Brawler (25 page)

“For everything. The way Laney and I have treated each other, the engagement, the way I’ve handled every situation with this family for the last nine years.”

Dan’s face was blank as he studied me. “Is that all?”

“I can probably come up with more.”

“No, let’s stop there. That’s enough, I think.”

“I know you must be angry at me.”

“I am, but probably not for the reasons you think. At least not all of them.”

I blinked hard, taken aback. “What are your reasons?”

“You listed a lot of things you’re feeling guilty over, but I want to hear you admit one in particular.”

“What one?”

He looked at me hard, waiting.

I knew I should answer, I knew that I
knew
the answer he was waiting for, but still I stayed silent.

“You asked my permission to date Laney when you didn’t even want to. You asked my permission to marry her when you never intended to. Are you going to sit there and lie to my face and tell me there’s not something else you need to ask me right now?”

I clenched my jaw, my heart racing in my chest. “I don’t need your permission to love Jenna.”

“No, you don’t,” he agreed, “but given the way you’ve conducted yourself over the years, what do you think my answer would be if you did ask me?”

“You’d tell me ‘no,’” I replied immediately. “And I know that because if our situations were reversed, I’d tell you exactly the same thing. In fact, I’d already be taping my hands.”

He nodded his head, staring forward again. “And I’d be asking you to understand. To see it from my perspective and know that I never meant to hurt anyone. I’d tell you that the situation got away from me and it was ugly now, we were in the thick of the hardest part, but I was committed to seeing it through.”

I frowned. “I’d tell you that you should feel ashamed.”

“I’d ask you what shame there is in loving a good woman.”

“I’d tell you that you’re not good enough for her.”

Dan chuckled softly. “I’d tell you that no one is or ever will be, and I’d ask if you wouldn’t rather she be with a man you trusted.”

I cleared my throat, feeling it try to tighten. “I’d say it’s her choice, not mine.”

“And I’d say she’s already made it,” he replied meaningfully.

“Do you think—“ I swallowed hard. “Is it wrong to want to be with Jenna after dating Laney for so long?”

“My opinion doesn’t matter.”

“It does to me.”

He sighed, running his hand over his chin and down his throat, stretching it thoughtfully. “You and Laney weren’t good for each other. You weren’t bad either, you were always just… meh. I hate to say it because it feels like rubbing salt on your wound, but she’s more excited about this other guy than she has been about you in years. I think she’s genuinely taken with him, but she’s so caught up in the idea of getting married that she doesn’t really care who it’s too at this point.“ He held me pinned under his stare for a long moment. “But you and Jenna – even when she was a young girl – have always been good for one another. She lights up when she’s around you. She laughs louder, she smiles brighter, she argues harder. She’s at her best when she’s with you, and I like to think she brings out the best in you as well. I’ve never seen you happier than when you’re with her and I’ve never seen you more depressed than when you’re not.”

“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.

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 following 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?”