Babies ruin everything,” I mumbled.

  Avery smiled with a melancholy air. “That’s definitely the message in every teen drama I’ve ever watched. ‘Don’t do sex, girls, you’ll get pregnant and die.’”

  I nodded. “Harsh but true.”

  “I’m off, too,” Jillian said. “Not to interrupt this depressing convo, but y’know.”

  She didn’t offer to pay, which made me wonder if this was how Avery and Jillian operated. Like Nadia and I didn’t always talk like we should, but sometimes we made other gestures full of subtext. Maybe friendship didn’t have one concrete definition, one certain way to be; maybe it was enough to love somebody however they let you and for the pieces to click in, however felt right.

  They hugged as I went on out to the car. Avery caught up with me a few minutes later, seeming to be in a better mood. “All good?”

  She nodded. “I think so. Better anyway. Sometimes that’s all you can manage.”

  “With Dr. Reid’s help, our scope will improve.” I said it like I believed it, not just for her but for me, too.

  Maybe I wasn’t in a hurry to tell people I was getting help, but I wasn’t ashamed of it. On the way home, I drove slowly, avoiding the worst of the billowing gusts. I was a little worried about Happy, but when I parked in our driveway, she was bouncing up and down in front of the door. Thank goodness she had the sense to come in from the cold, if she was playing in the backyard earlier.

  Inside, I knelt and hugged her, rubbing my hands over her sides. “Who’s a good girl, huh? Who’s a good girl?”

  “Is it me?” Avery poked the back of my head.

  “Obviously. People in Sharon may not agree, about you or me, but we’re fucking wonderful, better all the time.”

  “Would it freak you out if I said I love you?” She crouched down on the other side of Happy, smiling at me with such vulnerability that I couldn’t joke.

  “Not if I’m allowed to say it back. I couldn’t go down this road with anyone but you.”

  She pushed out a breath as I hugged her. “I’m scared, but I want to feel better.”

  “Me, too.” I wanted to be someone who didn’t melt down over small things. Deep in my heart, I imagined seeing Rob again, rebuilt like The Bionic Woman: stronger, faster, smarter. Well, I’d settle for stronger. To follow where he’d gone—to live in his world—I couldn’t spackle over my problems and call it good. Before, I couldn’t even imagine doing that. But now that I’d taken the first steps, I wanted Rob back, no matter what it took. First I had to ID my triggers and learn how to defuse the fear. Dr. Reid could get me there in time. With her history, Avery might have more work to do, but I wouldn’t let her quit before she healed.

  Our future might not be assured, but like a true video game geek, I was ready to buckle on my armor, take up my +5 vorpal sword, and do battle.

  Too bad the dragon I have to slay lives inside my head.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  The holidays completely sucked without Rob. I missed him more with every passing day. But I had a nice Christmas with Stuart and Mom, who cooked a full-on feast for the first time in years. I sang carols and drank eggnog, opened presents and pretended I didn’t have a hole where my heart should be. When classes started in January, I didn’t even care about the rampant sexism anymore. I just quietly turned in projects and ignored everything else.

  Over time, my sessions with Dr. Reid helped.

  Every two weeks, I shared a little more and she responded with constructive techniques to help manage my emotions. Breathing helped; so did relabeling my responses—like instead of thinking, Crap, I’m freaking out, I substituted, Wow, I’m really excited about this. She also reminded me that anxiety was natural, and that I wasn’t abnormal for feeling this way. Dr. Reid also pointed out that I needed to make realistic corrections to my expectations and stop creating exaggerated mental failure scenarios.

  The thing she said that made the most difference, however, was when she told me, “Understand that there’s nothing wrong with you, and that it isn’t your fault.”

  Before I heard that, there’d been a sharp sliver at the heart of me, constant pain and shame, because I just couldn’t be normal. I wasn’t trying for that anymore; I just wanted to be happy.

  When my mom asked me to go with her to a work thing because Stuart was at a conference in Lincoln, I said no problem. I didn’t know many of her coworkers and I could remember a time, not too long ago, when I’d be hunched over in a bathroom, horrified by the idea of meeting so many people, making small talk, dealing with their looks and wondering if they could tell there was something wrong with me. Tonight, I wasn’t looking forward to it, but I was okay, stronger, like I’d hoped.

  “Thanks for coming along last minute. I know you prefer to have some mental prep time for stuff like this.” Mom looked beautiful in a fitted blue dress, wearing a lapis lazuli necklace Stuart had bought for her in Hawaii.

  “It’s fine. I’m doing better.” Before, I never would’ve said that, never would’ve admitted to her that there was a problem. I’d have deflected with a joke and changed the subject. To me, it felt like progress. “If you don’t mind my asking, how did you snap out of it?”

  “The depression?” She fumbled the keys for a few seconds.

  “Yeah.”

  We never really talked about things like this. Like Avery and Jillian, we had more of a don’t-ask, don’t-tell policy. So I thought maybe she wouldn’t answer because she got in the car and after a few seconds, I did the same.

  But as she put it into Reverse, she said, “I got help. It’s not something I enjoy admitting, the fact that I didn’t have the energy to do anything. Or that I was thinking maybe the world would be better off without me. But I couldn’t go on like I was. It took me a while befo
re I didn’t feel like there must be something seriously wrong with me because I couldn’t pull myself up by my bootstraps and snap out of it. Some people can. I wasn’t one of them.”

  “I’m seeing someone, too.”

  “I thought you might be. But it would be hypocritical of me to make you talk when I don’t. So we muddle along.”

  I thought about that as she drove to the retirement dinner. A senior staffer was retiring after forty years of service, so the company was throwing a party to honor him. For me, it was such a welcome change not to have the whispers in the back of my head about everything that could go wrong. That wasn’t to say they were gone for good, but I knew how to manage them better now.

  “Maybe we should try harder...to be honest with each other.”

  “Maybe. It’s hard to know where to start. Possibly with Rob?” She cut me a look as she parked, and I didn’t bother to hide my flinch.

  His name still had the power to tie me in knots; though I didn’t regret sending him off to see what he could do in Toronto, I hated the fact that I’d hurt him, even more when I contemplated how much I still loved him. The pain was still sharp—nothing about it had faded, and matters weren’t improved by living in the house we’d restored together. I’d never told my mom the whole story, only that he got a job out of town, and we were done.

  So instead of the usual chitchat over dinner, I told her everything, including what I’d done and why. She’d obviously been taking communication lessons from whoever she was talking to professionally because she didn’t tell me I was stupid or that I didn’t have the right to make that decision for him. Because the thing was, if Rob hadn’t wanted to go, deep down, he never would’ve let me drive him away. I knew how stubborn he could be. So I stepped into the villain’s shoes and gave him a way to go without feeling bad for leaving me behind. Which sucked for me, but I didn’t doubt it was right for him, even now.

  “Do you miss him?” she asked.

  “Every day. At this point, I’m used to it. But...in a way, I was using him as a crutch, hiding from life. Running home was an avoidance tactic, not a coping one, and I was really in no shape to sustain a relationship.”