18. Malcolm
MALCOLM
A ndrea, my long-time therapist hands me a fresh box of tissues because I used up what was left of her other one.
To be clear, I’m not weeping or anything, but the tears are flowing nonstop.
They have been since I left work. Since Ryan stopped me from kissing him and told me to back off.
He did it again today. For the second day in a row.
Not in words so much, but he might as well have said it.
Yesterday was bad after he ducked out of work early to get some sleep, but it was understandable.
He hadn’t looked as rough or tired today, though, which I assumed meant he caught up on his rest.
But then he went off and had lunch with Miguel. Somewhere not in the building. When we were in the office, he never once left his desk to go to the bathroom, and he didn’t return any of the texts I sent him where I made it abundantly clear I wanted to see him tonight.
I feel like I’m finally getting my long overdue punishment. Like what we did—sucking and kissing and fucking—was a trick to get me to fall for him, and now he’s pulling the rug out—same as I did to him way back when .
I’m crying because I know I deserve it. Because I know he’s right to use me and leave me lost and broken.
“Can we go back to this room metaphor?” Andrea asks gently, but also like we’re definitely circling back, whether I want to or not.
I heave a sigh and wipe my leaky eyes again. “What about it?”
“It had to do with your mother’s affair?”
I’ve been seeing Andrea since my mom died.
She’s the same age mother would have been had she lived, which means there’s been a lot of transference she and I have both had to work through over the years.
I’ve been needy, petulant, rebellious, regretful, unfair, ungrateful, and angry with her in each new phase of my life.
She’s a grief therapist, so that’s how this all started, but now she’s the person I vent all my issues at for fifty minutes a week.
When I’m done, she gives me a thing to do to deal with something I’ve been nervous about or avoiding.
Whether it’s having a conversation, paying a bill, or replying to an email—just something so I don’t let my anxieties fester or sabotage myself.
“Sort of,” I say, not wanting to talk about this with her either.
It’s one thing to tell someone my mother had an affair. It’s another to disclose who she had an affair with and what any of that had to do with me.
It’s all so fucked up. “Do you think I’m normal?” I ask.
“I’ve never liked the word normal,” she says.
“Do you think I’m fucked up?”
“I think you’re human. Perfectly imperfect.”
“What if I told you I’m in love with my stepbrother?”
“I’d remind you that you no longer have a stepbrother.”
“Is that really a label that goes away, though? Former stepbrother, ex stepbrother, are you catching the brother part? ”
“I remember Ryan, yes. You haven’t talked about him in a while.”
“I thought he was gone,” I say. “But he’s in my internship.”
“Why haven’t you mentioned that?”
“I was processing it.” And we’ve mostly been talking about the break with Kaylin. Ryan hasn’t come up, and I guess that was on purpose. But now that the “room” is lit up like a fucking carnival, it’s harder to avoid.
“Love feels like quite the leap,” she says.
“It’s not,” I say, sighing again. “It’s more like a laying down of arms.”
“Hm. I know sex isn’t your favorite topic?—”
“It’s fine,” I say, in full surrender mode.
I feel like shit, and if this makes it worse, who cares?
On the off chance it might help, I’ll talk about Ryan and sex.
“It’s just complicated, and I don’t expect anybody to understand it, except I thought maybe he would, but he’s not talking to me right now, which is fair since I made his life hell. ”
“I don’t recall you being particularly happy at that time either.”
More tears fall remembering how miserable I was in high school.
The soul shriveling loneliness. How being with Ryan was unthinkable, but being without him was just—fucking devastating .
I abused alcohol and Adderall. I had sex with Kaylin literally any chance I got just to be held and stop thinking.
I tried out for the goddamn football team for the body contact for fuck’s sake while also hoping to find a friend I could be close to the way I’d been with Ryan, but maybe not mix so much love in with it.
Back then, I refused to admit I missed him even to myself. And I didn’t just miss him as my friend and someone I could say anything to, I missed everything . The physical closeness. The safety and containment. The unconditional acceptance no matter how rotten I was.
Something about losing a parent when you’re that young makes most people weird around you, especially kids. Everyone I told, with the notable exception of Ryan peeled themselves away from me like it was their fucking mom who died. I felt like an infection.
Andrea helped me reconcile that piece. I understand grief better now. She was okay with my decision to stop telling people my mom died. She was also okay when I started lying and claiming she was still alive, living out of state.
Andrea said as long as I was honest with her and my father, I was allowed to cope however I needed to.
But part of my teenage rebellion involved not telling her about what happened with Ryan.
At the time, it was because it embarrassed me.
Now I’m mostly embarrassed that I was embarrassed.
The thought of trying to explain it all so long after the fact is exhausting when all I can think about is whether he’s going to start turning everyone against me the way I did to him.
But in answer to her question—about how fucking miserable I was in high school, I say, “I didn’t understand what I was feeling. I didn’t get what I liked about him or what I wanted.”
“But you do now?”
“Yes.”
“In retrospect as well?”
“Yeah.”
“Which I’m assuming was a more physical relationship?”
“That’s what I’m assuming, too,” I say, so frustrated with my brain’s inability to wrap its arms around the totality of who I am. “I’m still really confused about a lot of it.”
“Well, why do you think that is?”
The real answer for that is what I don’t want to talk about because it nauseates me that it’s still something I think about.
It shouldn’t be. Ryan is separate of all that, but my question is can he really be ?
If I’m still affected by it, can I really say it’s not spilling into my feelings toward Ryan, too?
Fuck, I want to talk to him so bad. There’s no one else I trust with this, but I don’t know if I can trust him anymore, either. I wish I’d told the Ryan who showed up at my apartment after work Friday night. Friday night Ryan was listening, and I hadn’t crossed any major lines with him.
Now I’ve had sex with him, and the need to have sex with him again is impossible to ignore—for me at least. Conversations like this one I should have with him feel secondary. I want to connect with him both ways, but my physical desire is out of control.
I need more time with him. Time without TikToks or Patreons or fucking Miguel coming between us. Time to hold him and whisper all my secrets to him and let him tell me my past doesn’t make me fucked up beyond repair or wanting.
Goddamn, I’m needy. Selfish, too. Is that what’s pushing him away? I’m making it all about me?
“Because he’s not talking to me,” I say.
More tears. Goddamnit. I grab two tissues and shove them both against my eyes while I lean over, elbows propped on my knees.
I’m such a fucking mess. Christ. This obsession I have with him isn’t cute or endearing.
It’s psycho, and I’m sure it shows. I’ve seen him look scared at least a few times already, but I took no for an answer… didn’t I?
Fuck.
“When we were fourteen, he told me he was in love with me. It wasn’t something I could hear at the time.
The way people talked about LGBTQ kids at school—like they were freaks—and here I’ve got my fucking stepbrother telling me he’s one of them and maybe he thinks I am too—I just flipped out on him. ”
“But you were close before that,” she says .
“Yes.”
“Best friends?”
The very best. “Yeah.”
“If he’d only told you he was gay would you have reacted the same way?” she asks. “Or was it more to do with the fact that his feelings were directed at you?”
“I don’t think he is gay,” I say, which just puts my thoughts into more of a snare.
“But back then.”
“Back then—if he told me he was gay—I mean…” I think about it.
About the way we held each other. About the way we’d whisper talk about random things—TV shows, teachers, dinner, giving the most mundane conversations the veil of intimacy and importance.
“I think…I think…” I take a deep breath.
“I think I would have told him I was, too.”
“Oh.”
The room goes completely silent for a long moment.
“But that’s not how it happened,” I say in a rush.
Fuck, now I really wish that had been how it happened.
“What bothered you about knowing he loved you?”
“Not loved— in love . I don’t know. It was about twenty steps beyond where I was at? It was like having all this pressure on me all of a sudden, but it also changed the context of our whole past—or the previous year or two at a minimum. Like he’d been luring me or grooming me or something.”
“Grooming?” she asks, sounding even more surprised.
“I just mean I thought maybe he had ulterior motives.”
“Do you still think that?”
“Obviously not.”
“I don’t know why the hell you think that’s obvious,” she says.
“I felt the same way,” I tell her urgently, needing her to understand what I’m just now beginning to grasp. “I was just too stupid to realize it at the time. And I thought it was wrong.”
“Which was it?”
“Both,” I insist.
“To clarify,” she says, “You pushed him away out of a misguided sense of wrongness, not your feelings for him.”