A Broken Kind of Life (28 page)

“I. Do. Not. Know. What. To. Do. Now,” Spencer said to their hands. Aaron could understand his fear. He didn’t know what to do either. He’d never been in a relationship and wasn’t even sure he was capable of it. For God’s sake, he couldn’t even jack off in the shower. What kind of relationship could he offer someone? But he liked the way his hand felt inside of Spencer’s. He didn’t feel safe, exactly, but he felt content, like someone turned off the screaming in his head, at least for a little while.

“I think your dad is right. I don’t think I’m ready for… for….”

“I. Am. Not. Asking. For. That. Aaron. I. Would. Never. Ask. You. For. That.” Spencer turned so that he faced Aaron completely but didn’t let go of his hand. “In. The. Last. Three. Months. You. Have. Become. My. Best. Friend. I. Would. Not. Do. Anything. To. Hurt. You. We. Can. Just. Be. Friends. Or. We. Can. Do. Something. Else. Something. We. Define. I. Will. Not. Take. You. Farther. Than. You. Are. Willing. To. Go.”

“That’s just it. I don’t know what I
can
do. I… I don’t want to keep you from having a relationship with someone who can give you what you want.”

“I. Just. Want. You.”

Spencer’s sentiment made his heart race, and not in the normal terrified kind of way. The contrast made him dizzy. He needed to be away from Spencer for a little while to think about the monumental shift in their relationship. In two and a half years, he’d never considered he would ever want to date someone. The idea that he did, and more importantly, that someone wanted to date him, knocked his whole world off balance.

“I can’t believe this is happening. I never thought I would find someone to look past the scars. I want to try if you do,” Aaron told him, his voice full of hope that Spencer could not hear.

But Spencer’s eyes lit up like maybe he understood what it meant to Aaron. Maybe something in Aaron’s face showed it, or Spencer merely sensed it, because he smiled softly.

“Then. We. Will. Try.”

T
HE
screen stayed resolutely blank as Spencer watched, hoping Aaron would come online. He felt alone and couldn’t even explain to himself why. His father was upstairs in his study, and he’d just seen Aaron at school a few hours before. The empty feeling in his chest had grown steadily through the afternoon until he couldn’t stand it and got onto the computer, hoping Aaron would be there. The solution stared at him from behind the laptop screen. He could just text Aaron and ask him to log on, and he knew he would end up doing that eventually.

The screen blinked and he looked up. A smile played at the edge of his mouth until he saw that the message was from one of his online sex buddies. He couldn’t have picked a worse time to start that conversation with Spencer.

MARK:
Hello
?

SPENCER:
Hey, man
.

MARK:
Hey, there you are. You haven’t answered the last couple of times I pinged you. Everything okay
?

SPENCER:
Yeah, I have been busy with school
.

The screen stayed clear for a moment, and in the silence, Spencer considered talking to Mark about what bothered him. Mark was a friend, right? They’d exchanged pictures and messed around online dozens of times. The next message made him sigh in frustration.

MARK:
I’ve been hard for you for days
.

SPENCER:
I am not in the mood
.

MARK:
Maybe I can get you in the mood. I’ve been touching myself since you came online
.

SPENCER
Seriously, I met someone
.

MARK:
Really? He can play too. I’d love to watch you guys
.

Spencer slammed the laptop closed in disgust. He would go in later and clear out all the people from his chat list he no longer had any interest in chatting with. How could Mark even think he’d let that jerk anywhere near Aaron? The thought nauseated him. Why did Spencer ever think that messing around on the Internet would make him feel better? He felt good with Aaron, even without the sex. What he had with Aaron was real, more real than anything he’d ever had before. He wasn’t going to screw that up by playing with guys on the net.

S
PENCER
’
S
lips felt warm and soft on Aaron’s as they kissed slowly but deeply on the couch in the rec room. He didn’t know where Dr. Thomas was but got the impression he and Spencer were the only ones in the house. Aaron’s arms rested lightly around his boyfriend’s neck. His boyfriend—he never thought he’d use those words, but in his heart, and in the dream, that’s what Spencer was. Spencer’s shaggy curls tangled in Aaron’s fingers as he pulled and brought him closer. God, he wanted to crawl in Spencer’s lap and never leave.

Somehow his hand wound up in Spencer’s. Aaron pulled it down to the open fly of his jeans and rubbed. Never in his life had he been touched like that, with such love and tenderness.

Aaron looked down to see those sweet hazel eyes he loved so much looking up at him through a wisp of brown curls. Oh God, he wasn’t…. Spencer’s beautiful lips, the ones Aaron so enjoyed kissing, wrapped gently around the head of Aaron’s erection, and for a moment, he couldn’t breathe. The sensation, even just the idea of it, sent tingles through his body. He felt them everywhere—in his legs, his balls, his stomach. It was like nothing he’d ever felt before.

Spencer’s free hand rested on his chest, and he wondered at it for a moment. Then Aaron realized Spencer wanted to hear Aaron moan for him—he wanted to feel it in his fingertips. Aaron tightened his fingers in Spencer’s hair and gave him what he wanted.

Under the blankets, Aaron rubbed himself through the light cotton sleep pants. He listened intently but didn’t hear anyone in the hall through the closed bedroom door. Taking a chance, and without thinking about anything other than Spencer’s face, he pulled the pajama pants down.
Please. I want to feel it. Just this once.

It took longer than he expected, maybe twenty minutes, but finally, mercifully, he was able to finish. As he went to the bathroom to clean up, hope nestled in his chest and took hold of his heart.

“M
Y
MOM
is going to pick me up at three because we’re going to dinner for my little brother’s birthday,” Aaron told Dr. Thomas as he tossed his bag next to Spencer’s bag on the desk. He’d been working with Spencer for the last two hours on their new program and would much rather be adding additional functionality to it than be down here baring his soul. Uncomfortable as it was, however, Aaron knew this therapy was the key to him becoming a functioning individual. The final walls had fallen, the ones that hid the hope that he would ever be normal. While he knew he was setting himself up for a major disappointment if this failed, it had been so long since he’d even dared to hope. Believing in himself, in Dr. Thomas, and in his ability to heal was essential to the success of his therapy, and for the first time, he was going to embrace it. Dr. Thomas was the foremost expert in the country on his type of trauma. If he couldn’t help Aaron, no one would be able to.

“That’s fine. We should be done before then,” Dr. Thomas said pleasantly. “I read your last blog entry, and I think you’re making great progress in describing your reactions since the attack. Once you can really understand your triggers, you’ll have more success in dealing with the more subtle ones. You recognize the obvious triggers, like being touched, the smell of gasoline, and the sight of blood. It’s the smaller, less obvious triggers, the ones that bring up memories without being overt. The sound of the thunder yesterday prompted something, and we weren’t even aware that was a trigger for you.”

“Yes, that explains at least one reason why I don’t like stormy days, and I honestly didn’t remember the sound of the storm during the attack until you pointed it out to me here,” Aaron said, and rather than being ashamed by his limitation, he was encouraged at its discovery.

“Aaron, let me ask you,” Dr. Thomas said quietly, sitting back in his chair, “how do you feel you’re progressing in therapy? I can tell you all day long what I think of your progress, but it isn’t me that has to live with what you have to live with.”

Aaron sat back in his chair as well. It had taken weeks of intensive sessions for him to feel comfortable with Dr. Thomas, but now, while he didn’t think he could tell him everything about the attack, he felt like his therapist did truly care about him, about his recovery. That, as much as anything else they’d discussed, made Aaron want to work with the man rather than against him, as he had done with so many other therapists who didn’t believe in him.

“The first therapist my mother took me to was so out of his element. I have a feeling he was used to dealing with stressed-out CEOs or couples fighting about money. He had no idea what to do with me, and even a scared sixteen-year-old boy could see that. The reason he had no chance of helping me is because he never believed that he could, and he never tried. Dumping antianxiety pills and tranquilizers on me was his solution, to make me so drugged-out that I wasn’t freaking out, but I wasn’t really conscious either. After that, I had a successive list of therapists, and with each one, my belief that I could ever be anything more than the broken shell of a person that I’d become, faded.”

Dr. Thomas nodded but didn’t interrupt. That was one thing Aaron really admired about the man: he always heard everything Aaron had to say, and even some things he never said.

“You never put the ownership of my recovery on yourself. You always put it on me. You didn’t try to hide my problems behind a regimen of drugs. I’m still all kinds of messed up, but I think the difference now is that I have hope,” Aaron explained. Dr. Thomas nodded with a small smile and then sat back in the chair. His expression changed to something more serious as he spoke.

“I want to try something different with you today. I was thinking about using a mind-mapping diagram to chart out a memory and some of the things that might trigger it. It’s pretty much a free association exercise.”

Dr. Thomas wheeled out an impressive whiteboard from where it had been sitting along the back wall, waiting for their attention. In the center of the board he drew a lopsided oval, underneath which he wrote “memory.” From the oval, he drew three lines, each in different directions. At the end of each line he added more ovals.

“I want you to think of a memory, and we’re going to put it in the center oval. Then, we’re going to map out things that you associate with that memory. If we find a trigger, we can document it.”

“That sounds easy enough,” Aaron said and grimaced as Dr. Thomas shook his head and laughed.

“It may sound easy, but it’s going to be very hard for you. It could also trigger a panic attack, but we know how to deal with those.”

“Okay, so where do we start?” Aaron asked, even as his body tensed with the idea of remembering something from that night, purposefully, and with painful detail. As much as he wanted to forget every moment, he understood working through the fear and the anger would be the only way to move on and have any kind of life.

“Think of a memory from that night, but let’s start out with something manageable, like the abduction or the riding in the van. I want for us to be more comfortable with the process before we move on to something harder.” Dr. Thomas stood next to the whiteboard and picked up one of the markers. “Just sit back on the couch, close your eyes if you want, and pick a memory to work with.”

Aaron suddenly wished Spencer were down in the rec room rather than up in his room studying for his calculus final. In addition, he also had a paper due in Freshman Composition and another one in psychology. The only class he seemed to breeze through was programming. Aaron, having only taken the programming course, didn’t have as much academic work. His therapy homework ended up being far more painful. Dr. Thomas waited patiently for him to come up with a memory, so he closed his eyes and waited for one to come.

“Come on, we gotta go,” the man above me said with wild panic in his voice.

“But the guy is still moving,” another voice said, from farther away, or maybe he was just fading.

“The girl is already dead—it won’t take long. We have to get out of here.”

Aaron couldn’t turn his head again to look at Juliette. All the strength drained from his body. As he heard a heavy door slam in the distance, he used his remaining energy to put his hand in his pocket and wrap it around the phone he found there.

“Okay, I have it,” Aaron told Dr. Thomas as he pulled his feet up onto the couch and wrapped trembling arms around them.

“Can you sum up the subject of the memory into a few words?” The doctor popped the cap off a marker and turned toward the board.

“Dying,” Aaron said, summarizing the entire horrific event into a single word so that he didn’t have to go into the excruciating detail. Dr. Thomas turned to look at Aaron for a long moment, concern written into his slight frown.