Copyright 2011 by Dextrousleftie. Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance of characters to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. The author holds exclusive rights to this work, unauthorized duplication or use of the characters is prohibited. Please contact me at my e-mail address if you have any questions. Also, enjoy the story. :)
Jonas stared in frustration at the younger man currently occupying one of the guest chairs in his office. Julian Archer returned him look-for-look, a stubborn set to his mouth. This was their third session, and the college student had turned uncommunicative and mulish. Last time they'd talked about his childhood, and he'd recounted for the therapist all about what it was like living in his mother's big house pretty much alone. Coming home from school to the empty echo of his feet on the tile of the foyer, going into the kitchen to make himself a snack(because there was no one else to do it for him), then going upstairs to his bedroom to study diligently. He'd done that partly because he was bored, and partly because he just liked to learn. The only voices he'd heard were the ones on the TV set that he left on all the time just to hear another human voice.
But while they'd shared stories about their childhoods last time, today the younger man had flatly refused to discuss his college life with Jonas. He'd so far sat with his arms folded over his chest, letting the silence between them deepen. The therapist wondered what to do – his agreement with Julian didn't seem to extend to this part of the other man's life. How to get him to talk? He considered alternatives, but the truth was that if Julian simply wouldn't talk to him then there was nothing he could do to change that fact. People came to therapists to be helped, but since Julian had been blackmailed into coming here...
He sighed. "Julian, this is no good. If you won't talk to me, you might as well leave. This is futile."
The college student snorted. "I've been telling you that all along," he replied sardonically.
Jonas shook his head wearily. "Very well. I'll call and tell your mother that you're not being cooperative, and that she should consider trying to find you another therapist."
Silence. Julian had stiffened in his chair. He glowered at Jonas angrily, baring his teeth at the therapist. "That's dirty pool, Jonas," he spat.
"Is it? I told you the first time you came into my office that if you didn't help me to at least make some progress then I don't see any reason to continue these sessions. I'm not just going to sit here and look at you three times a week for months. Not when I have patients who really need and want my help. You're not only wasting my time, you're wasting theirs as well."
Julian looked faintly surprised at the command in Jonas's voice. He moved uneasily in his chair. "Fine," he said. "What do you want to know?"
The therapist took a deep breath. "You said that while you were aware of your sexual orientation in high school, you didn't have a boyfriend. What about in college?"
Julian's face closed up, going completely blank. "I don't have a boyfriend now," he replied woodenly. "Although I had one last year."
Jonas studied his face in concern. Had he touched on a nerve? "Did you break up?" he asked carefully.
"Yes." Julian said this single syllable emphatically, making it clear that he wasn't going to say anything else about the matter.
Jonas tapped his pencil on the pad in front of him contemplatively. "Do you enjoy your classes?" he asked.
"Yes. I've always liked school. It was much better being there than at home. I had friends and I got to learn new things. And going away to college meant that I didn't have to live with my mother anymore. A decided bonus for me." His voice was tinged with bitterness, the same emotion it contained whenever he talked about his mother.
"What about you?" he asked abruptly. "Did you like college?"
"Yes, I did," Jonas replied with a smile. "I really enjoyed it. And I met..." he trailed off, making Julian give him a narrow-eyed look.
"You met?" he demanded. "Who?"
Jonas sighed. He didn't really want to talk about Chris, but maybe it would help him feel a little better. Talking out your problems and pains really helped, as he well knew. "I met my future lover Chris," he said as steadily as he could. "We were taking the same class, and he drew funny pictures on his notebook and showed them to me to make me crack up during the boring lecture we were enduring."
Julian frowned a little. "And are you still with him?" he asked with a slight edge in his voice.
Jonas closed his eyes. "No. Chris was killed last year in a car accident."
Shocked silence. Then Julian spoke in a far gentler and kinder voice than any he had used so far in this office: "I'm sorry, Jonas. Really sorry. I shouldn't have asked you that."
"No, it's all right," the therapist replied, reopening his eyes. Julian was giving him a compassionate look, something he considered to be a good sign. If the younger man was paying attention to someone else's troubles rather than his own for a change, then he wasn't completely locked into his negative cycles. "I don't mind talking about Chris. He was the best thing that ever happened to me, and I treasure every day that I had with him."
Silence once again, as Julian digested what he'd just said. "I can't really imagine that," he said thoughtfully.
"What?"
The younger man shrugged. "Loving someone like that," he replied simply.
Jonas didn't know how to reply to this statement. After a moment he said carefully: "I take it you've never been in love before?"
"I thought I was," Julian replied in a clipped, cold voice. "But it turns out I was wrong. I guess I didn't have enough experience with it to know what real love is like."
Jonas winced slightly at his tone of voice. "So you blame your mother for your bad experience?"
Julian snorted. "I'd love to blame her, believe me. It would make my life easier. But once you're an adult you're responsible for everything you do and all the choices you make. So no, I try not to blame Mommy Dearest for my troubles. It would be pretty much a cop out if I did that."
He had strength. Jonas admired that. "It's not easy to come to that conclusion," he said aloud. "It IS easier to blame others for our troubles, but it's also wrong. It stunts our personal growth, always looking for a scapegoat."
"Personal growth, huh? I guess I'm a midget, then," Julian remarked dryly.
Jonas looked at him. "Why do you say that?"
Julian shrugged. "As my mother will tell you, I'm an out-of-control party boy. I do all of the things I'm not supposed to. Not a good example of personal growth, wouldn't you say?"
The therapist tilted his head a little. "Personal growth can come in many forms," he noted. "So I really can't say one way or the other."
"Uh huh. Being diplomatic, Jonas? Don't want to just tell me that I'm an asshole and get it over with?"
"Asshole isn't the word I'd use to describe you," Jonas replied gently.
"What then? Confused? Mixed-up? Crazy? A loser?"
"None of those, actually. You're not confused – clearly you're aware of just how destructive your behavior is. And you're not crazy either, although `crazy' isn't a term we actually use. As for being a loser...by what standards do you judge yourself? Do you think that you're a loser? And if so, why?"
Julian sat back in his chair and folded his arms across his chest again in an eloquent gesture of `keep out'. "Well, maybe because I am," he drawled. "And as for whose standards I use...those would be MINE. I think I'm a loser."
"I see," Jonas wrote on his pad for a moment. "Is it because you feel that you're letting people down? By acting this way?" he asked quietly.
An uneasy frown appeared on Julian's face. "No, of course not," he said a bit too quickly. "Who would I be letting down? My mother? My father? I don't care what either of them thinks of me."
`Don't you?' Jonas thought to himself. "If it isn't that you think that you're letting people down, why do you think that you're a loser for behaving in the way that you have lately?"
Julian scowled. "Does it matter?" he demanded somewhat petulantly.
Jonas cocked his head. "It clearly does to you," he pointed out gently.
A lifted lip and a cold look. "It doesn't matter to me at all," Julian said. "Nothing much matters."
"If I really believed that you meant that, I wouldn't have bothered to meet with you at all. I would have turned your mother down flat, no matter how much she threatened me. But it's clear to me that it DOES matter to you." Jonas insisted.
Julian sprang to his feet and did a restless turn around the office. "You don't know what you're talking about," he spat.
Jonas let him pace. He stayed silent, letting Julian stew. If there was one thing that he'd learned over the years, it was that people knew how to heal themselves if given a chance. He was only here to help that along, to facilitate it. All of it was really up to the young man currently prowling his office. If Julian wanted to help himself, he would. Otherwise, there was nothing that anyone would be able to do for him.
Julian had arrived at his desk. He paused, staring at the picture that Jonas had righted a few days ago. He stared at it. "Is this...Chris? The guy you talked about?" he asked abruptly.
"Yes, that's Chris and I at the beach," Jonas replied quietly.
Julian put out his hand, but didn't quite touch the picture with his fingers. "You both look happy," he said, sounding almost wistful.
"We were."
The younger man whirled away from his desk. "But it never lasts, does it?" he noted cynically. "One way or another."
"Maybe not," Jonas conceded, "But as I said I don't regret even a single moment of the time I had with Chris. And isn't a little bit of time with someone you love better than decades with someone you might care about, but don't really love?"
Julian glanced at him over his shoulder. "I don't know," he replied. "I've never had either. You tell me, Jonas."
"Well, I've never spent decades with someone I didn't really love, either," he said in faint amusement. "So I can't say. I just assume that it's better, I guess." His dark eyes twinkled behind the frames of his gold-rimmed glasses.
Julian snorted as he came back to his seat and plopped down in it again. "You know what they say about assumptions, don't you?" he asked.
Jonas laughed. "Yes. But I don't mind being an ass. There are worse things to be," he pointed out amiably.
"So are we almost done for today?" Julian asked.
"Almost. I wanted to ask you about your piercings and tattoos. Those are fairly new, aren't they?"
The college student reached up to idly play with the ring through his brow, which still looked rather infected. "Yeah, they are," he replied. "This is the newest one. But I'm not sure that I like it... I might take it out. AFTER I give Mom a coronary, of course."
Jonas felt his lips twitch. "I take it she was unhappy when she saw it?"
Julian grinned. "Unhappy isn't the right word. Livid would be more like it. Her face actually started to turn purple when I walked through the door sporting it. She could overlook most of the others, since they're hidden by my clothes. And anything that she doesn't have to look at is very rigorously ignored by my sweet mother. But she couldn't ignore this."
"Is that why you got them? To upset your mother?"
"We've had this conversation before. I don't do anything with that as my only intent. It's satisfying to piss her off, but it's not the be all and end all of my life."
"I take it you didn't have any piercings or tattoos up until the last year or so?" Jonas asked tactfully.
Julian eyed him. "No. But I was busy pretending to be a good boy up until then, so I wouldn't have done anything as shocking as getting a tattoo."
"Was it all a pretense?"
The younger man scowled again. "Sure. I was just being what everybody expected me to be. But now I'm free to truly express myself," he waved a hand negligently at himself.
"I see. Would you say that you're happy, Julian?" Jonas asked.
A stiffening of the other man's body. "What does that matter? Not everybody has to be happy all the time, do they?"
"Not all the time, no, but it should be one of our goals as human beings to try and be happy when we can," Jonas told him. "The Founding Fathers understood that – why do you think that it says `Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness' on the Declaration of Independence? Because it's one of our most important needs. And while we can live without happiness, we can't live WELL."
"If you say so. My misery suits me just fine. So if that's it, Jonas, I'll get the hell out of here for now. It's been..." he paused as he rose to his feet. "Irritating. See you Monday," he flipped a hand at the therapist before leaving the office abruptly.
Jonas watched him go. Then he sighed, shaking his head as he made some notes on the pad. Julian Archer was as difficult as ever. But still...during the sessions when he was talking to Julian, he almost completely forgot about Chris. That hadn't happened for a long time.
www.dlsyaoi-polloi.com