Lennon Reborn

by Scarlett Cole

  Once they were in the kitchen, Georgia put on oven mitts and took the casserole dish out while Lennon dealt with the sides. “Did you get a food delivery?” she asked, wondering where all the food had come from.

  Lennon carried out the screw-top bottle of white wine tucked under his arm and cracked it open, pouring them each healthy glasses. “I went out to the grocery store and picked up a few things.” He said it so casually that anyone who didn’t know any better wouldn’t think anything of his comment. But she did, because she knew, though he hadn’t explicitly told her, that he’d been avoiding going outside. At first, she’d assumed that he’d just wanted to avoid the paparazzi who had been on their own “Where’s Waldo?” quest to find him in the aftermath of the accident. But as time progressed, she’d realized he was hiding from the world.

  She looked at him and smiled, the only acknowledgment of his achievement. He smiled back and placed the cutting board from his own apartment on her counter. The suction cups held the board in place while the pins held the baguette as he cut it.

  “This looks delicious,” she said once they were seated at the table with a steaming dish of chicken casserole packed full of veggies. She blew on a forkful before tasting it. She could smell the herbs.

  “It fucking better be. Even with that peeler attachment, it took an age to make,” he said, his voice thankfully filled with humor. He took a large bite and winced at how hot it was.

  “Well, it tastes awesome.”

  Lennon grinned and took a sip of his wine. “I got the recipe from Jordan, who got the recipe from Maisey.” He shrugged sheepishly.

  “You called him?” Her heart skipped a beat. He’d been out shopping, he’d cooked, and he contacted his friend.

  “I texted.” He looked up at her. “Don’t look at me like that.”

  She bit her bottom lip but couldn’t hide her happiness.

  He passed her the platter of bread. “I have to report back in the morning.”

  She pushed her chair out from the table and went to crouch down beside him. “Take a picture of us with the dish in the shot.”

  He shook his head. “Not going to happen.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Take the picture, Lennon. It will make them feel better to see you happy. Plus, I don’t think we have a picture of the two of us yet. Having a picture of you on my phone would make me happy.”

  Muttering under his breath, Lennon pulled his phone out of his pocket. He threw his arm over her shoulder and held the phone out wide. At the last minute, he turned and kissed her cheek. “Kissing you makes me happy,” he explained quietly.

  Georgia was happy to the very soles of her feet. “It makes me happy too.”

  Lennon tapped away on his phone. “There, sent,” he said, picking up his knork.

  “You need to remember to send a copy to me.”

  Almost immediately, Lennon’s phone buzzed. Then it buzzed again. And again. And again.

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” he said, scrolling down the messages. “Jordan fucking shared it. Asshole.” He handed her his phone.

  Nik: Jenny says you guys look adorable. She made me type that with threat of withdrawn sexual privileges!

  Elliott: Bring the good doctor home. I got news I want to tell you.

  Dred: You are a shit. I don’t know what she sees in you. Does she know you still tug into a sock?

  Georgia laughed. “A sock? Really?”

  “It’s handy, and easy to hide if you’re about to get caught,” he said, blushing.

  Dred: Petal is pissed that Unky Lennon got a girlfriend. You better bring her something fucking expensive when you come home.

  Jordan: That chicken looks fucking anemic. Gonna be helpful she’s a doctor when you are puking later.

  Elliott: It’s Kendalee. I love your hair!

  Two more messages came in while she was holding his phone.

  Maisey: Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage. ~ Lao Tzu

  Ellen: And you, my boy, have always had more than your fair share of both.

  He was loved so very deeply, and yet he believed he couldn’t love them all back—something she knew wasn’t true. Neural pathways could always be rebuilt. Sometimes it involved erasing history and dismantling old beliefs. But sometimes it simply involved taking the steps that had been missed over and over until the neural pathways remapped themselves.

  Georgia knew she’d never be able to change Lennon’s entrenched views by finding a way to teach him the science. Even if she could, this was a belief he held at a deeply personal and emotional level.

  She’d just have to show him.

  * * *

  Lennon was going to kill the man sitting across from him in the waiting room of his therapist’s fifteenth-story office.

  Okay, perhaps not kill.

  Maybe just knock him unconscious so he would stop tapping his nails on the chair arm, tapping that lacked coordination and consistency, and had erratic spacing.

  For someone who could usually be found tapping rhythms on any surface, Lennon knew he was overreacting. And he was very aware that it was because he was already on edge.

  The last time he’d sat in a therapist’s chair was the day before his eighteenth birthday. It had been the last day the court order had had any weight. After that day, no one could force him to say anything. Not that he’d said much in those sessions anyway.

  He wiped his palm on his thigh. It was fucking sweaty.

  With a huff, he pulled the phone from his pocket and pulled up the photograph he’d taken with Gia in her apartment, the one that Jordan had taken upon himself to share. It was all her fault that he was here, and though at first he’d felt grateful that she cared enough to call him on his shit, he’d later felt frustrated that she hadn’t just left him alone. But in the last fifteen minutes, staring at ugly white ceiling tiles, he knew his frustration wasn’t with her. It wasn’t even with tapping guy, it was with himself. How could it derail him so much just to sit in the waiting room of a therapist?

  One look at the photo, though, helped him center his emotions.

  The churning in his stomach began to ease.

  It was easy to see from the photograph that he’d caught her off guard. Everything about her said “joy.” Her laugh, her eyes. He’d rested his stump on her shoulder; she’d placed her hand on it. It looked . . . effortless. It did look not quite normal because the lower half of his arm was still missing. But that wasn’t what stood out in the photo.

  She did.

  “Fragile feelings” was such a pussy concept, but perhaps that was what he felt.

  He ran his finger along her screen image cheek and took a deep breath. He owed it to both of them, to the two people who looked so fucking happy in that photograph, to figure some of this out.

  And he didn’t just mean his surgery.

  He meant everything that had left his world so fucking bleak that he lived in permanent winter.

  The door opened and a tall man with salt-and-pepper hair and a knitted vest walked into the waiting room. “Lennon?” he asked, looking between Lennon and tapping guy.

  While he hadn’t considered it, he felt immediate relief that the guy had no clue who he was. He stood. “That’s me.”

  The man smiled. “Welcome. Come in. I’m Jack,” he said, offering his hand.

  Lennon shook it, suddenly aware that his sweaty palms gave away his true feelings about what was happening. His throat tightened, his words already getting caught between his heart and his head.

  Suddenly, he couldn’t say anything. Not even small talk.

  “Please take a seat, Lennon,” Jack said, pointing to a black leather chair.

  The office was set up more like a small living room than a doctor’s office. A large hessian rug was centered in the room, and two black leather chairs were angled across from each other. Next to each chair was a small round table, each with a bottle of water on top. He noticed that the table next to the chai
r that Jack had encouraged him to sit in also had a box of tissues on it.

  If Jack was expecting him to cry, he was sadly mistaken.

  He didn’t cry.

  But with Georgia he’d felt able to.

  Fuck.

  He took the seat and looked out of the large window. The New York skyline was impressive but too congested. For the first time since the accident, he realized he missed Toronto. And his brothers.

  His heart tilted, then righted itself.

  “Thank you for filling out the forms for me, Lennon. The information you provided was very helpful to set the context for your visit, but we can take this wherever you want. I thought it might be useful for us to get to know each other a little more and hoped you could start with telling me what made you make this appointment.”

  Wasn’t it obvious from the forms he’d filled out? “There’s a lot of shit in my head. I have . . . issues. Stuff I want to see if I can . . . you know . . . work through. Get through.”

  Jack slid his pen into the little holder attached to the clipboard that rested on his knee. “Well, that’s what I’m here for. But I meant the question a little more specifically. I understand that your surgery was fairly recent. Much of what you wrote about on the form, however, happened many, many years ago. So I’m curious about why you decided to make this appointment now, as opposed to, say, last year, or five years ago.”

  Gia. The answer was simple and straightforward. Three letters that made him want to be better. Three letters that made him want to be capable of love more than anything else in the world. “If I said it was because of a woman, would you tell me it’s the wrong reason to be here?”

  All of a sudden he felt like Will Hunting, in front of Robin Williams’ Sean. They’d be talking about game six, and apples, and seeing about a girl.

  Jack smiled. “As a man who has been married to the same woman for thirty years, I completely understand. So answer me this: Why are you here because of a woman?”

  “Because she deserves better than the man I currently am, and before I rule it out permanently, I want to see if I can become the man she deserves.”

  Jack didn’t say anything in response. Instead, he held Lennon’s gaze. Lennon looked down at the rug and considered his answer. Why wasn’t he the man she deserved? Why had he stayed emotionally in the same place all of these years? Was it really about Georgia, or was she just the catalyst? “I don’t know,” he said out loud, answering his own question.

  “You don’t know what?” Jack asked.

  “Why I’m here? Why now? But there is something about this. Something about the accident, and being away from everything I know, and being around her that’s giving me clarity about myself, and my life, and the idea that I might actually want more from it. Hell, I might actually deserve something more from it.” Lennon shrugged and looked back up at Jack, who was smiling softly.

  “That feels like the kind of answer we can work with,” Jack said. “How does it feel to say that out loud?”

  Stupid.

  Like a pussy.

  Wanting more.

  Undeserving.

  “Vulnerable. Foolish. Entitled.”

  “That’s a lot of judgment you’re placing on yourself, Lennon. But ‘vulnerable’ is the perfect emotion for therapy to work. It’s hard to be open and honest with yourself, let alone a stranger. Vulnerability shows you are digging down into those deep layers of emotions and exposing them. But tell me a little more about ‘foolish’ and ‘entitled.’”

  “People have rough lives. I grew up in a group home with boys who all had shitty starts. Hell, some of them didn’t even make it to adulthood. It feels whiny to sit here in your fancy office and complain when I have millions in the bank, multiple homes, and . . . shit.”

  Jack leaned forward in his chair. “The accumulation of things will never fill the holes inside of us. And from what I’ve read of the information you provided, I would never consider you foolish or entitled for seeking help to figure out how to fill those holes from the inside out. I guess the question is, are you ready to do the work?”

  “Yes.” The single word felt as though it bounced around the room. Bounced off the walls and then settled back inside his chest. He was ready. It was time. It was fucking terrifying, but it was time. “Yes,” he repeated, his voice gruff.

  Lennon felt his eyes sting with tears. He looked at the box of tissues that sat on the table and realized he probably would be using them after all.

  Two hours later, Lennon’s cab pulled up outside his condo building. After sitting in Jack’s chair for ninety grueling, exhausting, mind-blowing minutes, he had a pounding headache and a burning sense of resolve. Nothing had been fixed in those ninety minutes. Hell, they hadn’t even begun to properly excavate the layers and layers of damage. But he’d taken a step, and that step felt fucking amazing.

  He wanted his notebook. He had shit he needed to put down on paper before it disappeared out of his head. And he had homework. Jack had suggested he begin a gratitude journal. Lennon had initially scoffed at the idea, but the more he’d thought about it through the session, the more he’d realized that he did let the negative in his life drown out everything else. Perhaps focusing on the good in his life might help restore some balance.

  Gratitude. There was somebody he wanted to thank, and luckily the florist across from the apartment was open. He jogged across the street and stepped into the store, where the sweet smell of flowers surrounded him.

  “I want some flowers for my girlfriend,” he said to a woman making a large arrangement on a white table. “Do you have red roses, the long-stemmed kind?”

  The woman stood up straight and greeted him with a smile as she wiped a hand down her apron. “We do. I can sell them loose, in an arrangement, or we do boxes of six, twelve, or twenty-four. Do you have a budget or a number in mind?”

  As for budget, he could buy the shop. But as Jack had mentioned, buying things had never filled any of the holes inside him. Instead, he’d try the simple beauty of being traditional. “I’ll take a dozen.”

  Once the box and his handwritten note were ready and he’d paid the bill, Lennon tucked the flowers under his arm and crossed the street back to the condo. Georgia had already told him she’d be working until seven, so he’d suggested a late supper at the Italian restaurant down the street. She was going to text him when she was ready, and they’d meet in the lobby. Using the key and elevator pass she’d given to him, he’d leave the flowers on her bed where she would see them as she changed. The elevator took its own sweet time to get to her floor. When the elevator doors opened, he saw that the door into her home was wide open.

  He was about to place the roses on the ground and creep in quietly in case the place was being burgled when he realized that any thief would have had to get in through the security doors, past the concierge, up an elevator that required a pass to operate, and then through her front door, all the while being watched by security cameras throughout the building. And would have had to have the alarm code.

  Her plans must have changed while he was in his appointment. His heart foolishly skipped a beat at the idea that he would get to see her earlier than planned, and the thought made him grin.

  He placed the roses down on the bench. “Where are you, sweetheart?” he muttered, wanting to surprise her. He slid out of his jacket and then picked the roses back up.

  She could be in the shower or upstairs. He heard the faint sound of his cymbal, as if it was being tapped by something small, not the stick.

  He jogged up the stairs, thinking how cute she’d looked—as she’d watched him play the night before—but then reflected in a picture frame on the wall, he saw a man in a black suit holding a clipboard, tapping the cymbal with his pen.

  “Twenty-four feet and six inches,” came a voice that sounded as if it was in the greenhouse. “I’d be very surprised if it didn’t sell for more than twenty million.”

  Sell.

  Lennon held his spot and l
istened.

  “That’s good news,” said a third voice. “I think you’re right to suggest listing it at nineteen five to start a feeding frenzy.”

  “As a reminder, you are going to need to provide us with the documents that prove your daughter has authorized you to execute the sale on her behalf,” said the man holding a clipboard.

  “I have the documents with me. She’s sorry she couldn’t meet us here today, but she had a very full operating schedule today and asked me to take care of this in her stead.”

  Lennon’s chest felt as if all the air had been sucked out of it. Something didn’t add up. He’d always gotten the impression that Georgia loved her home, and it also didn’t make sense that she’d never told him she was thinking of selling.

  She’s going to leave you.

  She’s lying to you.

  STOP!

  She told you her father wouldn’t miss her if she left.

  She told you her father wants this place for himself.

  She loves you.

  It wasn’t much of a stretch to conclude that her father was going to try to sell the condo out from underneath her.

  Bastard.

  He marched into the room, placing the roses down on a side table as he quickly looked at the three men. It wasn’t hard to conclude which one was her father. Same eyes, same dark hair. “Gia doesn’t even know you’re here, does she?”

  “Who are you?” he asked, taking a step away from the door, a nervous glint to his eye.

  The man with the clipboard stepped back too. “Should I call security?”

  “Go ahead,” Lennon replied without taking his eyes off Georgia’s father. “None of you should be here.”

  “I asked who you are,” her father said as he took in Lennon’s missing arm.

  Yeah, look all you want motherfucker. One arm or no, I can still kick your fucking ass. “I’m Georgia’s boyfriend. And I’m more than happy to help you leave.”

  And then he saw it. The defining difference between Georgia and her father. Arrogance oozed from him in the way he looked down his nose at Lennon, no mean feat given Lennon was a good six or seven inches taller than the smarmy bastard in the silver-gray suit.