Adrian
I’ve had counseling before. It’s mandatory as part of discharge and getting hurt, it’s compulsory for a shit ton of reasons. I didn’t need it, because cracking open my brain and sharing thought wasn’t enjoyable. It was hell. The concept of having to talk about my feelings—losing close friends, the only man I’ve ever loved getting hurt—was an alien thing that I didn’t want to go through over and over.
“Can you tell me a bit about your time in—”
“No.”
The counselor, a new guy to me and JC both—Alan—peered up from his notes and raised his eyebrows in surprise.
“I just need—”
“I don’t need to sit here talking about how war is bad, and how devastated I was to lose friends, or how it nearly killed me to think JC was dead. I’m done with all that.” I was stiff and sitting upright in my chair, and JC reached over to take my hand.
“We’ve talked about it a lot, at least I have,” JC murmured. He was talking to Alan but was looking at me with a ton of emotion in his expression that I had no hope of unpicking. Did he want me to talk about that part of our lives? Was this what couples therapy was like?
Was this even couples therapy when we were together but not quite?
In love but not acting on it.
Kissing but holding back.
“Okay,” Alan didn’t seem phased by what I said. Instead, he smiled softly and nodded. “So, let’s focus on how the two of you met?
“I was five,” I said.
“Four,” JC corrected me, “nearly five.”
“He remembers that better than me—”
“We had a party in the treehouse—”
“You stole a pie from the kitchen—”
“I gave you my Transformer—”
We talked over each other in our usual way, and then we stopped and grinned stupidly at each other.
“I still have that Transformer, you know,” I said softly. “In a box along with the photos and the letters you smuggled out to me from boarding school when they blocked your emails.”
“For real?”
“All of it.” All of you.
He frowned at me. “I don’t know where anything I had from when I was little went—mom cleared it out when Dad left, and…” he stopped talking and shifted awkwardly in his chair, and I immediately felt protective.
“We should go back and find it all—it’s probably in storage somewhere.”
“You think mom kept all of my stuff?”
“She’s your mom,” I reminded him, and he winced.
“Exactly.”
I liked to think that JC’s mom had a heart somewhere under the picture-perfect model exterior. It was buried deep, but it had to be there somewhere.
“Okay, so you met as children,” Alan interrupted our musing, and I snapped back to him immediately.
“Sorry. Yes, we did. My mom was housekeeper to JC’s grandparents.”
“She made the best pies. She was like a second mom to me.” He snorted in disbelief then. “No, a first mom, really. I grew up with her and Adrian was always there. We’ve always been best friends, and what we feel for each other isn’t brotherly.” He side-eyed me, and he looked worried.
“Not brotherly at all,” I defended and then leaned in and kissed him squarely on the lips. He chased for more of the kiss when I moved back, and then we smiled at each other like idiots.
Alan scribbled something in his book, and I peered over to see if I could make out what he’d written, but his writing was tiny, and no doubt it was in counselor-code.
We talked about everything and nothing for the longest time—memories from when we were growing up, the moments we cherished between us, and I began to relax into this. We were clearly on the same page with the way we felt, with how close we’d been, and there was nothing awful that the counselor was pulling out from any of it.
“So, what made you both enlist?” he asked.
And there it was… Alan had taken a grenade, pulled the pin, and thrown it between us.
“I enlisted first,” JC said, after a prolonged pause that I had no hope of filling. This was his story to start, but I dreaded where it would go.
“Why?”
“Why does anyone enlist?” I interjected defensively. “Patriotism, family, there are a ton of reasons.”
“I wanted to achieve something that would add up to more than the sum of my parents’ lives. I wanted to be me, and not just the child of famous parents,” JC interrupted, and it sounded practiced, but then he’d probably explained his reason before in his regular weekly counseling. “It was a thought I’d carried with me a long time, from being a kid, I guess, and it seemed right to enlist. It wasn’t some form of running from my dysfunctional family or avoiding real life; it was a conscious decision I made.” He sat back in his chair as if he’d run a marathon, and I wondered if he’d expected this question, and now that it was over, he could relax.
“Is that the same for you, Adrian?”
“Yeah,” I lied.
“He’s lying,” JC said very simply.
“Why do you say that JC?” Alan didn’t look surprised, and he didn’t write anything in his notes.
“I’m not lying,” I lied again.
“You went to keep me safe,” JC stared right at me, probably willing me to spill all my innermost secrets. I could feel the weight of his gaze, and that grenade that Allen had thrown was ticking down to an explosion that could open too many old wounds. “Tell him,” JC encouraged, but I was frozen. “Tell him it’s my fault you were even there.”
“JC, that’s not true—”
“Why are you lying! We said we’d be honest in here.”
“I am being honest.”
“It’s my fault that you were out there, my fault you were hurt, my fault for everything. Until we get past that there will never be a real us.”
What? I had to make him see that he was wrong about most of it, and I sighed heavily, but to do that, I had to be honest about the bad part of it. “JC, this isn’t what I want to do.”
“I need you to be honest. I need to know that we don’t have an unhealthy co-dependency.”
“What—”
“I mean it, Adrian, tell me… tell Alan… everything.”
“Okay, so maybe, JC is half right,” I admitted after a pause.
“See?” JC said immediately as if I’d just validated his fears.
“No, JC, wait.” I untangled our fingers and sat away from him, knowing that if I had hold of him that I wouldn’t be able to say the words in the right way. He looked tired, pressing his fingers to his temples.
“What do you want to say, Adrian?” Alan prompted.
“I always look out for JC. It’s as if protecting him is coded into my DNA or something, and when he went to sign up, I went as well, because it seemed right to support him. But I didn’t go just to be with him, but to enlist myself—to make a difference and begin a career that meant something to me. Maybe even to show the world what the son of a housekeeper in a rich Hollywood-shaped world was capable of. JC’s parents never thought much of me, and I wasn’t sure what I actually thought about myself. No one expected us to be put together, that was on his grandmother, but maybe it was a chance for me to be on my own and to forge a path in the world.” That was the part I’d never wanted to admit—that maybe I needed to be alone and to make something of myself that wasn’t connected to Adrian directly.
“I see,” Alan made a note. “And would you say that—”
“You wanted to enlist?” JC interrupted, and he sounded incredulous.
“Yeah, I knew it was what I wanted.”
JC stood shakily, “you’re lying just to make me feel better! Stop fucking doing that!” He stumbled toward the door, yanking it open then slamming it behind him.
You’d better believe I was two steps behind him.
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