Page 55 of Last Chance Love

“I never claimed it was my responsibility,” I said in a low voice. Once again, I found myself hating how he always tried to dismiss his own problems as if he was the only one who should care about them. He hadn’t owned up to it yet, but Iknewthat was why he had finally decided to cut off contact with me.

“Good,” he said quietly, barely heard over the gurgle of the coffeemaker.

I watched the dark liquid fill the carafe and wondered how we’d gotten to this point, not for the first time. It had always been a struggle to get him to admit the tough things he was going through, and that had been in person. Too often, I wondered if perhaps the end of our relationship and our friendship had been inevitable from the moment I left for college.

That was when he started to drift away from me. Slow and hard to notice as I adjusted to a new setting and the constant load of schoolwork. And how stupid I had been not to notice it when it had been him suggesting we end our relationship, considering we barely saw one another, where he couldn’t get away to see me, and I couldn’t do the same.

Then I’d gained a new social life, started dating casually, and sleeping around because I was still hurting from our breakup. I knew he’d been right, but even then, I didn’t pay attention to the signs or see how he was drifting away. It was easier to miss after the breakup. We’d needed time to fall away from being boyfriends and go back to being friends again. But after that? How had I missed it? And when I’d caught on, why had I continued to let it happen without a fight?

“Reed,” he began in warning. “Don’t go wherever you’re going right now. It’s not worth it.”

“I rather think it is,” I said as the coffee began to slow to a drip. “Did I…where did I fail, Leon? Where did I falter so badly that you couldn’t…that we?—”

“You didn’t. There was nowhere for you to ‘fail,’ Reed. It wasn’t about you, or I mean, it wasn’t about how you failed or that I felt you wouldn’t let me turn to you when I needed help,” he said in a weary voice.

“Then what? You being stubborn?”

“Something like that.”

I let out a weary sigh and poured two cups of coffee before returning the pot to the machine. I walked over to the desk and set it down next to him, realizing one of the books appeared to be a journal from the looks of the plain leather cover and a thin spine absent any lettering.

“Taking advice from a shrink?” I asked.

“What?” he asked, looking down at the book and shrugging. “I guess. How did you know?”

“Because Dr. Mirandez comes into the clinic when he’s at the ranch,” I explained, thinking of the hard psychiatrist who visited for half a day every Sunday. Anyone could see him, but most guys didn’t. It probably didn’t help that despite all his awards and accreditation, he wasn’t…well, I thought he was better suited for a lab than counseling. “He’s made a few comments.”

Leon’s eyes widened. “Jesus fucking Christ, I only saw him once!”

I blinked and then laughed. “No, no, he didn’t tell me anything about you or anyone specific. The guy is awkward as hell, but he won’t tell some random convict about other convict’s problems. He just asked me once if I wanted to come for a session with him.”

“Good luck with that,” Leon said with a snort. “All he does is sit there and ask questions and then say some of the weirdest shit about you. He even tried to guess what kind of background I had and guessed that one of my parents ‘inappropriately touched’ me.”

“Considering your, uh, reticence to share things with me, I’m kind of duty-bound to ask?—”

He rolled his eyes. “No. Unless you count cracking me upside the head and the occasional beating, which is pretty ina-fucking-propriate, but not what he meant.”

I managed to keep my uncomfortable wince internal as I nodded. “Well, that’s good…sort of.”

“He seemed surprised when I told him my parents didn’t give a shit about me enough even to try to fuck me,” Leon said, smirking into his cup as he prepared to take a drink.

I stared at him. “I…Jesus Leon. I haven’t heard you make a joke that dark since we were kids.”

He laughed. “I couldn’t help it. He was so sure of himself when he made that guess, I had to throw him off. Honestly, I thought shrinks were supposed to be good about that sort of thing, dark humor and all that.”

“If it makes you feel better, he was nonplussed when he kept insisting I could tell him what drugs I’d done to get through med school and when I insisted my blood contained only unhealthy levels of caffeine and whatever the hell they put into energy drinks, he didn’t know where to go with that.”

“Did you know he keeps a picture of Freud with him?”

“I saw that. He uses it as a bookmark.”

“Funny, I told Riley about that once when he asked me about the doc, and the look on his face was…well, he looked almost like Reno on a normal day.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, said something about how Freud was so terrible a psychologist that the only reason you could call him the founder of psychology was that he pissed so many people off they threw themselves into the field just to prove him wrong, which they did, completely. There were many other things thrown in, too, including a whole tirade that would have made Elliot proud, considering the sheer amount of rambling that happened.”

“You know, after what was told to us about him, that makes a lot of sense when you think about it,” I said thoughtfully.

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