Total pages in book: 75
Estimated words: 71698 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 358(@200wpm)___ 287(@250wpm)___ 239(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 71698 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 358(@200wpm)___ 287(@250wpm)___ 239(@300wpm)
She just lets us be us.
That’s the thing about my mom. She’s never tried to control anyone. As a therapist, she probably spends all day helping people come to terms with the fact that the one thing they’re never going to be able to control is other people. It’s important to just let go and let it be, even when people are doing it wrong. She’s going to let me make my choices, as she has ever since I legally became an adult, and even before then. She’ll give me a gentle encouragement or a hard dose of reality in a loving way if that’s what I need, but she’ll wait for me to ask first and be ready to honestly receive an answer.
I shift my hand from Wilder’s leg over to find his hands when he drops them under the table and into his lap. I clench both his hands with mine. I stroke his long fingers, smoothing over the calluses on the tips.
Wilder sees the world in music. That’s the way he understands it. He breaks it down and turns it into chords and lyrics. Music flows through his veins. It’s in his brain and in his heart. I’ve seen him literally sit through the most uncomfortable press, and I can just tell he’s up in his head, turning the conversation and his responses into lyrics before he decodes them back into reasonable answers for the rest of the world.
“You know, I’ve seen a few therapists in the past,” Wilder says, turning to my mom. His voice gets even deeper and smokier, the tone he seems to save for the most serious times. “I didn’t like it, but I do think I got something out of it. I could let go of… what happened before I lived with my grandma. It’s a complicated profession that evokes a lot of complicated feelings in people.”
My mom searches his face, not impolitely or invasively. She’s just trying to understand what he’s saying beneath what he’s not saying. “That’s very true.”
Wilder doesn’t have to swear anything to my mom. I like that he turns to me, not cutting her out, but speaking while he makes the most intimate and honest eye contact. “I don’t want to hurt you or have something happen to you that you’re not ready for. I’ll do everything to keep you out of the professional part of my life if you decide you do want to be in it.”
“But we can’t just keep walking around in disguise. I can’t go to your place, not even after the hype dies down, and you can’t come here. Someone will figure it out.”
“I could do pizza delivery one week and smuggle myself inside a suitcase the next.”
It really isn’t funny, but it feels good to laugh. “That’s kind of insane.”
“You don’t have to water it down. It’s completely insane,” he says.
“Is there anywhere else we can go? A private studio in the middle of nowhere? Somewhere no one would find? A retreat of sorts? Could you book it? You could go out in disguise, and I could pick you up and drive us there?”
“We’d still be hiding.”
“I know, but I don’t see another option other than keeping this our secret if we want to continue it. Not a shameful secret, but just something that’s private. For us only,” I say.
I immediately look to my mom for some kind of… something. I know if I ask her what we should do, or what I should do, she’d ask me what I think I should do. She’d ask me how I’m feeling. But I have no idea. It’s too much. A lot. My heart is going to beat out of my chest. The anxiety is starting to set in, curdling my stomach into a painful stone.
“I… Mom, I’m sorry, you have no idea what’s going on.”
She gives me one of those mom looks, the kind that says she knows a lot more than I think she knows. I’m her daughter. She’s known me since the day she knew I was there. We might be two separate people, but I’d be naïve to think she has no idea how I feel. She’s probably known since I’ve known. Maybe even before that. It’s not just today since she walked in on us in a very obvious way. I’m talking years.
I slap my hands over my face, the nerves crawling up my throat and closing it up until I can’t breathe.
Wilder’s hand sweeps to my back, nestling between my shoulder blades. He rubs small circles there before he cups the back of my neck gently. “We don’t have to decide anything right now. It’s too much for one night.”
I know what my mom thinks. I might even know what she’s going to say. She doesn’t believe in the right person at the wrong time. In her mind, right means checking off every box, and that includes timing. Just because things get hard, even if they look bleak, it doesn’t mean they’re broken. She’s helped so many people repair themselves and mend relationships with family, friends, or a significant other that they thought were beyond repair. She can’t ever talk about her clients, but I know she has to have helped people in that way because of the things she’s said to me to help me in my own life.