Page 27 of Someone Like You

“I think I want to have sex,” I said. “I think I’m ready. Or almost ready.”

Dr. Varu looked at me through her glasses, hummed, nodded, and scribbled something on her notepad. “And what brought about this revelation after making the decision two years ago to never be intimate with anyone?”

I had zero qualms about talking to my therapist about sex. After all, it was the reason for all my issues and hangups, and her specialty. She was like a modern day Freud. Kind of. Not really. Never mind.

“Well,” I started. “I met someone.”

Dr. Varu was aware I’d been triggered to the point of losing control, but I hadn’t really talked about how Brody had also taken care of me. How he’d been so careful to respect myboundaries since that day, how no one else made me feel safe like he did. So I talked about it now, and she listened patiently, nodding along and writing things down.

“And do you think he’d continue to respect your boundaries if things became…more, between the two of you?”

I nodded. “Yeah. I do.”

“And what will you do if he doesn’t? If he breaks your trust in some way? How will you cope if things get out of hand?”

“But that’s the thing, I don’t think they will. We’ve already…” My face heated, but I powered through my next words. “We did something last week. He…jacked off in front of me. And he didn’t touch me. He asked, but I said no.”

“Mm. It’s good that he continued to respect your wishes. Respect is a very important factor in feeling comfortable with another person. In trusting them with the vulnerable parts of yourself. Do you trust him, Isaac?”

Did I? I think I was starting to. But trust took a long time to build, didn’t it? You couldn’t just start trusting someone because they’d treated you well for a while. A lot of predators acted like saints until they had their prey firmly curled in their claws. I should know.

“Sometimes the only way to know if you can trust someoneisto trust them,” said Dr. Varu before I could answer.

“Okay, Confucius,” I muttered, making her lips twitch up in a small smile. “So even after what I’ve been through—what I know some people are capable of—you’re telling me I should still put myself out there? I should still risk it just to get my—” Nope, don’t say that. “Just to beintimatewith someone else?”

“Maybe that’s what’s needed here. He sounds like a good person, from what you’ve told me. Someone worthy of your trust. And if on the off chance we’re both wrong here, you can implement certain safeguards. Tell your friend Jordan where you’re going, what your intentions are. You could tell him toexpect a call from you at a certain time, and if he doesn’t hear from you, then he can go to you. Whatever you’re comfortable with. Because the most important thing here is to feel safe. So do whatever you need to do to ensure your safety.”

I did feel safe with Brody. But it was hard to put away the past when it came to sex, and I had a feeling that no matter how kind and respectful and supportive Brody was, it didn’t matter in the face of my demons. But I wasn’t about to let them direct my life, and I wasn’t about to let them come between me and something I desperately wanted, so it was time to start letting go.

“Have you told him about your past? Maybe an honest conversation is what’s needed here, if you think telling him would help him understand.”

“No, I haven’t told him about that, and I don’t really want to,” I said. I didn’t want it to affect his opinion of me.

“And why is that?”

Sometimes I hated therapy. It wasn’t easy for me to share things in the first place, let alone talk nonstop for an hour about them and have someone else try to dissect it all. It made me deeply uncomfortable at times, and as open as I tried to be—because I knew it would help, in the long run—I still wanted to ignore my problems. It was easier that way.

“I don’t know,” I hedged. “I guess I just…” I was ashamed, that was why. But I didn’t want to talk about my deep-rooted feelings about what happened to me. Not today. We’d been over it a million times before, and it always left me feeling numb and tired after. “I just don’t feel like talking about it right now.”

Dr. Varu moved on and segued into school and how everything was going in that area of my life, thank god.

And while I appreciated my therapist’s helpful advice, there was no way I was telling Jordan what I planned on getting up to with Brody. No fucking way.

After my sessionwith Dr. Varu, I went home and worked on the one thing that brought me peace and joy—my book. I had a few hours to kill until five o’clock, and with all this desire and anxiety swirling through me, it was the only way I knew how to center myself.

Writing had always pacified me, allowed me to pull away from reality and put my thoughts on paper, making them more real than they felt just swimming around in my head, untethered. But I didn’t really write stories. Instead, I wrote silly poems that sparked a delighted kind of glee in me. I had always loved Dr. Seuss and Shel Silverstein as a child, and as I got older, I’d started writing my own mishmash of quirky rhymes, trying to emulate my favorite authors. Reading their books had been a deep source of happiness for me during a time when it had been hard to find any. It had been my escape from the truth: that I wasn’t really wanted by anyone, just tolerated.

My birth parents had died in a car accident when I was two, and I was adopted by my aunt and uncle. But they didn’t really want me. I always wondered why they’d taken me under their wing in the first place, considering how little attention they gave me. How, when they did turn their focus my way, it was to belittle and berate me. I could never figure out what had made them bring me into the mix when they barely put up with me. Probably out of some misguided sense of responsibility, seeing as there were no other living members of our family.

When I turned twelve, I was convinced that they’d been blackmailed or something. Or that I was going to be some kind of ritual sacrifice that they were fattening up until I got oldenough. Or that they had been paid large sums of money to take me in.

I’d been a fairly happy child, though pretty unloved, until middle school. It was when I was old enough to see how other parents—parents who loved their children—acted. It was when I was old enough to start questioning things on a deeper level, to really feel that mangled link that I so desperately wished wasn’t broken. I tried to be a good son, but nothing I did was good enough, and they barely paid any attention to me anyway. So I just kept my head down and read my books. I focused on my studies and getting perfect grades, and was ultimately offered an academic scholarship to Paxton University, where I was continuing my streak of a 4.0 GPA and majoring in my passion.

I wanted to be able to help kids like me, kids who needed a healthy escape from a less-than-desirable reality. I wanted to be the source ofgoodin someone’s life, like Shel Silverstein and all those other authors had been for me. I wanted to create and inspire and give back.

I pulled my notebook out from underneath my bed and flipped to the current poem I was working on. Then I let go of all my worries and put my pen to the paper.

I should’ve heldon to that one worry I always had about being late, because when I surfaced from hyper-focusing on my writing, it was 5:10 and I was fuckinglate.

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