Page 39 of Loverboy

“Probably not.” He didn’t look up. “You never are.”

“Some therapist you are.”

“It’s the truth,” he said. “But I’m here anyway.”

“You’re not sick of me yet?” I turned my head toward him.

“No.”

His answer was short and gave my spiralling mind little to latch onto. I had a thousand follow-up questions, hungry to crack open his skull and pick it apart with a fine-toothed comb for the validation I needed.

“Why?” I whispered.

He closed his book and sighed, running his fingers through his hair and pulling it away from his face. The space between his brows wrinkled.

“You’re all I have.” There was an intensity in his eyes that made my spine prickle.

Simple words—but better than before. Ones I could work with. I’d heard them a dozen times before, but they always managed to cut through the noise. The symphony of self-loathing and fear quieted to a simmer, and the room seemed to settle with it. However, some of the thoughts still lingered.

“That’s not true,” I said. “There’s Mom and Blane.”

There had to be people who ranked higher than me. Our other brother. Mom. Friends I didn’t know about. I hated the idea that our social circles might not overlap the way they used to, now that I had spent so long away from home.

“Are they you?” He tapped his fingers against the book cover.

“No,” I admitted.

“Exactly.”

He said it confidently, as though it were just that simple.

It was infuriating how he refused to feed my spirals. I wondered how long this could last. Whether he’d wake up one day and realize I would always be this way, and that I truly couldn’t be fixed, no matter how much he poured into me.

“Please don’t leave me,” I said quietly, crippling vulnerability on display.

He snorted. “You couldn’t get rid of me even if you tried.”

“I don’t know.” I scrunched my nose. “I feel like if I really committed, I could manage.”

“You think I’m weak like your shitty girlfriends? Offensive.” He clicked his tongue.

It was my turn to snort.

His fingers slipped into my hair, and he massaged gently, pulling a heavy sigh from deep in my tobacco-infested lungs. No matter how many times he did it, I never got sick of it. My eyelids grew heavy as he worked the remainder of my frenzy out with his touch. Lying at the foot of his narrow mattress, I was more comfortable than I’d been in weeks. The space was cramped, the situation absurd, but it was more than enough for me.

“What do you like about me?” I asked with my eyes closed.

His hand stilled, the weight of it a pleasant pressure on my head.

“You’re committed,” he said.

“You already said that when we went for coffee.”

His hand drifted down to the back of my neck, cupping it and smoothing his thumb over the side of my throat. “You do everything with your whole heart.”

My stomach turned into a butterfly enclosure.

“It’s kind of sickening, actually,” he added, softening the compliment into something more familiar. But it was too late, because I’d remember it forever.