by Ashley Love
They haven’t spoken much other than in passing after their previous outburst just a few days prior. Lex spent as much time as he could away from the room to avoid Mike’s questions. It seems like all everyone does is question him now.
“Why are you the most guarded asshole I’ve ever met?”
“Why do you ask so many fucking questions?” Lex growls, and Mike comes around the bench to get a better look at him, to see him eye to eye. “Look, I’m not into this whole true confessions bullshit. That’s not who I am.”
“It’s not who you are, or its not who everyone’s made you believe you are?”
Lex scoffs. “God, why does everyone in this motherfucker think they’ve got some psychology degree? Y’all are the craziest fucks I’ve ever met, I swear to God.” He shakes his head.
“What does it hurt to have a few friends in here, Alex? Huh?” Mike asks more forcefully, taking a step closer and Lex gives him a warning look. Stay away from me, motherfucker, he tells him without saying a word.
“Don’t call me Alex…and as a friend, you can do me a favor and shut the fuck up.”
It’s different with Mike than it is with Alan. Alan is the peacemaker, the advice man, the straight-shooter. The shit that Mike does to Lex’s head doesn’t sit right with him, ever. Alan has faced all of his demons and Mike, well, sometimes Lex wonders if Mike is prodding him for his own benefit as much as his. Everyone in this place just seems like they need someone, and Lex knows, at least some part of him does, that he doesn’t have much to give.
Mike takes a seat next to him on the bench, not fazed by his dissuading glance earlier. Lex watches him suspiciously from the corner of his eye, keeping his focus mostly toward the ground.
“What’re you doing?”
“Waiting.”
“Waiting for what?” Lex asks, impatient, perturbed.
Mike leans back and settles, crossing his arms. “Until you decide you wanna talk.”
“Well, we’re gonna be here all fucking night then.” Lex laughs, unamused.
“Why?” Mike asks, challenging him, pushing him. He never lets Lex get an easy out, because he knows, he knows if he just keeps tapping the glass it eventually shatters. He knows it will.
“God, what is your fucking deal?” Lex huffs out, finally looking at him.
“Tell me about her.”
“No.” He shifts nervously. “No, just…just fucking stop it.”
“I know she’s important to you.” Mike leans firward, knees against his elbows, mirroring Lex’s posture.
“How? Are you a mind reader or some shit, too?” He laughs, looking at his hands, threading and unthreading his fingers anxiously, thinking, thinking about everything.
“I see the look on your face when you think about her.” Mike waits, studying Lex who tries not to change his expression, tries not to blink or swallow or sigh. “Like right now…”
“Stop it.” His voice trembles.
“What’s her name?”
“Stop!” he shouts, hanging his head, and it’s silent for a moment.
Lex looks up again, rubbing a hand over his face, back over the knitted fabric covering his head, folding his hands to rest his chin on his fists. He watches twig tree limbs make silhouettes over the moon and sits back, pulling his elbows back against the bench, settling there. Mike doesn’t move, just gives him time.
“Leala,” he finally says, quietly.
“What?” Mike asks, turning his head a little toward Lex but only to hear him better, still keeping his eyes on the ground.
“Her fucking name,” he snaps, then sighs, quietly again, “It's Leala.”
“Is she clean?” It’s a safe question, and Lex doesn’t hesitate for too long before answering.
“Yeah.” Mike opens his mouth but Lex continues quietly. “She wasn’t. I mean, she used to do it…with me, or whatever. But she got off it, she’s…she’s just got other shit going on, ya know?”
Mike hears it in Lex’s voice, hears the distance, the wanting, all of those things he ignores or pretends aren’t there. “You want her to be proud of you, don’t you?” Mike finally looks at him over his shoulder, and Lex hangs his head back, breathing out a frustrated sigh.
“Okay, that’s enough fucking talking about it.”
Mike laughs, sitting back, somewhat relieved. “Okay, Alex…okay. Someday you’re gonna get in touch with how you really feel. I kinda hope it’s soon.”
He chuckles, still staring up, watching purplish wisps of clouds move across the blackness there. “Keep hoping…and it’s Lex, I told you that.”
Mike smiles. “She calls you Lex, doesn’t she?”
“Just drop it.” Lex shakes his head.
They sit there, quiet until night completely falls, until their fingertips and noses are red and slightly painful to the touch, neither of them in a hurry to move inside. Lex turns the thought over and over in his head, still staring blankly at the sky, the cold making his eyes dry, the idea of pride, of someone being proud of him for once. Is that what he wants? Will those feelings come next?
And Mike doesn’t miss the fact that despite all of Lex’s bitching and pushing, pushing him away and telling him to fuck off and not letting him in, the truth is that he’s still sitting there. Lex never walked away, and Mike is starting to see that this tough guy façade is just a hoax, just like he suspected. Mike more than anyone knows that sometimes staying is the hardest part, and if Lex has that fight in him, Mike decides that very night that he’ll be damned if he lets him walk out of this the same way he came in.
13
“That was just embarrassing. Like, I think I’m actually embarrassed for you a little.”
“Yeah, yeah, I’m gonna get you next time, man. Fucking ex-college player trying to hand me my ass.” Lex laughs, trying to swat a basketball from Alan’s hands as the two of them come into the warm hallway from the concrete court outside. Alan chuckles and switches the ball from hand to hand, his skills, though rusty, still enough to keep Lex frustrated and reaching.
It’s true, Alan played college ball—junior college, until he fell in with the wrong crowd. He’s been telling Lex this story little by little, growing a trust, a bond between them since their individual sessions have started becoming more frequent, and more personal. Now they’re boys, in a way, and the pickup games of basketball and half hours snuck here and there listening to rap music in Alan’s office are now just other vehicles for their communication, just more opportunities for Lex to open up and start really taking what Alan says to heart.
The boys laugh, pushing up the sleeves of their hooded sweatshirts, their sneakers scuffing the squeal of rubber against slick linoleum down the hall toward Alan’s office, when at the end of the hall where it opens into the visiting lounge, Lex sees something that catches his eye.
“Hey!” he yells down the hall, his face paling instantly. “What are you doing here?”
The head of the young boy snaps toward Lex’s voice and Alan becomes uneasy, concerned. “Lex we don’t have ti—”
“That’s my brother,” he says, the words stopping Alan in his tracks as Lex leaves him standing there, picking up his pace to jog down the hall toward Damon.
“Lex!” Alan finally shouts after him, but doesn’t move to catch up.
Damon stands at the end of the hall, looking slightly shaken, hands dug deep into his pockets. His breath quickens noticeably when he sees his brother. A tall uniformed security guard stands next to him. Lex recognizes the man as Pat, who always escorts visitors in, only today isn’t visiting day.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” Lex asks heatedly under his breath once he reaches the end of the hall, snatching Damon close by his slender arm. “Who told you I was here?”
The receptionist has stepped around the enclosed desk and moves to the two boys uneasily. “Sir, it’s not visiting hours, we need you to—”
“This is my brother,” Lex says, not able
to look away from Damon’s face.
“I understand, but—”
“Can you just give us a minute?” Lex finally looks at Pat who looks at the receptionist, both of them sensing the tension between Lex and this young boy they’ve never seen. “Just give me a minute,” he says again when no one answers, pulling Damon over to the far side of the room.
“What are you doing?” he asks once they’re out of earshot, jerking Damon so that he’s backed into the corner, a tall plant standing next to him reaching its branches close.
“I…I just—”
Lex doesn’t let him continue. “Why are you here? Who told you I was here?”
“What do you want me to answer first?” Damon tries to laugh, but his fright holds it in his chest.
“Don’t be smart with me!”
“Sorry…sorry.” Lex’s tightening grip on his arm makes his words quick and pained. “I just, I ran into your friend—”
“My friend? Which friend? I don’t have any friends.”
“That girl.” He winces. “That girl that used to—”
“Son of a bitch,” Lex breathes out, finally releasing him and bringing both hands up to his own head as he turns his back and it all makes sense.
Damon releases his own pent up breath, rubbing his bicep where Lex’s fingers had dug in. “I’m sorry,” he says quietly, whimpers, and Lex turns back to see his lips trembling.
Damon looks wild, pekid, like those kids found in the woods raised by animals or locked in closets, save for him being well-groomed and obviously fed. But he’s standing there looking at Lex as if he were a predator, as if at any moment he would lash out and tear his throat from between his head and shoulders. Something overcomes Lex in that moment, a tug in his stomach, in his bones, a call to nurture and coddle his brother, to show him that he wouldn’t hurt him, though he doesn’t know how.
“Hey…quit crying, alright?” he says gently, reaching for Damon’s shoulder and Damon sniffles, hurriedly wiping his eyes and nose on his shirt where they’ve just begun to leak.
“I’m not,” Damon insists petulantly and Lex rolls his eyes.
“You just…you can’t just show up here like this, you get that? Giving me a heart attack and shit?”
Damon nods and clears his throat, rubs his eyes stubbornly where they sting from tears. He smooths a nervous hand over the hair that’s now missing atop his head, curls sheared off leaving flat brown roots and he looks more like Lex than ever, almost painfully so.
“You told Mom, didn’t you?” Lex asks after a moment, knowing the answer, seeing it in the way Damon can’t hold his eyes.
Damon nods again reluctantly, and waits in apprehension for his brother to explode, but he just sighs.
“Alright….it’s alright I’ll, I’ll figure something out.” He runs a hand over his head, his fingers curling in in masked frustration because he really doesn’t know what to do now, how to handle his mother knowing where he is, having his brother venturing here once again to see him unannounced.
Lex looks off into the room, back turned to his brother. He sees that across the room Alan has moved and is speaking to Pat quietly in the hallway. He can feel Damon trembling behind him, fear permeating from him in waves, a deep kind of fear that he doesn’t know how to console. It’s the kind of fear, Lex understands now, that’s kept him in top ranks in his life for the past five years, a fear that makes others take orders, obeying him but not necessarily respecting him; it’s the fear of the broken, and he’s broken everyone in his life that’s tried to get close to him.
It never used to phase him that he didn’t know his brother, because he always tried to pretend that he did, never thinking that maybe the ten year old he left behind had grown into a bitter teenager, or a sad one, or a lonely one.
“Are you gonna come home?” that same lonely teenager asks, finally, in a voice that sounds like his own. “When you get better, are you gonna come home now?”
Maybe he’s had his heart broken, maybe he’s needed advice with things he was too embarrassed to ask their parents, so he had to ask his friends—his stupid friends who don’t really want the best for him, not in the way that a brother would, that a brother should, if he knew how. Lex’s not that brother anymore.
“I dunno, Dame. I don’t know what I wanna do, or even how long I’m gonna be here.” He can’t look at Damon when he says it.
“Well can I come stay with you? When you’re better and you get out of here maybe I can come hang out and we can do stuff, right? We can do stuff if you’re not in trouble anymore. Mom won’t be mad.”
“It’s not that simple. You know that,” Lex says between gritted teeth, Damon’s questions grating on his nerves because he knows the kid deserves to ask them. He deserves answers to these and a hundred others but Lex just doesn’t have them. No one ever had any for him.
“Why don’t you wanna see me anymore?”
Lex whips around to face Damon again. “Hey, don’t you ever say some shit like that to me. You got that? I didn’t say anything like that. Don’t start putting words in my mouth,” he growls, expecting to shut Damon up, but it doesn’t. It hurts him deeper, the way Lex’s dancing around everything he’s come here to ask him about, the way he’s spouting off orders instead of answers. It pushes Damon over the edge, raising up an anger in him that’s been boiling since he was old enough to understand that his brother didn’t just disappear, he left him.
“I’ve just been waiting for years for you to get yourself straightened out! Mom always tells me she doesn’t want me around you 'cause you’re in trouble all the time, and you’re getting it together now and you still won’t come home! You still don’t want shit to do with me!”
“Hey!” Before Lex can stop himself, his hands are curled around the collar of Damon’s jacket. “Watch your fucking mouth.”
Damon’s eyes widen and instinctively he shoves Lex away hard. Lex is shocked as he stumbles back, but when he looks at his brother his breath catches in his throat, the sight of Damon, every bit the teenager and probably a total handful outside of this impromptu drop-in, standing there ready to piss himself. He expects Lex to retaliate, expects to be at the mercy of his temper. It makes Lex sick to his stomach. Thoughts flood his mind that he doesn’t want to remember. He sees himself at Damon’s age; he wonders if that’s what his father saw—a teenaged man reduced to a scared little boy. He wonders if his father had that same pull to baby him after scaring him senseless or beating him to the same state. He wonders if he, too, just didn’t know how. The difference is he never tried.
“Damon—”
“I don’t know why I even came here. It doesn’t matter what I say,” the young boy says before Lex can offer any condolence. “All you do is think about yourself…doesn’t matter if you leave the rest of us behind.”
Lex opens his mouth but the words can’t come. He doesn’t have any. As much as he wants to scream that Damon’s wrong, that everyone is wrong, he can’t. Not anymore.
Damon doesn’t give him the chance anyway. And as he brushes past and heads for the door, Lex hears it click closed behind him and he wonders if that too—walking out—is just another part of his image that he’s left in the minds of everyone that has tried to love him.
14
As soon as Damon left, Lex wanted him to come back. It’s weird, he thinks now as he sits at the phone station and stares at the receiver, thinking of who to call. He wants to talk to someone. Alan has been trying to talk to him for the last two hours, but he’s not in the mood. He’s never tried, but he’s pretty sure he can’t just roll into Alan’s office and say, “Hey, just listen, don’t talk.” It’s his job, after all, to interpret Lex’s feelings.
Right now he just wants to talk.
He dials a number that he now regrets not calling more often.
“Hey man.” He sits back, relieved when he hears the answer on the line. “You doing alright?”
“I feel like I
should be asking you that.” Kyle laughs on the other side.
Lex chuckles, turning a chair to his right to face him, propping his feet in it. “Nah, don’t worry about me.”
Kyle asks, “They treating you alright in there?”
It’s so genuine, Lex imagines it would break his heart if he knew what that felt like. He tells himself Kyle always sounded this young, but he knows he never paid it much mind before.
“It’s…it’s different, you know? People give a shit so much its kinda crazy. This guy I’m rooming with…he’s got two kids. Been to rehab three fucking times. Heroine. Can’t kick the shit. And worried about me getting better.” He barely believes it himself when he says it, and he lets it sink in a little as he switches the phone to his other ear.
“Fuck,” Kyle sighs in disbelief.
Lex reaches for the notepad and pen at the corner of the desk and starts drawing absently. “I know.”
“Your girl been coming to see you?”
He cradles the phone between his shoulder and ear, using his other hand to keep the paper steady. “Yeah. Visitation’s only once a week, but she’s been coming.” He draws jagged strokes around the edge of the paper.
“Good. Oh, speakin of…I, uh, things started to hit the fan dude, and I…I didn’t know how to get in touch with you, so…” Kyle’s uneasiness makes Lex’s pen still as it registers in his mind where this is leading.
“Everything go smoothly?” he asks eagerly, slight panic setting in, making him shift in his chair and sit up straighter. It makes his arms itch, makes his nerves vibrate.
“Yeah. Yeah, it’s taken care of. All of it, just like you said,” Kyle assures him, his voice just as jumpy as Lex feels in his own skin. “It’s over, Lex,” he says then, more steadily, taking a deep breath, and Lex feels lightheaded, sitting back in his chair again. It’s over. He’s not sure if Kyle means it as solemnly as he hears it, and regardless of the words, they’re both sure in reality it is far from over, but the simplicity of it is so freeing that Lex is beside himself. He breathes deep, running a hand over his face and blinking several times down at his lap before the sensations melts away dully. It’s over.