Promise Me This (Between Breaths 4)

It’d been a couple of weeks since my mother had been released from the hospital. My father had already moved his things out of their house and, on the advice of her attorney, she had filed a restraining order.

I couldn’t help worrying about her mental health. She hadn’t been alone like that in years and in many ways, I could see the relief evident on her face. But I also saw fear and sorrow. I slept at the house with her the first couple of nights, even though she didn’t ask me to. I just wanted her to feel safe.

Luke also slept there some nights and they were working toward repairing their relationship. His shame ran deep and I saw him attempting to make amends and become the man I’d always hoped he could be. The kind of brother I could finally look up to. But it would take some effort and time. As it turned out, Anna had been just the right kind of influence.

My guilt was hardest of all to dissuade because I had been the one to shake this family’s feeble foundation. My father was suddenly getting pressure on all sides from people who long suspected but now knew the truth.

He lost it and took it out on my mother that night. The flip side was that my mom finally admitted that the abuse had still been going on and that she was only trying to keep the peace until we graduated. She finally returned her sister’s calls, and Aunt Johanna had made the trip up to be with her this week.

At the top of the hour, I packed up my stuff and headed to the counseling center on campus. I’d had a draining therapy session with Dr. Drake the week before that basically blew my mind and my own theory about myself out of the water.

I was raw and on edge and Jessie had become my safe haven. She had shown up at my place a few times in the last couple of weeks to simply hang out. Unless I shared, she never asked me anything deep about my family or about us, as if she knew I just needed her comfort and company while I worked out all this crap.

Thing was, I liked having her in my bed, even if the only thing we did these days was sleep wrapped tightly around each other. I’d wake up with a hard-on every single time but it was like an unspoken rule that we weren’t going to go there, not until we got some things straight.

God, she was the fucking shit and I wanted to do right by her. And that’s what I murmured in her ear almost every single night.

As it turned out, sometimes life hands you a perfectly scripted moment—and still you don’t recognize the significance of it, until it clubs you repeatedly over the head.

“C’mon Nate, lay it on me,” Dr. Drake said, sitting across from me now in his cushy black leather chair. “We’re in private and nobody is going to hear you or judge you.”

I felt a burn at the back of my throat. Tears were beginning to well and I did not want to lose it in front of him. But why did it matter? Suddenly it became clearer to me: because my father warned me that crying was for sissies. Was his logic so ingrained in my head that I couldn’t ever shake it?

“It’s scary,” I said. “Because I don’t know what I’ll become if I let it loose.”

He immediately picked up on my word choice. “What you’ll become—not who?”

“Well,” I said, my voice shaking, “A monster is a thing not a human.”

“A monster,” he said, as if testing out the word in his mouth.

“Yes,” I said, simply stating the belief I’d harbored about myself for a long time.

“Do you have urges to do monstrous things?” he asked, in a calm voice.

I gave an imperceptible nod, now terrified what he’d think of me.

His voice was soft and low, maybe in an effort to keep me calm. “Are they urges to hurt and control people or things?”

I cleared my throat, here it was. I could either say it out loud to the person I actually sought out for help with this shit or I could keep it buried and let the acid eat away at me, bone by bone.

My voice faltered. “Y . . . yes.”

He shook his head, not even judging me. “Have you acted on them?”

“A couple of times . . . during sex.”

He steepled his fingers beneath his chin, as if thinking it through. “Did you get consent before you performed those actions?”

“Of course!” I sat up quickly in the chair.

“And outside of the bedroom?”

“Well, no. Those aren’t the kind of urges I have,” I said. “They’re all related to my fantasies during sex.”

“You’ve never wanted to control somebody that you were dating?” he asked, pushing his glasses further up his nose.

I thought of how I’d become so damn jealous with Jessie that I wanted to control who she spoke to in the hallway that night at Zach’s Bar. But as soon as she stood up to me, I’d backed down.

“Well, I’ve gotten jealous, but no, I don’t ever want to treat a girl like that,” I said with conviction in my voice. “I watched my mom cower in fear my whole damn life.”

He nodded again. I wished to hell I could figure out what he was thinking. “And in the bedroom . . . have your urges been . . . well received?”

“Yes and no . . .” I said thinking of Jessie as compared to my girlfriend in high school.

“Can you expound?”

“Only if you do . . .” I said, inclining in my seat, my heart thrashing in my chest. “This is killing me, Doc. I don’t know what you think of me or if what I’ve told you is so messed up you don’t know what to say.”

He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. “That statement alone reveals the kind of person you are, Nate.”