Logan (Federal Protection Agency #9)

Chapter 15

CHAPTER 15

Logan

It was nearly midnight when I finally stepped through the door of my own apartment and collapsed on my bed.

After dropping Clay off in Maryland a month ago, I’d returned to Baton Rouge to immediately pull the newly named “Bell ringer” case back off the shelf. Roland was assisting in the case, and Sebastian and Damien lent a hand whenever they could, but overall, it had been one long night after another.

Add in my little impromptu trip back to San Francisco to find Jordy and repay him for helping me, and I hadn’t seen the inside of my own apartment very much since I left Clay behind.

No.

I didn’t leave him behind.

I returned him to his brother, his family, where he belonged.

I’d repeated this mantra to myself so many times over the last month that it almost felt true, but I still couldn’t shake the lingering sense of guilt whispering in my ear that I had abandoned him.

As if the very universe were laughing at me, my phone rang with a familiar ringtone.

Clay was calling me.

Nothing could have stopped my finger from hitting the “answer” button.

A video call popped up on the screen. He hated talking on the phone without being able to see who he was talking to, so Clay almost exclusively used video calls. In the split second before the video opened, I sat up in a more presentable posture so my exhaustion wouldn’t be so evident.

“Clay,” I greeted with a cheerful voice that only felt a little forced. “What’s up? How’re things going?”

“All right,” Clay said with a distracted tone. Even looking at him on such a small screen, I could see him fidgeting. Based on the background behind him, it looked like he was in his bedroom, sitting near the window. The hand not holding the phone kept opening and closing the blinds. The orange glow from the streetlight outside would illuminate the room just long enough for me to see all of Clay’s face, then it would disappear and cast the image on the screen back into the gray haze of twilight.

I wanted Clay to elaborate, or even explain why he’d called, but he didn’t say anything more as he continued to play with the blinds.

“Have you gotten your results back from the doctor, yet?” I asked. It was one of the more pertinent questions that had been hanging on my mind. He hadn’t been to a proper doctor since he was kidnapped. Even without any other factors, that alone was enough for him to need a doctor’s checkup. Plus, there was no telling what he might have been exposed to in the years since then.

Clay sighed and his shoulders slumped back into a more natural posture, like he was relieved that I’d started the conversation for him.

“I’m fine. Nothing to worry about. The one thing my captors did teach me was how to look after my health. Farmers don’t want their cattle getting sick, after all.”

He laughed, but I just scowled at him.

“Clay.”

He immediately waved me off. “Yeah. Yeah. Self-depreciation and deflecting with humor aren’t healthy communication. I know.”

He was clearly quoting something that he had heard many times before, and although he looked annoyed, I couldn’t help but smile.

“It sounds like you’ve had your first therapy appointment. How’d it go?”

Clay shrugged and went back to playing with the blinds. “First two appointments, actually. I’ll be going three times a week for a while, until I’m more stable.”

He rolled his eyes so hard on the word ‘stable’ that I was surprised he didn’t fall right out the open window.

“So? Was it as bad as you feared?”

I meant for the joke to lighten the mood and maybe finally bring a smile to his face. However, Clay’s fidgeting grew even more manic, and he looked away from the screen.

“Logan. Have you ever attended therapy before?”

“A couple of times.”

My easy answer seemed to surprise him, and he looked back at the screen like I’d just illuminated the light at the end of a long, dark tunnel.

“When? What was it like?”

Since this was gearing up to be a long conversation, I moved over to the comfortable armchair near my bed and propped the phone up against a couple of books. “The first time was right after I got out of the Air Force. I’d seen other people I served with struggle to make the adjustment back to civilian life, and I didn’t want to follow in their footsteps. The second time...” I hesitated.

Would my answer hit too close to home and upset Clay, or would it bring him comfort?

Either was a possibility.

Deciding to take the risk, I answered honestly.

“The second time was after some undercover work I did a few years ago. Working for the bad guys, even if it was just pretend, messed with my head for a while. Why do you ask?”

Clay must have propped his own phone up on something, because I could now see both of his hands in the frame of the screen, twisting around each other like he meant to tie his fingers into knots.

“Was it... I mean... How did it make you feel?”

I grimaced, and my exaggerated expression managed to earn a small chuckle from Clay. “It wasn’t fun. Kinda feels like dissecting your own brain, and you often don’t like what you find, but overall, it helped in the end. Why? How does it make you feel?”

That must have been what was weighing on Clay. The moment I asked the question, he immediately stopped fidgeting and fell deathly still instead.

“I don’t like it,” he said in a small voice, almost whispering. “It makes me feel...” He shook his head, and his shoulders slumped until he looked even smaller on the screen. “I don’t want to go back. It isn’t going to help.”

Running my hand though my hair, I took a moment to choose my words carefully. “Therapy isn’t an immediate cure. It takes time. The mind is tricky. Isn’t like a broken leg that you can heal just by slapping a cast on it. You’re going to have to dig up a lot of painful things in order to figure out how to heal them, and that can feel really bad at first. But I promise, it will be worth it in the end.”

My hopes of reassuring him were dashed as I watched him curl up on the window seat until his arms were wrapped around his knees. It was exactly the same position I’d found him in when I barged into his apartment in San Francisco.

“I told Jason I didn’t want to go back, and we fought about it. He said the same thing.”

Not for the first time, I hated the miles between Maryland and Louisiana. I wanted nothing more than to reach out to him, but the distance made that impossible. If he were even a single state over, I probably would have gotten in my car and driven to him that night. However, seven states were a much harder obstacle to overcome.

“Look…” I sighed again. “Neither Jason nor I can make you do something you don’t want to do. But?—”

There wasn’t even time for me to try and make an argument before he cut me off.

“I do want to do it. I want to get better. I want to finally feel okay in my own head, and I don’t mind if the process is difficult or painful. I just don’t want to have to relive the details over and over. I’ve already lived through it all, once. I can’t do it again.”

“Wait a minute…” I instinctively held up my hand to cut off his rambling, even though I couldn’t actually reach him from so far away. “You’ve only been to two appointments, right? What kind of details would you be getting into already?”

“Everything,” Clay practically exploded. “This guy, Doctor... whatever his name is. He wants to know details about everything. Like... okay, so, we were talking about when I was kidnapped. And I thought that made sense because that’s where it all started. But then we got into the first time I was made to... you know, do anything. And this doctor guy kept asking about what they made me do and how they made me do it. When I tried to just give a vague answer, he insisted that I had to describe things in detail. He said I’d never heal if I didn’t face the reality of what happened to me, but I have faced it. I faced it every day, for years. Why do I have to relive these things again? This doesn’t feel like it’s helping me. It feels like...”

The energy of his sudden outburst drained away like someone had pulled a plug inside him and emptied him out. I half expected to see him deflate like a balloon as he wrapped his arms around his knees again.

“It feels like I’m catering to another client, only this time I’m the one paying.”

On the surface, Clay’s description of his therapy sessions sounded inappropriate. The protective side of me was tempted to storm back off to the other side of the country and demand that therapist have his license revoked.

However, Clay wasn’t the first victim of sexual violence that I’d dealt with. I’d seen firsthand how people dealing with his kind of trauma could misinterpret innocent situations and twist them into threats. As much as I wanted to just believe him, I couldn’t trust his mental state enough to take his description at face value.

That didn’t mean I was going to disregard his concerns. Whether the therapist was actually being inappropriate or not, there was something we needed to do either way.

“I think you need to change to a different therapist, Clay. Maybe this therapist has honest intentions. Maybe he doesn’t. I promise, I’ll look into it. However, I do know that therapy works a lot better if you’re comfortable with the therapist, which you clearly aren’t. So, how about this… I’ll call your brother, and we’ll see about getting you moved to a different therapist. I don’t know the therapists in your area, but I can probably call around and get some recommendations. If we do manage to find a therapist that you’re comfortable with, will you promise to give it another try and stick with it for a while?”

Clay agreed, but the mood of the conversation had definitely soured. Not wanting to leave on such a negative note, I asked him to tell me about something fun that he’d done recently.

At first, he looked hesitant, but then his gaze landed on something just off screen, and his eyes lit up.

“Oh, yeah.” He grabbed several books and held them up in front of the camera. “So, Jason and Patrick have a bunch of books in the house, but Patrick noticed I wasn’t enjoying them, so he took me to the bookstore to pick out some for myself. I wasn’t sure what to think of him at first, but he’s a pretty nice guy. Like an actually nice guy, you know. Not one of those self-proclaimed Nice Guys .”

I nodded along, happy that Clay had found something to enjoy, but then I read the titles of the books he was showing me.

Goosebumps .

Anamorphs .

A Wrinkle in Time .

They were all books I’d read in middle school, and while there was nothing wrong with adults enjoying books meant for a younger audience, the fact that Clay had exclusively picked out those titles worried me.

Clay must have noticed my expression, because he pulled the books back to his chest and laughed nervously. “Yeah. I haven’t attended school since I was thirteen and didn’t really have the chance to keep up with my education. Turns out, I’m a bit behind when it comes to reading skills. Patrick had me take some sort of online test to figure out where I’m at, and he said that these books would be better for me. He also said that I just need practice, and even mentioned that I could get a tutor if I wanted, and maybe take the GED someday.”

I wanted to kick myself.

How had I not considered the greater impact that being kidnapped at the age of fourteen would have on his life?

Of course he was reading kid’s books. He’d missed the opportunity to read them as an actual kid. In a way, it was like his entire life had been put on pause almost a decade ago, and now he was trying to pick it back up from where he left off.

My silence lasted too long as I struggled through my self-criticizing thoughts and Clay began to grow visibly uncomfortable. He laughed again, rubbing at the back of his head as blue eyes peeked at me from under his bangs.

“Is, um... is Patrick right? Do I just need to practice? These books are a lot easier to read than the adult books, but I’d like to read adult books too someday.”

Snapping out of my own thoughts, I scoffed and waved a dismissive hand. “Psh. A lot of adult books are boring. Don’t get too hung up on them. You should read what you like.”

My reaction was a little too over the top to be natural, but Clay seemed to appreciate it, nonetheless.

Casting my memories back to my middle school days, I recalled the few Goosebumps books that I had read and told Clay about my favorites. One of them turned out to be the same that he bought, and he ended up reading the first chapter to me over the video call.

We both pretended that it was for the sake of helping him practice, but in reality, it was just an excuse. Neither of us wanted to end the call yet, and we ended up talking into the early hours of the morning.

I was going to be dead tired at work tomorrow, but it was worth it as I watched Clay focusing on the page in front of him, reading to me with a small smile on his face.