Saugatuck Summer (Saugatuck, #1)(81)
“I don’t— I don’t— I don’t know,” I stammered. “Isn’t it the same thing?”
“No. No, it’s not,” Jace said tenderly. “You need to respect your pain for what it is. Stop beating yourself up for feeling it.”
I shook my head violently, wiping my eyes on the pillow I clung to. “No, no. Stop. Just stop, Jace. This is bullshit. I am feeling sorry for myself. I mean, Jesus, throw me a pity party. It’s not like they beat me. Hell, they didn’t even torture me the way your family did to you. It’s—”
“You think they didn’t torture you?” Jace hooted. “What the f*ck do you think you just described to me? If those were lectures, they were the f*cking waterboarding of parental lectures. They tried to break you, Topher, break your soul, the same way my family and the doctors and camps and pastors tried to break me. Okay, so they didn’t go about it the same way. Doesn’t mean it doesn’t count.”
I groaned and closed my eyes. Once the torrent of memories was unleashed, they began replaying obsessively in my head, making me relive all the anxiety and frustration and anger and hurt. As it had with Brendan. I couldn’t shut it off; it kept going and going.
“Fuck. If I’m not pitying myself, why does every conversation turn into this crap?”
“Because you know what they did to you was wrong, angel, so it eats at you, because it was unfair. Really f*cking cruelly unfair. You’re justified in feeling that you were mistreated. They’ve convinced you that everything you think and feel is wrong, and you’ve bought into it. If you could stop trying to convince yourself that they were right, you’d be able to put it into some sort of context and begin to move on.” He sighed again on the other end of the line. “I mean, if your appendix was bursting, would you get better by telling yourself it wasn’t happening and that the pain you were feeling was only you being sorry for yourself? Of course not. No one has ever healed by denying they were injured. Seems like your therapists should have made that clear along the way. Otherwise, I’m pretty sure you were missing the point of therapy.”
That stopped me cold. Jesus, was that true? When I was a little kid, I had no idea why they started taking me to see a therapist. My family never explained, they just delivered me to the appointments, and then the guy asked me questions for a while. I’d assumed it was because of something wrong with me. Then when I was a teenager, I’d thought my aunt and uncle sent me to therapy to “fix” me rather than accepting that they might be in the wrong, too. I’d appreciated the opportunity to vent about what was going on in my life, but had I ever understood that I was supposed to be healing? And that I had to accept the pain as real in order to do so? I’d gotten good at talking about deeply personal stuff, but had I known I was supposed to be processing it? Had anyone ever explained to me why I was there?
There was a long pause while I digested that, and then Jace chuckled. “That aside, in the interest of fairness, I have to point out that not every conversation turns out this way. Some of them are about sex.”
“I like those a lot better.”
“Yeah?” I heard the mischievous lift in his voice and knew what was coming before he even spoke. “So, what are you wearing?”
And just like that, tears and frustration morphed into to laughter and arousal. With something else to grasp, I was able to shut down the obsessive cycle of recollections.
“Same thing I was when I spoke to you before bedtime. My boxer briefs.”
“Mm, love the way those look on you,” he murmured. “They show off that tight, tight ass of yours. Think you might wanna take ’em off for me, angel?”
Jesus. Wow.
“Yeah,” I whispered, pushing at my waistband. “Oh yeah . . .”
Funny me, so used to knowing what to say
I couldn’t remain in
Something that would suffocate my passion
And kill my pride
—Casey Stratton, “Projector”
As horrible as it was to say it, when I saw Mo the following weekend, it was easier to live with the weight of my secret. Brendan, it turned out, had decided to go back to Lansing for the rest of the summer, so I wasn’t in any danger of running into him again. I still didn’t want to deceive Mo, but I also couldn’t bring myself to out Brendan, so I just had to find a way to live with it.
It helped that we both had a lot to talk about, in the form of Jace and Cody the Archery Instructor. We pretty much spent the whole weekend drinking wine and comparing sex and is-or-isn’t-it-a-relationship notes. Mo’s opinion was that, yes, I definitely had a relationship going on with Jace.
Since I didn’t really want to go back to that house where I’d been with Brendan, I invited her to stay with me at Ling’s apartment, and we snuggled together and watched movies when I wasn’t working. She admired my nipple piercings while simultaneously scolding me for not waiting until she was there to see me get them (though she thought the fact that Jace was there was quite hot, which it had been). She also just about passed out from incredulity when I told her the (somewhat sanitized) tale of going to the bathhouse in Chicago.
By the time she left on Sunday to spend one night in Big Rapids before heading back to camp, I’d decided my life didn’t have to be completely ruined by the momentous screwup that was Brendan Gardner. Perhaps I didn’t deserve a pardon, but it appeared I might have one anyway, so maybe I should just try to forgive myself and move on.