Work Text:
<< WINTER >>
The final crossword clue stares back at him, mocking. Nothing is left to fill in around it. Eleven-down, seven letters, What marriage is the leading cause of, per Groucho Marx.
Patrick knows the answer. He hasn’t decided if it’s more distressing to write out those seven letters or to leave the crossword unfinished. It’s Monday. He hasn’t left Monday’s puzzle unfinished since he was a kid.
The bell on the door saves him from deciding. Except it’s Ronnie, so it doesn’t save him from the suspicion that disaster is coming.
She frowns at the otherwise empty store as she stomps snow off her boots on the mat. “No David today?”
“He’s off today.”
She does one of her wide-eyed okay then looks that makes Patrick feel like he’s made of glass, easy to break, easy to see through, and plucks a bottle of hand cream off the table. He’s tempted to invite her to come back tomorrow, when it will be his day off and she can have David to herself, but the unfinished crossword is still mocking him, like it solved the puzzle of him instead of the other way around.
She mulls around, picking up products here and there. She makes small talk about the weather—flurries but no accumulation yet. She browses exactly long enough for him to let his guard down and then hits him with, “Seems like I don’t see you here together much anymore.”
He tries for a casual shrug. “January is always slow. Doesn’t make sense for both of us to be on the floor.”
It’s the truth. They don’t both need to be here. Although that’s mostly always been true; they just both wanted to be here. Spending all day and all night together was still never enough of together. Now, there are days where it’s too much. He didn’t realize that was noticeable to anyone other than them.
Ronnie brings her purchases to the counter, and he begins to ring her up, bracing himself for a line of questioning that never comes. When he hands her the tote with her purchases, the look she gives him might be sympathy, but it’s so wrong, so foreign on her face, that he can’t tell for sure.
She comes back an hour later and hands him a card.
“I don’t want to know anything about anything,” she says, “but she helped me and Karen when we were going through some things.”
Patrick eyes the card suspiciously and catches the important details. Greta Thacker, Registered Couple and Family Therapist.
“But you and Karen…”
“Got divorced.” That word again. “I know. Listen, it’s not a sure thing. But when it was time to say goodbye it was… we were okay. And every relationship I’ve had since has been better for it.”
Patrick’s mind reels at the mere idea of it, saying goodbye. They’re not there. They’re not even close to there. Right?
“See that?” Ronnie points at him, “What your face just did? You’ve got that stubborn-ass ‘hit the winning home run’ thing scrunching up around your ears. You’ve got the right kind of fight in you, kid. She can help you direct it.” She points again at the card and slides it closer until he picks it up.
Patrick doesn’t point out that at forty-plus-change he’s earned the right not to be called ‘kid,’ but just barely. “I’ll think about it.”
“You do that.” Her pointed stare and pursed lips don’t have an ounce of softness, but she pats his shoulder when she leaves, a tender, knowing thing.
Patrick slides the card into his pocket. Maybe he’ll forget about it and it will go through the wash and this whole conversation will be bleached and turned to dust along with the name Greta Thacker. Instead, he restocks the bath salts and messes around with the budget software and rings up customers and fills in the damn crossword, because it’s a Monday.
“We don’t need therapy. We’re not getting divorced,” he mutters as he tosses the paper in the recycle bin. There. He can even say it out loud.
They’re just stuck in some kind of… fatigue. He’s as certain that he still wants a lifetime with David as he is certain that he would like to not talk to him today. It was a difficult autumn, and a more difficult winter.
He thinks about the card in his pocket all afternoon.
David texts him to let him know he’s grabbing dinner and a movie in Elmdale with Stevie, so Patrick warms up leftovers at home and thinks about the card in his pocket as he watches the hockey game.
David comes home late, after Patrick is already in bed but still on the edges of sleep. He can hear his husband tiptoeing around the room as he does his skincare and puts on his pajamas and plugs in his phone. It’s comfortable and familiar, and Patrick can picture all of it without opening his eyes, the tilt of his shoulders and the frown at his phone and the little wobble as he balances to put on his pajama pants.
For a long moment, he can sense him hovering by the side of the bed, neither of them moving, when Patrick is sure he holds his breath for too long to be convincingly asleep. But David just heaves a sigh as the mattress shifts under his weight. He falls asleep soon enough, his breaths turning slow and raspy with light snores while Patrick lies awake, and all Patrick can think about is the card in his pocket in the hamper.
In the morning, Patrick wakes up early and starts a load of jeans in the washer, card and all, even though he hasn’t forgotten it. A habit more than a gesture now, he leaves breakfast and coffee for David, who he can hear puttering around in the bathroom. Then he pulls on his hiking shoes and heads out.
The trail up to Rattlesnake Point is quiet and serene and full of good memories. He tries to soak them up as he walks, but his mind is preoccupied with the card turning circles in the washing machine.
David is gone by the time he gets home, but the jeans have been transferred to the dryer, a habit more than a gesture probably. Patrick adds the ingredients for dinner to the crock-pot, folds the laundry with a podcast as background noise, and discards the pulpy lump from the pocket to the trash. He goes outside to put salt on the walk ahead of the coming snow and never stops thinking about the remnants of the card in the waste bin.
David has a council meeting after work, so he won’t be home until closer to eight. It doesn’t matter where the card is now, because Patrick can’t get rid of her name, and so, when he turns on his laptop to check his email, he looks her up. Her website is clean, professional, and well organized. She has tabs for resources, including several specific to LGBTQ+ couples, and a little bit about herself. She looks like Ms. Frizzle come to life, which is disarming. All she needs is a dress that looks like a Rorschach test.
David comes home late after the council meeting and stops in their home office on his way to bed.
“I saw you got all the new product unpacked. Slow day yesterday?”
It’s been more than twenty-four hours since Patrick heard his voice, and it’s not even hello, how are you, I missed you.
“Yeah. Ronnie came in. We had—”
“I don’t think I’m up for Ronnie-Patrick drama tonight,” David says with a heavy sigh.
David turns to go, and Patrick almost drops it. But he keeps thinking about Ms. Frizzle and her Magic School Bus, and how the whole thing was a metaphor for driving right to the heart of the matter.
“It was fine actually.” David pauses. Turns back. “She gave me a name. For a therapist.”
“For you?” David asks as he fidgets with his sweater cuffs.
Patrick rubs the back of his neck. “For us. Actually.”
David’s body stills and then he takes a tentative step into the office, sitting on the couch where they used to talk late into the night when one of them got a new idea for the business. “Isn’t that kind of a last resort?”
Couples might choose to see a therapist even when things are going well, according to her website. But. Things are not going well. Patrick closes the laptop and looks at him carefully. “I really hope not.”
Patrick has never been to a therapist—it’s not exactly the Brewer way. David has seen a therapist sporadically since his parents moved away, but Patrick didn’t think to ask him what to expect. Nothing he might have said could have prepared him for this twitchy, nervy feeling. Despite the cluttered surroundings, there’s nowhere to hide.
It was probably unfair to assume therapists all keep tidy, wood-paneled offices with velvet-upholstered chaise lounges, but Greta Thacker’s office is so far from that, he distrusts her immediately. She invited them to sit and left them alone to refill the pitcher of water, so now Patrick has to decide if a Freud bobblehead is criteria enough to call off the whole thing.
“It appears her attachment to tchotchkes is worse than Ray’s,” Patrick mutters, and David snorts.
“It’s missing the phallic cactus. I always thought that tied the room together.”
“Mmm,” Patrick nods thoughtfully, “Especially when strung with Christmas lights.”
“Oh god. I missed that.”
“It’s new. Noticed it two weeks ago.”
David scans his way down and across a wall of framed needlepoint quotes with mounting horror, but Patrick manages to tear his eyes away from the decor just to watch him. He turned forty-five last summer. Gray sprinkles his eyebrows and sprouts from his temples. Patrick used to notice whenever a new silver strand appeared, but lately he hasn’t let himself just stop and look.
“Okay, welcome,” Dr. Thacker says, setting down the pitcher of water. “I’d like for you to call me Greta, if you’re comfortable with that.”
They nod in unison and introduce themselves. And just like that, the door to this museum of themed gifts for psychologists is closed, and they’re on a first name basis with the curator.
She starts with what must be a standard script. She makes sure she has everyone’s correct pronouns. She ticks off a few expectations regarding confidentiality, how the sessions will go, what they’ll need to bring with them, that they are welcome to use the objects on the table to keep their hands busy, if they want. That they are welcome to continue seeing other therapists individually or start seeing someone if they are not already, if they want. How to ask each other to stop completely, if they want. Her rote reciting of it provides some comfort. They’re not the first people to wind up on her ugly green couch, desperate for solutions. They’re probably not even the first people today.
“So in a bit, I’d like to hear all about how you met, got married, what your relationship is like now, but I always like to start by asking what you’re looking for from me.”
The answer to that should be obvious, and Patrick hates this already.
David, god love him, says as much. “Um. We’re looking for marriage counseling.”
She smiles, unfazed. “Of course. I mean, are you looking for a program you can follow, someone to talk to once or twice, a longer or more regular arrangement, someone to mediate a specific dispute or fallout from a specific incident, something else?”
David looks at Patrick for the answer like this was his idea, which seems a little unfair because really it was Ronnie’s idea, and it’s just occurred to him that she might have pranked him.
He closes his eyes and tries to refocus on why he kept Dr. Thacker’s—Greta’s—card in the first place. “I guess we hit a rough patch, and we are just looking for some help, uh. Navigating that.”
“How long have you been married?”
“Eleven years,” they say together.
“And now a rough patch. Do you have a sense of when it started?” Greta asks, tapping the end of her retractable pen to make a note.
“No idea,” Patrick says, already grouchy, at the same time David says, “There was an accident.”
“An accident?”
David picks at something invisible on his thigh. “A car accident.”
“Everyone was fine,” Patrick says quickly.
“The car was totaled.”
“It was my fault.”
“It was an accident,” David repeats, in that same weary tone he adopts whenever they talk about it now. Like he’s given up hope of Patrick ever letting it go.
Patrick shakes his head, because it feels important that she knows he understands this. “It was my fault.”
“Patrick, do you feel like there were challenges before the accident?”
A headache starts to press at the front of his skull, and they still have thirty-five minutes left. It hadn’t occurred to him to tie the two things together, because everyone was fine, they replaced the car, they figured out the insurance, and put it past them. It got better before it got worse again. But. “Sure but not… I guess things have been different. Since then.”
“Why do you think that is?”
Patrick searches all the tiny disputes, the strained conversations, the three major blow-ups, the nights where they’ve gone to bed in roaring silence, and he can’t find the answer. He has no idea how they walked away from that accident two different people. Why they were fine, and now they’re bumping along, inflicting fresh wounds far too often.
“I don’t know,” he whispers, looking at his hands.
“What about you, David?” she asks, so gently.
David breathes in, wet and shaky. “I think it was just a lot. I think normally when I’m spiraling about something, Patrick is the steady one. And he just wasn’t, after that. Neither of us were.”
The quiet lasts far too long as her eyes pass back and forth between them. Patrick wants to say it works both ways, that David calms him when he’s in crisis. They work best that way. Except this time they didn’t, and haven’t. If everything really changed in one night, he doesn’t know why he can’t just flip the switch back. Be steady. Be calm. He doesn’t know why they’ve both forgotten how to make everything okay for each other.
“It was two months ago,” he says instead, trying to shrug it off. “It’s in the past.”
Greta dabs a finger to her tongue to flip a page in her notepad. “Okay. Well why don’t we go back a little further. Tell me how you met.”
And that, finally, is a question he’s happy to answer.
Their second trip to Greta’s office is accompanied by heavy, wet snow falling in clusters that land on the windshield in percussive bursts. The road salt is working, so traffic isn’t too backed up, but Patrick has to ride the brake pedal as they get closer to Elmdale. David sits, tensing up with each press of his foot, until eventually he braces his hands against the dashboard.
“It’s just snow,” Patrick says, annoyed and anxious for the appointment. They spent most of the last appointment sharing good memories, which only served to heighten the contrast between then and now. “This car has all-wheel drive.”
“I guess you’ll have a smooth drive right into the back of that Subaru then.”
“David.” Patrick doesn't want to sound this frustrated, but he can't seem to temper it. He backs off the gas to give the Subaru more distance, and David makes a visible effort to return his hands calmly to his lap. Silence coats the rest of the drive.
David has always been a little jumpy in the car, but no more so than he is anywhere else. Now, he can’t seem to relax whenever Patrick is driving. Patrick should have just handed him the keys, but that feels worse, somehow, for reasons he can’t place. As they crawl along, all of Patrick’s frustration and impatience simmer like bile in his throat.
Patrick brings his bad mood into the office and sits it down across from Greta on her couch. She takes a pen out of the bunch of corkscrew curls piled on her head and peers at them through her glasses, which are purple today.
“How was the drive?” she asks, like it’s small talk, when she can obviously fucking tell it’s not.
“The roads are fine,” Patrick grumbles.
“The new car has all-wheel drive,” David says pointedly.
They shoot each other steely looks.
“Okay,” Greta says. “Tell me what’s going on.”
They tell her, sort of. It’s ridiculous, because Patrick wrecked their car, endangered their lives, and now he’s angry, he’s so incredibly angry, that David seems perpetually fearful that he might do it again.
She doesn’t spend nearly as much time on it as he’s expecting. Instead, she focuses on how their subsequent disagreements have gone, and Patrick squirms in his chair and does his best to listen as she picks apart the way they’ve started to move around each other, speak around each other. And then time is up, and he feels worse than when they arrived.
“Want to drive?” Patrick asks when they get back to the car, holding out the keys.
“It’s okay. You're doing fine.”
Patrick swings his head around, expecting… snark, bitterness, something. But David looks like he means it. That shouldn’t make Patrick’s skin feel itchy and hot.
“Fine.”
“I’m sorry about the ride here,” David murmurs. “It’s just—”
“It’s fine.” Patrick’s cheeks burn with shame. He hates that David is jumpy now, hates that David feels bad for just reacting, hates that he makes him feel even worse by being grumpy about it. David used to be skittish from the trauma inflicted by others. Patrick is supposed to be safe for him.
Now he’s stuck trying to explain all of this to a stranger as though it should make sense if she just asks the right questions, when it doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t. Blaming Greta seems unfair, so he blames Ms. Frizzle.
The snow is still falling, and the roads are worse than before, relegating traffic to a crawl in the one semi-clear lane. Patrick grips the wheel and tries to drive as carefully as possible. David distracts himself by flipping through the workbook Greta gave them, which helps keep his nervous fidgeting to a minimum. But it’s tense. Still.
“Okay.” David clears his throat and flips back to the front of the workbook. “Five things in her office that are incorrect. Go.”
They’re supposed to play this game to get them talking. Someone comes up with a theme, and the other person has to list five things on that theme. The five things are supposed to be personal, like ‘five ways you felt appreciated this week.’ But honestly, this is better.
“The bobblehead.” Patrick starts with the lowest-hanging fruit.
“Yes!” David points. “Why would she have a bobblehead of Santa Claus in a business suit anyway?”
“I think it was Sigmund Freud.”
“That makes sense and is also… worse. Okay, sorry, I’m not supposed to interrupt.”
“The baseball helmet she was using to hold breath mints.”
“Yes! It was too big for a desk accessory, but too small for a head.”
“There's a head-shrinking joke in there somewhere.” In his peripheral vision, he can see David's shoulders lift the way they do when he smiles. It feels good to make him smile. “But the real problem is that it's an Orioles helmet.”
“Mmm.” David nods, understanding. “She's sworn allegience to the wrong bird. Okay three more.”
“Uh let’s see. The Rolodex.” David hums like he’s trying not to say something; Patrick lets it slide. “The couch. And… the scent of that candle sitting next to me. Is it wrong if we bring her a better one?”
“Seems like a gray area.”
“Hm.”
“For the record, those were all correct incorrect things,” David says. “Especially the couch. You would think more care and attention would be paid to the selection of an essential tool of the trade.”
“It is comfortable,” Patrick grants.
David’s smile quivers at the corners of his mouth. This is the easiest conversation they’ve had in weeks. Maybe this game isn’t so bad.
“Okay now you’re supposed to pick a theme,” David says after consulting the workbook. And Patrick was wrong. This game is stupid.
Patrick searches for something similarly low stakes, but he keeps thinking about the example Greta used when she introduced the game. So. “Five dates we went on that you still think about.”
David taps his fingers against his knee, the gold band on his ring finger catching the dull winter light.
“The time we went to the drive-in right after they rebuilt the concession stand,” David says softly. That night lives rent-free in Patrick’s brain too. “The time we tried the new barbecue place in Elm Glen.”
“Don’t remind me. I think they’re supposed to be memorable for good reasons.”
David points a stern finger at him. “No interrupting. The date the week before we got married, when you told me I wasn’t allowed to talk about wedding stuff, and then you talked about wedding stuff all night.”
“I was really excited,” Patrick says, even though he’s not supposed to.
“Yeah.” Patrick can’t take his eyes off the road, but he can hear enough of David’s shy smile to picture it when he speaks. “Number four is the first one, obviously. And…” He trails off, turning sharply so he’s looking out the passenger-side window. “The last one.”
The last one has to be the day before the accident. They’ve gotten dinner together since then, but not with any other official date-like elements.
“That was a really good day,” Patrick agrees, pulling into their driveway. “Until.”
“Yeah.”
They’re both quiet while he parks the car and they walk inside.
Patrick has to go to work at noon, which leaves him just enough time to make a sandwich. He starts assembling the ingredients while David hovers in the kitchen, uncertain.
“Is this what you hoped it would be?” David asks, resting his elbows on the counter and his chin on his palm so he can wedge himself in Patrick’s eyeline as he spreads mustard on his bread.
“I don’t know.” He shrugs. He’s still not really sure what about this is supposed to make a difference. “Thanks for trying it. But. We don’t have to go back if you don’t want to.”
David frowns at that and stands up, pressing his palms into the butcher-block surface of the kitchen island. “‘Want’ is a strong word? But.”
Patrick keeps his eyes carefully trained on the application of mustard.
“I’m not mad at you for the accident,” David says finally.
“I think you are.”
“I’m not,” David insists as he takes the mustard and puts it back in the fridge.
“You’re something, then.” That’s closer, he can tell. The tight line of David’s mouth is confirmation, and it tugs at something hollow inside him. Why won’t he just say it?
“I mean. It was an accident! I shouldn’t—It was two months ago. Why are we even still talking about it?”
“I don’t know. Because I promised to climb a thousand mountains for you, and I can’t even drive us home safely from a fucking business conference?” It’s a sign of how frayed things have become, that Patrick saying fucking in any context doesn’t make David smile.
“That’s not quite what you said.”
“Yes, I did!”
“No. You said I know you would do that.”
“David. What is the difference? Christ, we were both there. Why are we even fight—”
“Patrick.” David pushes the workbook Greta gave them across the kitchen island between them. “This is a mountain. Go put on your ugly mountaineering shoes.”
Patrick’s face tightens, and the hardness around his heart cracks open just enough to start the tears dripping down his cheeks. He hasn’t been able to cry about it before, but everything feels looser now. Greta’s scrutiny has made it harder to pass this off as nothing.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I don’t know why I’m—It’s just when we were telling her about it, I kept thinking of how much worse—”
“Mmm-mmm.” David’s silencing hum sounds scratchy.
Patrick walks around the counter and touches David so, so tentatively. David wraps a hand around his forearm and pulls him closer. They look at each other for too long with that mystified how did we get here? look that they usually trade in fights these days. Except this feels softer, blameless. It’s nice.
This mountain feels really tall, but he’s afraid if he says that out loud, David will see how daunted he is.
David exhales a shaky gust of air. “I’m sure we’ll find out it’s me, anyway, that I’m—”
“No. It’s not.”
“It might be,” David murmurs, and Patrick kisses him before he can go any further down that road. He hasn’t kissed him in days, and David’s mouth tenses in surprise before giving in, returning gentle, careful pressure. David stays close. “Pack a first aid kit, okay? Just in case.”
They’re close enough that Patrick can feel David’s chest against his own when he huffs a laugh. “Okay.”
This time, it’s David who kisses Patrick.
“David, what if this doesn’t work?”
“Well. I’m prepared to try hypnosis, body swap, and screamnastics as plans B, C, and D, respectively.”
“Are we tied to that order? Because body swap sounds intriguing.”
David smiles and takes his face in his hands. His hands are so soft. His voice is softer. “Five things that were good about today.”
“This,” Patrick says. “This, this, this, and this.”
“So how’s it going?” Greta asks when they sit down in her heavily-accessorized office.
“Okay, I guess,” Patrick says, at the same time David says, “Fine.”
Even after two months of appointments, Patrick never knows what they’re supposed to say. If it were going well—hell, if it were going badly—they wouldn’t still be here.
“Tell me about the last two weeks. Did you implement the weekly meeting? I know you were both feeling some hesitation.”
Next to him, David nods. “We tried it.”
“Tell me how it went.”
David glances at Patrick, but by now, all three of them know it takes Patrick a few minutes to warm up to being here, still broken. So David tells her about how they decided to do the meeting on Sunday night, that they revived their pizza and a movie tradition to reward themselves for a job well done.
“We just followed the outline in the book,” David says, before summarizing their conversation.
It wasn’t so much an outline as a series of questions. How do you feel about us today? What was one time last week I made you feel appreciated? What do you need from me in the coming week? What is something you have avoided talking about? Etc., etc., etc.
Patrick is the one who requested the workbook to begin with when Greta laid out their options. He likes having tools. A plan. Something to rest his expectations on. But in practice, the results are mixed. One of the synchronous breathing exercises was an outright failure, and some of the getting reacquainted exercises are clearly meant for people who don’t spend as much of their professional and personal lives together. Their problem isn’t that they’ve lost touch, it’s that they can touch each other’s buttons without even trying.
Out of all the exercises and guidance Greta has offered so far, the weekly meeting is the one Patrick can see the most value in and also the one he resents the most. It seems so official, such an obvious acknowledgement of problems to be solved and such a sterile, forced means in which to solve them. Their parents both have happy marriages, and he doesn’t think Moira and Johnny Rose or Clint and Marcy Brewer have ever asked each other to identify a time in the last week that they felt appreciated. Meetings are for work, for people who are in different books, never mind on different pages.
“Was there anything you talked about that made the next week go more smoothly?”
“Not really,” Patrick frowns. The meeting was fine. Nice even. But it didn’t change anything. It didn’t fix anything.
“We talked more.” David’s voice is timid. “And I liked doing the movie night again.”
Patrick thinks back over the last week and is forced to admit there were more conversations that lingered and sprawled, leaving the safe neutral ground of the store or errands or schedules. Patrick looks at David with a small smile. “We did. And me too.”
“So is this something you are both interested in keeping up?”
“I think so.” David’s smile, his voice, are so tentative.
Greta makes a note. “Patrick?”
“Yeah of course. I just—No. Of course I’m willing if you think it would help.” He says the last part to David.
David looks as frustrated as Patrick feels. “You just what?”
Patrick closes his eyes and shakes his head. “I just hate that it’s even necessary. This used to be easy!”
“Okay,” she says, the one that means ah-ha. “What used to be easy?”
Patrick blows out a breath. “All of it. Nothing in my life has been as easy as being with David. Not that we didn’t fight or have misunderstandings or whatever. But it wasn’t hard. I don’t understand why it’s hard now. I don’t understand why we’re here, or how we got here, where I need a meeting to tell my husband how I feel about him and what I need from like he doesn’t already know. He knows. I know! What is the fucking meeting for?”
When he finishes his outburst, the stuffy, overstuffed room is so, so quiet. David’s mouth has fallen half-open, and Greta is looking at him like she’s actually glad he raised his voice and questioned her methods.
“Okay,” she says finally. It’s the one that means she’s going to let this sit, that they’ll come back to it.
Next to him, David’s intake of breath is jagged and wet. “I do know,” he says quietly, the first half of a sentence he doesn’t finish.
Greta asks David to tell her about the origins of pizza and movie night, and David tells her about how, back when Patrick was living with Ray, Ray started visiting his aunt in Pinebrook on Sundays after he finished open houses, and that most of the time, they had the whole afternoon and evening to themselves.
Patrick consciously uncrosses his arms and tries not to look quite so resistant. It takes all of his acting talent.
David doesn’t tell her the pizza and the movie were intermission, that Patrick used to be so starved for privacy with David, so starved for David, that he insisted they schedule those Sundays to make sure they didn’t miss them.
“We scheduled it,” Patrick says suddenly.
“Hm?” Greta asks.
“We had a calendar appointment.”
Greta’s smile is genuine and kind.
“‘Performance Reviews,’” David whispers. A meeting.
Patrick and David exchange soft smiles, and David has to blink away tears threatening to spill.
“Okay,” Greta says, the one that means now we’re getting somewhere.
Patrick holds his hand open in David’s lap, an offer. David makes a noise in his throat, blinking hard. And then his hand closes around Patrick’s, squeezing. Patrick forgets about Greta and gets lost in the way their hands look, white knuckled together. It’s like seeing an old friend in an unexpected place, foreign and familiar, and agreeing that they have a lot of catching up to do.
On Sunday, before pizza with extra cheese and Notting Hill for old time’s sake, Patrick looks at the meeting outline they agreed to follow for two more weeks. This is still hard, and he’s still frustrated.
“Is there something that came up in the past week that you want to talk about more?” he asks, reading it from the workbook and trying not to sound weary. If they keep doing this, they might need to build their own outline. These questions feel like work.
David clears his throat and takes a sip of his wine, which they opened early for this. “With Greta, you said this used to be easy.”
“Yeah,” Patrick says, confused.
“It wasn’t.”
“Sure it was.”
David gives him a warning look, the one that reminds him he’s supposed to listen for at least two minutes before commenting. “For me, it wasn’t. It was good. It was… it was perfect. It was never easy.”
Patrick waits, not even because he’s supposed to. He just doesn’t know what to say.
“It was work, for me.” David takes another sip of wine, and Patrick tries to process that. Tries not to collapse as his world shifts and simmers underneath him. David takes his hand, weaves their fingers together. “It was hard. For me.”
It takes everything Patrick has not to trot out examples of times it didn’t seem all that difficult for David, but reminders are listed in bold at the top of the outline. Listen. Consider. Empathize. Ask for clarification.
“Can you try to explain?”
“When we met, I had walls up for a reason. I was even proud of them. Proud that I’d survived long enough to build them, proud of how strong they were. Letting you in, taking them down for you, was worth it but…”
“But it was hard,” he says, understanding. He bites back his joke about The Bachelor. A few contestants always lean on the breaking-down-their-walls metaphor, but the last season’s contestants needed sledgehammers.
“Sometimes it even hurt.”
“Like when?” Patrick asks, surprising them both.
“Like whenever you didn’t understand how hard it was.”
“Like when?” Patrick asks again, gravel littering his voice.
David just looks at him, because Patrick can come up with a handful of examples without even trying. Not telling him about Rachel. The first ‘I love you,’ as wonderful as that day ended up being. Assuming the whole situation with his parents would work itself out. Choosing to make a life here, in a place he never saw himself, because he saw himself with Patrick. The year Patrick watched and held his breath as the store fell into the red hoping the holiday shopping season would fix it before he had to say anything.
David watches patiently as all of that plays across Patrick’s face. “I’m sorry,” Patrick says.
He’s supposed to say more, something from the page on effective apologies, but flipping to it seems less genuine than getting it a little wrong, so he sets the book aside. “I knew your history, but I didn’t really think of it like that. It’s been… instinctual for me. Which maybe isn’t fair. I’m sorry for not seeing it. Hey.” He tips David’s chin. “I want to see it.”
David nods and sets his own workbook aside. “I didn’t want you to at first. It wasn’t you that was making it hard.”
“Maybe,” Patrick says, considering. He and David both shield themselves. David is so much a part of him, he thinks of it as protecting both of them. But clearly, he’s not. Not always.
“Maybe?”
“I don’t really think of them as walls, I guess. But I have some too. I’m probably overdue for some demolition,” he says with a shrug.
“Okay, I think we’ve exhausted the metaphor. This isn’t The Bachelor,” David says. The timer goes off, releasing them from the conversation. They could keep going. Maybe they should. But even this feels like it’s taken all he has.
“I’ll get the pizza?”
David nods, but before he gets up, David’s hand falls steady on his arm. “I love you,” he says, like it’s easy.
“I love you, too.”
David kisses him on the temple and shoos him away. “Go get the pizza.”
Over the next two months, progress is slow and erratic. Patrick feels like they’re searching for a fracture, like if he can find it, he can fix it, and they can start over and pretend it never happened.
When they get home from most of their appointments, it seems easier to just go about making dinner and doing the dishes like normal. The new normal. Patrick reads a business book on the couch in the office, David makes notes for their website designer, and they don’t talk much until bedtime, when their phones chime with the signal that it’s time to go to bed together. Part of their homework. They say goodnight. They usually kiss. They sleep fitfully as their subconscious minds work out ways to fit their bodies against each other, longing for warmth. Patrick doesn’t mind those days. The time to process and mull everything over is nice. Then they wake up together and make coffee and start over.
Other times, they continue the conversation—or the argument—when they leave Greta’s office, armed with new tools that are supposed to make their discussions more productive. Or more honest. Or something. Patrick hates those days, even though Greta says arguments are communication, too. He feels raw and wrung out by the end of them. They still go to bed together when the chime goes off.
“I’m still mad,” David whispers.
“I know,” Patrick says.
He squeezes David’s hand and wakes up early still holding it. He makes David coffee, and they start over.
Their last appointment in March is different. Patrick cries for the whole hour; he started on the way there and couldn’t stop. When Greta asks what's going on, he can’t even explain it.
“I sometimes have this effect on people,” David quips. Greta opens her notepad, which means he's not going to get away with that.
With Patrick barely functional, they spend most of the appointment on David’s penchant for self-deprecation, and soon, David is crying too.
They go to bed with the chime; Patrick waits until David is asleep to start crying again. David wakes up, because of course he does, and lays a warm hand on Patrick’s stomach.
“Hey. Talk to me.”
Patrick blows his nose into an offered tissue and dries his eyes with the cuffs of his sleep shirt. “I’m scared,” he says, something he can only say because he’s out of stamina and the room is pitch black with the curtains pulled.
“Of what?”
“I dunno. I can tell it’s helping. Even though I feel… like this, most of the time.” He sniffles a touch performatively.
“Mmm,” David hums into his shoulder, soothing and vaguely affirmative.
“We keep trying to start over like we're playing some kind of game. I think I’m scared we’re going to run out of lives. And I don’t want to lose us.”
“We won’t,” David says, even though he can’t know. David has reached out a hand to try to pull Patrick out of his spiral, and that feels like progress, even though it feels… like this.
“Okay.”
The last thing he remembers is David’s breath on his neck as he falls asleep.
The next morning, warmed by the sun that promises spring, Patrick wakes up to David sitting on the bed next to him with coffee and a scone from the bakery down the road.
“We’re still us,” he says. “Like, even though you know the entire Mariah discography now, and sometimes I actually enjoy the baseball, we’re still us. So.”
Patrick takes one of the mugs and sips the perfectly hot coffee in case it helps him figure out what the hell David means. Nope. “So…?”
“So we can change and still be us. I don’t want to start over today,” he says, looking at Patrick through the steam rising from the mug in his hands. “I want to start from here.”
<< SPRING >>
When Greta introduces the gazing exercise, which is supposed to help with bonding and intimacy, Patrick just barely manages not to roll his eyes.
“Patrick, tell me why you rolled your eyes.” So maybe he rolled his eyes.
He wrings his hands in his lap. “I don’t know. It just sounds like something we would laugh at if we heard other people were doing it.”
David raises a finger in point of order. “I actually waited in line for six hours at MOMA to do this with Marina Abramovic. It took me a week to recover.”
“I…” Patrick looks at Greta who looks between them and waits them out. He’s not sure if that’s an objection or what. “Fine. We can try it.”
“Patrick, what do you think will happen, if you try it and you like it?”
Even four months in, Patrick resents her incisive, invasive questions. “I don’t know. I just feel weird sometimes when the point of the exercise is to do something that we should be doing anyway. I hate that we can’t figure it out on our own.”
“He likes being able to watch a YouTube video and be the hero,” David says.
“I—” It’s uncomfortably accurate, but. “I’ve gotten us out of a bind more than once, doing that.”
Greta looks at David for a response. When he says nothing, she pokes gently. “David, do you agree?”
“Yes,” he says reluctantly.
“I could never pull off a cape the way David does, though.”
David nods. Grins. “Also true.”
Greta smiles politely. “Does it worry either of you, that you haven’t been able to figure things out?”
“Yes,” Patrick whispers, like it’s a secret and not the entire reason he’s still sitting here, but he’s not sure he’s ready to get into it yet. “Anyway it’s fine. Let’s do the gazing thing, or whatever.”
“Okay,” she says, the one that means she’s going to let him get away with it. For now.
Greta lays out the ground rules. They’ll sit facing each other, making eye contact. They’re allowed to blink and touch, but no talking or kissing. She'll leave the room to give them privacy for three minutes. When she comes back, the time is up. She’ll then ask questions he doesn’t want to answer. She doesn’t say that part, but it’s safe to assume.
They turn toward each other on the couch, adjusting so their knees are touching. She tells them when to begin and then quietly leaves.
Patrick feels the tension in his face relax as soon as they’re alone, and David’s mouth tries a few different positions before it stills. It feels like they’ve been doing this for thirty minutes, even though they just started.
It’s easy to get lost looking at David. It always has been. Patrick gets lost right away, studying his features, the sharp topography of his lips, the pinpoints of stubble across his cheeks, the heavy sweep of his brows, the ridge of his nose. The first time he saw this face, he got so lost he found himself somewhere entirely different. He found himself.
They’ve spent a good deal of time in this office talking about history, about all of their best memories. About the things they love about each other, big and small. It’s supposed to remind them that they married each other. Verb. An action that they did on purpose. The David he met in Ray’s office is still here, in this face, but blurrier than the David in front of him. All the years of their life together have accumulated in the tiniest lines at the corners of his mouth, eyes, across his forehead, so that when he looks at him, he can conjure not just a moment in time but can mark the passing of it. Mark the years they’ve been doing this on purpose.
David starts to cry. Not full, rolling tears, but a glistening dampness in his eyes that makes it impossible for Patrick to look away. Patrick cups his hand on David’s knee, rubbing firm circles into David’s thigh with his thumb, and he wishes he could say something.
I’m sorry. This is weird. I’m trying. David’s mouth quirks at the corner, tender and fragile, so Patrick just keeps thinking of all the things he would say if he could.
I miss you.
I wish I were better at fixing this.
I promise we won’t lose us.
David’s hand closes over his, sandwiching it against his knee.
His eyes go soft, unbearably soft, and Patrick can’t read them, exactly, but for a minute he can feel that old, frayed cord that connects them, feels like he can tug on it and pull David in, pull them closer to the people that first wove those fibers together with a determination to keep climbing, the willingness to be carried, when things didn’t go how they were supposed to go.
David blinks, releasing a tear as his lashes fall dark against his cheeks. Why are you crying? Patrick wants to ask. Is he thinking about the past? The future? Maybe he’s thinking about this awkward, horrible present when he has to pay a licensed professional just to get his husband to look at him.
Maybe all of it. Patrick can send his mind off in any direction and his own chest becomes heavy, his breaths uneven, his eyes wet. Patrick has the sudden urge to tell him that he’s beautiful, an urge that builds faster and thicker and more powerful, until it charges out of his throat.
“You’re so beautiful.”
David raises his eyebrows and pinches his smile between his teeth and makes a noise, a gorgeous, dense, laughing-crying noise in his throat. You broke the rules, his eyes say, loud and clear, and Patrick does start crying, because his whole face, from forehead to chin and every line and dimple in between, is so David, so smug and self-righteous and funny and soft and unbearably, unbelievably beautiful. Patrick smiles at him until he lets his own smile free, crooked and brimming with laughter.
Greta has definitely been gone for at least two weeks, but Patrick no longer cares because they’re dangerously close to laughing together over something dumb that will only be funny to them, and only because his husband’s face is a wonder and Patrick is weak for it. He’s weak for it, and he loves him. He’s in love with him.
If Patrick was going to break the no talking rule, it should have been to say that, probably. I love you. Or maybe I’m in love with you. Again. Still. But telling David he’s beautiful is almost the same. Maybe better, because when Patrick tells David he’s beautiful, he doesn’t just mean his face. He means his heart, his love. Telling David he’s beautiful isn’t just saying I love you. It’s I love you, and I love how you love me.
Greta opens the door and steps back inside quietly, without saying anything. She sits and waits for them to look at her, waits for them to come back down, gather themselves up.
David’s face turns serious again as he squeezes Patrick’s knee and whispers, “You’re beautiful, too.”
They do have to talk about it, about what they were each thinking about. Neither of them tells her Patrick spoke when he wasn’t supposed to. Greta doesn’t point out that he obviously sort of liked it. Which, he can admit, is nice of her.
They try it again at home that evening, setting a timer for five minutes. The temperature dropped just low enough by dinnertime to turn the rain to sleet, which taps a drumroll against the windows, picking up speed.
By four minutes, Patrick is having a hard time concentrating. The memories aren’t chaste this time, not here in the warm surroundings of their home. He remembers David’s fist clenching Stevie’s sheets as Patrick made a clumsy, inexperienced, and apparently very satisfying mess of him with his mouth. David’s careful, measured thrusts the first time Patrick ever let someone else inside of him, and the way David smiled at him, confident and sexy, and the way he felt, somewhat sheepishly, very gay, and so fucking happy about it. David’s hands on his wrist, knotting rope, an experiment that was supposed to be about control but instead freed something inside him. David’s mouth everywhere, anywhere, and the way it wrestles secrets from his body. The way David looks at him, after, with so much love. Verb. An action he does on purpose.
The timer goes off.
“Oh thank god,” David says, and then he tucks his hand around the curve of Patrick’s head and pulls him in, pressing a warm kiss to his lips. Patrick goes willingly, eagerly, kissing him back, opening his mouth and letting David in. Thank god.
He can tell they’re both trying to reclaim something. Not the careful, tidy mutual satisfaction of late, but something deeper, more desperate, considerate only of the other’s need.
David yanks Patrick’s shirt out of his jeans and digs his fingers under the waistband to pull him closer, while Patrick tries to unbutton his buttons.
“Hang on,” he mutters, scrambling off the couch and fumbling for the phone to turn off the alarm’s tinny arpeggio of chimes. He leaves it on the coffee table and returns to the couch, straddling David. They bought a nice couch a couple of years ago. A sectional that fits the space. They usually take it up to the bedroom whenever the mood strikes like this, but maybe… maybe it’s not so bad to drop the concept of usually.
David watches him, the little bit of awkwardness that hovers between them abolished by the gazing exercise. He unbuttons Patrick’s jeans as he pulls him into his lap, and then nuzzles his face into his neck. “This okay?”
“Yeah,” Patrick gasps against the sting of his teeth. Patrick tries to grind against him through his jeans. Eventually they’re going to have to shift for this to work, but it’s amazing like this, the shivers of want up his spine carried by this not-quite-enoughness. “Did you do this with Maria Abramovic?”
“It’s Marina, and no. I only lasted a minute across from her before I had to leave.”
“Really?” Patrick lifts his head as his hands scratch their way under his sweater.
David grips his waist tightly under his open shirt. “When you want to look at someone like that, you have to let them see you. I went back twice, to the exhibit. I never could handle the second part.”
Something about the quiet admission of that steals his breath and stills his hands.
“Can I take you to bed?” he asks, perhaps unnecessarily, given they’re half undressed and more than half hard. It feels important, suddenly, to stretch this fragile bubble of intimacy across their home, up into their most sacred of spaces.
“Mmm,” David hums with a nod.
It’s a risk, for sure, to gather their things and take their glasses to the sink. To take their time with teeth-brushing, to fold David’s sweater and toss their socks in the hamper. He refuses to give in to the fear that a good moment has to be wrung out quickly for all it can offer or it won’t last. Patrick begins to ache, though, getting harder just thinking about having David again, not rushed and frantic in case one of them might remember the distance between them, not careful and measured because neither of them can forget the distance between them, but like this. Here. Now. On purpose.
He thinks about all the things he wanted to say earlier.
“I miss you,” he says, standing next to the bed and raising onto his toes to kiss him softly on the lips. “I wish I was better at fixing this.” Another kiss, just as soft.
“We won’t lose us,” David says, something of a mantra of his now, as he tilts his head into another kiss.
Then he nudges Patrick back on the bed and proves it.
After, Patrick lays next to his husband and looks at him. The branches of the nearest honey locust thump against the roof above them in the wind, still waiting for the year’s crop of leaves. It matches the steady beat of his heart. Their bedtime reminders chime in perfect harmony from opposite sides of the bed, and David kisses him before reaching to turn his off.
They should get their books, read, wind down. In a little while. For now, it’s nice just to look.
After greeting them and inviting them to sit, Greta asks them how they are generally (“Okay.”) and how the last two weeks went specifically (“A little better, I think?” “Yeah, a little better.”).
“So last time we talked a little bit about scheduling some uninterrupted time together. Have you made any plans for it?”
“We talked about taking the day off for our anniversary. In September.” David cringes. They both know she meant sooner than four months from now.
“And is that what you would normally do?”
David shakes his head. “We normally go for a long weekend somewhere.”
“Somewhere where? Where did you go last year?”
“Last year we drove to a bed and breakfast outside Toronto. We’ve gone there a couple times.”
“Other years we’ve gone to my parents’ cabin,” Patrick offers.
“But not this year? Are you still deciding?”
“We haven’t really gone anywhere since…”
“Since the accident,” David finishes.
“Okay,” Greta says, the one that means oh really. “Why not?”
David reaches his arm across the back of the couch and scratches the back of Patrick's shoulder as they exchange a look. Patrick sighs. “It just seemed hard to make plans.”
“Because of the accident? Or because of how things have been between you? Or?”
“Both?” David’s scratching gets quicker, and Patrick leans into it.
“Okay.”
Greta crosses her legs and leans back in her chair. “I want to come back to your anniversary, but I think we should talk more about the accident, because it’s been six months, now, since that happened. I’ve noticed you both sort of talk around it and that whenever it comes up, it seems very fresh. Why is that?”
David sighs. “I just feel like we can’t get past it. Everything was fine, we had just had the best trip.”
Patrick picks up one of the wooden 3D puzzles on the table in front of them and tries to disassemble it. “And then I ruined everything.”
David emits a surprised huff, and Greta looks at him and back at Patrick, who tries not to frown, because yes, he heard it, too.
“That’s a big statement.” A dull pause. “David, how would you describe it?”
David squirms because they both know that’s exactly how he has described it since then. More than once. Even if he didn’t mean it.
“I guess I would say it was a great trip. And I was, perhaps, a little too complacent. Or I didn’t want to see how tired he was. And so I let him drive when maybe I should have insisted that we get a hotel.”
“Why didn’t you want to see how tired he was?”
“I didn’t want to drive instead. I hate driving at night. I hate the way bugs smack into the windshield.”
“Okay, but you just said you could have insisted on a hotel.”
“Mmmhmm.” David has gone from scratching Patrick’s shoulder to gripping it hard.
“So. Why didn’t you insist on a hotel, if you didn’t want to drive?”
“Because I knew it would be an argument, and I just didn’t think it would be worth arguing about.”
“Why is that?”
David crosses and uncrosses his legs, and then he looks at Patrick like he isn’t sure he should say it. Patrick doesn’t want to bristle, when he suspects that’s exactly the problem, but he bristles anyway. “Just say it.”
“Because he thinks he can do everything. He doesn’t like to discover his limits. And he really hates it when I find them for him.”
Greta turns her steady gaze on him. Patrick sets the 3D puzzle back on the table, the ring freed from the contraption. “I hate when anyone points them out. Not just David.”
“Why is that?”
Patrick sighs. He’s been suspecting, for some time now, that they would get here. It doesn’t make it any easier. “I like… I like being dependable. I like being someone he can depend on.” He turns to David. “I like being someone you can depend on. That’s important. To me.”
“I do depend on you!” David says, frustrated.
“Patrick, do you think that being useful, or dependable, is one of the reasons David loves you?” Greta asks.
“Yes.” He’s positive it’s true until the word leaves his mouth.
“Why?” David’s hand slides up his shoulder to the join with his neck, squeezing gently until Patrick looks at him. He looks confused and hurt. Shit.
“I just…” Patrick doesn’t know what to say. It’s so fundamental, it doesn’t feel like something that needs to be explained. He introduced himself to David as someone who could be of use, could be helpful, and then proved it, over and over again.
“Patrick, have there been other relationships in your family, or maybe with previous partners or friends, where you’ve felt your value in the relationship was to be useful?”
“Yes,” he says. “I mean not only that, but that’s… that’s just…”
She lets the silence hang, as though clarity will materialize from the tense space between them.
“Can you think of an example?” she asks, gentle in a way he hasn’t felt from her before, which makes him sure that his face is a perfect picture of the flailing going on in his head.
“My dad,” he says. “I guess my dad offered up my help a lot, when I got old enough. We’d mow the lawn together at the church. And rake leaves. He had a truck, so people were always asking him for help moving things, and he’d always bring me. It was just… part of Saturdays after baseball games. We played guitar together sometimes at the local nursing home, too. I dunno. Just helping people. I don’t think that’s a bad thing.”
“No. It’s not.” She shakes her head. “What about those experiences made you feel valued, in terms of the relationship with your dad?”
“I guess just that he seemed proud of me. Proud to introduce me. Excited to spend time with me. People would say things to him about how I was nice and helpful and… I dunno.”
“And what?”
“A good catch, I guess. A good man.”
“And that became part of how you saw yourself.” It’s not a question but he nods anyway. “So what do you think would happen if you were unable to be of use to David?”
“I…” Patrick has to stop to think. “I guess I feel like this would happen. We’d… break. That’s what happened in my last relationship, too.”
“David, what are you thinking when you hear this?”
“Honestly?” he asks, withdrawing his hand and inspecting his cuticles.
“Yes,” Patrick says, surprising himself. He feels like a snapped rubber band, like he can no longer measure how fraught something might be through his own resistance to it. But if David feels like he can talk to him here, then he wants to make room for whatever David wants to say.
David doesn’t offer anything, though.
“David, do you think there are times when you reinforce—?”
“I was never allowed to need someone before!” David agitates the air around him with his hands. “Before Stevie, it was the opposite, most of the time. And Stevie was not exactly thrilled about it at first either.”
Greta nods. They already spent a long meeting on Rose family history, good and bad, as it relates to their relationship. David groans in frustration but doesn’t say anything else. Greta has clearly figured out that silence is the best way to get whatever’s on the tip of David’s tongue to fall off. Eons pass.
“I don’t understand what I’m supposed to do differently. Just stop asking him for things?”
“No,” Patrick says, even though he’s not sure if that’s the right answer. It feels right.
“No,” Greta echoes. “If this dynamic is something you both enjoy, then it’s an important part of your relationship. I would like for us to try to understand it better, so that when it undergoes a shift, it doesn’t become devastating the way it has now.”
David turns back toward Patrick and blinks a few times before the tears start, and Patrick does need to be useful, dammit, so he hands him a tissue. “I like when you do things for me. I love that you like it, too. That it makes you happy. And it makes me happy to make you happy. And to not have to kill bugs myself.”
Patrick snorts. “I thought we agreed that was Stevie’s job.”
“Someone has to do it when she's out of town.” He sobers quickly when David’s hand closes around the back of his neck, squeezing to get his attention. “But. Sometimes you’re a fucking mess, and I still love you. Even when you’re not useful, you’re vital.”
Ronnie comes by the house the next day, his day off, and tells him to grab his baseball bat and gloves and meet her at her truck, as if he has nothing else to do. He doesn’t, so he does.
She drives them to the Lee Rec Center, where the town council approved batting cages alongside refurbished tennis courts. Three years ago, in a debate about allocating a regional Parks and Leisure Grant, David turned Patrick’s notes into a series of mood boards on the link between batting cages and little league dominance and presented them to the council on his behalf. Coach Patrick had already been banned from the meeting after getting a little carried away during the previous meeting, where he was deemed “too invested” to participate in further debate.
David is dependable too, even though he wouldn’t put it that way.
Patrick leans against the chain link barrier while Ronnie takes the first round in the cage. The thwack of the ball and subsequent ping as it ricochets off the far end is mollifying and makes it so Patrick doesn’t have to try to come up with something to talk about.
They switch places, and he takes a few swings of his own. Winding up and hitting something is satisfying; the burn in his muscles chases away the spring chill. He hasn’t come here yet this year. He forgot how nice it is to work out all the tension this way.
“I’d like to know how it’s going, if you want to tell me.”
He drops the bat off his shoulder with a sigh. “Apparently I think being useful is what makes me worthy of love. So. Just have to rearrange forty years of thinking there.”
“Well damn, I could’ve told you that,” Ronnie says with a laugh, which makes Patrick laugh too. “That’s why you think I don’t like you. I don’t need you.”
Patrick is about to disagree, but he can’t. Not really.
“I’m still not convinced you like me,” he says instead.
She shrugs but doesn’t confirm or deny. He smacks another ball to the back of the cage.
“Is it helping, though?” she asks, after another hit.
He takes a breather to lean against the cage, him on one side of the barrier, her on the other. That little bit of mesh between them provides the illusion of anonymity. Like a confessional.
“Yes?” Patrick says after a minute. “I guess… So far, I feel like all the stuff we’re coming up with is my stuff. It doesn’t feel like a mystery, anymore? But it sure doesn’t feel good.”
She turns around and leans her back against the other side. “I remember feeling, at first, like everything was a judgement. And I was so damn ashamed. You ask people to invest in your marriage, you know? From the very beginning. Not usually by getting someone’s girlfriend to provide a full garden’s worth of flowers at cost, but still.”
“Ha ha.”
“It needed to be said. Anyway, this may surprise you, Brewer, but I hate failure.”
“Shocking.” They’re facing in opposite directions, but he can imagine the pained look on her face. Sincerity isn’t their thing.
“I wouldn’t tell anyone. Wouldn’t let anyone help fix it. Not Greta. Not even Karen. Anyway we don’t need to get into that. My point is, nothing about marriage is as equal as you want it to be. Including the work to fix it. He wants to work with you, doesn’t he?”
Patrick kicks his toe into the dirt. “I think so.”
“Hmm.” She leaves it up to him to fill in the rest.
“You’re not a failure.” He needs to say it. For her. For himself. “I think you’re brave, actually. For recognizing that you needed to say goodbye.”
She makes a surprised noise as her head drops back against her side of the cage. “I still don’t like you,” she says with no real bad feeling behind it.
“It was worth a shot.”
They stand for another minute, the quiet pierced only by a pair of pigeons scavenging near the picnic tables.
“Well, are you done with this round or what? You giving up that quickly?”
He laughs and repositions himself in the batter’s box. “No. I have a few more in me I think.”
“I thought so,” she says, and looks at him like she means it.
“Patrick, last time you said you ruined everything the night of the accident. Do you feel like you let David down?”
Patrick grimaces, he’s pretty sure. He’s been trying to be less resistant today. Greta seems to be taking advantage of the opening. Patrick hates it. “Yes. I mean he said I did, afterwards. But I already felt like I did.”
“He said you let him down?”
David shakes his head. “I was angry. We were fighting.”
“I see. Something I want you both to try to remember, when you get angry, is that anger is not usually a primary emotion. When we say things out of anger, we tend to be covering over something else. So David, what is under that, saying that he let you down?”
“I was scared,” David says, and Patrick doesn’t like how small he makes himself. “We were both asleep when the car went off the road. So then, after, we had to just stand there in the dark and stare at it, and neither of us really knew what happened.”
“I was using cruise control,” Patrick says. “So after I drifted off…”
“It was freezing on the side of the highway. And we couldn’t really get back in the car. It was—” David clamps his eyes shut. Patrick closes his eyes too and tries to picture their new car instead, parked safely under the blossoming crabapple tree in the parking lot. “I remember I just kept looking at him, checking him. I didn’t see how we managed to walk away like nothing happened.”
That’s not entirely true. They were both a little bruised up, the full spectrum of the rainbow blooming across their chests where their seatbelts kept it from being so much worse. He’s not going to correct him, though.
“That does sound scary.” Greta’s face is laced with what seems to be real sympathy. It’s harder to muster his usual irritation when she’s being nice to his husband.
“I guess Patrick had a cut. On his wrist.” David thumbs over the faint line on his wrist bone.
“Just a small one. From the door.”
Greta waits to see what else they might offer. She leans forward to shift a vase of fresh tulips between them to one end of the table. Patrick has noticed she does this, moves things around here and there, whenever silence alone doesn’t get them talking.
“I’m used to rejection. From everywhere but here.” David releases his wrist and waves his hand in a manner so as to encompass Patrick generally. “The accident reminded me that he can still hurt me. And that. That with no say at all, from either of us, he could still end up leaving me.”
Patrick doesn’t know what to do with that or the sudden feeling like he’s glued down. He can’t move. Can barely breathe.
“It’s my fault,” he says, because he always says that when he doesn’t know what to say to make it better.
“It’s not.” David slides his pencil in and out of the coil binding of the workbook on the table next to him and doesn’t look at either of them. “I know it’s not. But I think a part of me wants to believe it is, because it would explain how hard it’s been to trust him since then.”
Greta lets the silence hang for a long time, and all the air in the room seems to vanish with the sound. Patrick wants to say something more, shout something, but he doesn’t trust himself either, it turns out. He knows they’re here so they can say things to each other that they’re afraid to say at home. But it’s crushing anyway, when he’s been begging and pleading for an explanation that never comes, only to have it come here, now.
“Trust him with what?” Greta asks finally.
Tears start building in his throat, clogging out what little air he can take in. David shrugs. “Everything. It’s a little better now. But before, it was everything. How I was feeling, what I wanted, business stuff, sex, dinner. Everything.”
“Patrick what are you thinking, hearing this?”
Patrick shakes his head. He still feels like he can’t get enough air pumping through his lungs to breathe, let alone speak. Some part of Patrick has known this. He began to anticipate when the arguments would come, what they would be about, the shape of David’s irritation with him. Putting a word to it was supposed to feel better than this.
“It’s not fair to him,” David says. “I know that. I want to trust him.”
Patrick shakes his head again. He knows he needs to say something. It’s my fault. That’s not nearly enough.
“Have you ever dealt with a breach of trust before in your relationship?”
Patrick nods and hopes she’s got it in her notes already, all the other times he deserved to lose David’s trust, and somehow didn’t. They’ve already been over the main ones. God, even the fact that he can think of more than one! He clamps his hands down on the edge of the couch cushion.
“Just the things we already talked about,” David clarifies.
Patrick nods again, frozen.
David blinks away a tear and seems to gather himself. “I feel like I should remind everyone that not trusting people is my comfort zone. Normally. So falling back into it after… that, seems. I don’t know. Reasonable.”
“It does,” she agrees. “In the past, how have you reestablished that trust?”
David shakes his head. “I don’t know. If I knew…”
If he knew, Patrick could fix it.
Patrick really can’t breathe, not at all. He needs air. Needs to not be staring at Sigmund Freud nodding solemnly along on Greta’s desk. He stands abruptly, a released spring, and paces toward the door. He paces back, willing himself to sit down. Back to the door. Back to the couch. Back to the door.
David watches him like he can tell how badly Patrick wants to leave. The door is right there. This is a test, and he has to pass it. He has to.
“Patrick—” Greta starts.
“Why didn’t you just tell me this?” Patrick asks. David startles at his tone.
“Because you didn’t do anything wrong! And I didn’t want you to feel any worse about everything than you already did.”
Patrick sits down again with a huff, and David lets out a relieved breath.
“Can we fix this?” He doesn’t even know which of them he’s asking. He’s just looking for a lifeline.
Greta sets her notepad aside and folds her hands in her lap. “That’s not up to me. I can help clarify your dilemma, but you have to decide whether it’s worth it to you to work through it. And whether this is the right place for you to do that.”
She’s saying more than she’s saying, he’s sure of it. The three of them are unnaturally silent.
“We’re almost out of time, but I want to leave you with this. A lot of people who sit in my office are learning that another person will never be what they need them to be all of the time. I think you both actually understand this very well. The other piece of it, that seems harder for both of you, is that you will never be what you expect yourself to be all of the time. You can’t blame the other person for that, and you can’t blame yourself.”
Patrick opens his mouth to say something, but he comes up empty. As per fucking usual.
“David, would you be willing to think about the other times this issue of trust has come up, either with Patrick or someone else? It might even help to make a list, which you don’t have to show me, and try to identify whether you felt, immediately afterwards, like you could have prevented it by doing or saying something differently.”
“Mmm. Not my favorite idea of yours, Greta.”
She smiles sympathetically but doesn’t say anything, waiting out a real answer. David glances at Patrick, who still feels like he’s meters behind them in a race he didn’t realize he agreed to run, and back at Greta.
“Fine. I… will. Try that.”
They say their goodbyes, and once they step outside, Patrick finally feels like he can breathe.
When they get in the car, Patrick leans his forehead against the steering wheel.
David places a warm hand at the center of his back. “It’s not too late to try screamnastics.”
Patrick’s laugh comes choked out through a sob. He lifts his head and looks at his husband. “You are worth it, to me.”
David’s pleased smile helps set his world right again. “So are you.”
Patrick spends the slow hour before lunch working on budget projections on his laptop at the cash while David restocks the refrigerator case with the shipment he picked up at Heather’s on his way to work. They decided to go back to their old schedule, working in the store together most days, and it’s been nice. There’s an intimacy about being here together that Patrick took for granted before. The store highlights the ways they balance each other, reminds them how they work together, surrounds them with their shared history that helped ground and bind them.
David ducks into the back to break down a box. When he comes back out, he stops behind Patrick, somewhere between hesitation and hovering. When his hands find Patrick’s shoulders, steady and heavy, Patrick closes his eyes and holds still, like any movement might spook him.
“How’s it looking?” he says.
Patrick can feel his hands start to slide backwards, and he reaches up and grips them, pulling them back in place. The noise David makes… god. He’s missed this. “It looks good,” he says, like this is normal. “March was slow as usual but better than the last three years. RMG’s latest round of acquisitions has upped our online sales.”
“I’m glad,” he says. After another beat, a brief hesitation, David steps closer, draping his arms over his shoulders so he can see the screen. “Will you show me?”
His breath is warm on the thin skin behind Patrick’s ear, and the weight of his arms, the press they lay across his shoulders, is soothing and earth-shattering at once. How did they just stop doing this? How did he let them?
“That feels good,” Patrick says.
“Good,” he says, and then, like a slow unfurling of months of pent-up casual intimacy, he spreads a hand flat on his chest and kisses his cheek. “Now show me.”
Patrick does, showing him the graph he made of their last three years in sales by monthly profits, overlaid so he can see the difference.
“Wait, so that’s our percent profit?” David squeezes, his wrist bone digging uncomfortably into Patrick’s collarbone. Patrick hooks his hands over his arm to pull him in tighter.
“That’s our percent profit.”
“Fuck,” David says.
“I know.”
“You said it was good. This is like, a week in the Maldives good.”
“I mean, probably more like a weekend in Cancun good, before taxes, but sure.”
David’s laugh is light and fluttery in his ear. Patrick cranes his neck to kiss whatever part of him he can, catching mostly his nose and part of his cheek.
“Lucky us.”
The conversation gives Patrick an idea, but this is too fresh, too fragile to voice it just yet. Instead he says, “Will you have dinner with me tonight?”
“Sure.” David is still enamored with the little green number on the spreadsheet, and Patrick is worried he isn’t getting it. Wouldn’t be the first time.
“I mean like, I’d like to buy you dinner. As—as a date.”
“Oh.” It’s soft, almost melodic, and followed by a kiss pressed into his hair. “Yes. Where?”
“Regina’s in Elm Glen? It will cut into our Cancun budget, but their patio is nice.”
“You can move the money around.”
“That’s not how it works.”
“I know. Regina’s sounds perfect.” He smiles at the tickled notes in David’s voice. He is still draped over his shoulders like an avant-garde cape, so Patrick runs his hands up and down David’s forearms.
“I’ll make us a reservation,” he says, navigating to the restaurant’s website.
David doesn’t move, just holds on and watches Patrick select a time of 8 p.m., which is hopefully late enough for both of them to clean up and get ready after work. Eventually the lunch rush begins and they both have to help customers, but the promise of dinner, of a date, lingers.
He knows Greta is not wrong. He has to stop looking at this like something that he needs to fix for them. But it has actually helped to have words for what fell apart. So Patrick is a little right, too.
The afternoon is filled with shy glances and soft smiles, the evening with tangled feet and rapt conversation. Later, in bed, David whispers, “I trust you,” as Patrick lines himself up, and then he gives himself over to Patrick’s precise and ruthless knowing.
It’s a normal day, except for how long it’s been since the last one like it.
<< SUMMER >>
“David, six months ago when we started meeting, you suggested that the difficulties started with the accident. Now that you’ve been at this awhile, do you still feel that way?”
“I… yes?”
“What about you, Patrick?”
Patrick tries to think about it, which is one of the agreements they made after they decided to try this for another three months. To think about questions and answer honestly. “Yes. I think so. If anything, before that night, things were as great as they’ve ever been. We’d just had—I mean we’d had one of the best days. Normally if we’re gone for more than a day or two, I’m itching to get home.”
David’s hand twitches in his, hard enough to make Patrick turn and study him. Greta sees it too, but she doesn’t jump on it. She never jumps on it. He’s noticed that about Greta. She circles it like a shark until they’ve both forgotten they spilled blood in the water.
“So tell me more about this great day,” she says instead, circling.
They tell her the story about the small business conference in Montreal, and how they spent an extra day in the city and dragged their feet when it was time to leave. So much about the day was overshadowed by what came after, and reliving those blissful hours when they didn’t know what was coming is strange.
“So what made this better than a normal day?” she asks.
“It was little things,” David says with a shrug. “The conference was actually good. We’d lined up a couple of new vendors and learned a lot about online merchandising, and I don’t know, it just felt like we had all these ideas and places we wanted to take the business. Normally the business stuff is Patrick’s domain, but it had started to feel like it was less his and mine and more… ours, I guess. Like we were speaking the same language.”
“Do most of your good days involve the business?” she asks.
“No,” Patrick shuts down that train of thought quickly. They are partners in business and life, and both of those are vitally important. “Maybe at first, but no. I mean the store is…” He’s not going to say ‘our baby.’
“Our baby,” David says. Patrick fights a smile.
“We work well together,” Patrick adds. “Normally we balance each other out. But that day, even before that really, it started to feel like more than that. Like the sum was more than its parts.”
“So you both felt like you’d reached a new, exciting place in your business relationship.” They nod. “So David, what were you most excited for?”
David answers with so little hesitation that Patrick wonders how long he’s been waiting to bring it up here, with an impartial third party. “It seemed like maybe he was starting to open up to the idea of us moving somewhere… else.”
She raises her eyebrows and turns to Patrick. “Is that something you’ve been resistant to?” Shark bite.
“I… guess? I like our life. Or I did. But I did like that day, and the things we talked about, and how it seemed like there might be compromises that would work for both of us.”
“Have you talked about it since?”
David shrugs. “It just… I don’t know, it felt like by the time the dust settled, everything was different. We got bumped to a different timeline, and all of those things we talked about became part of the distant future again.”
“The distant future… like when?” she asks.
David throws his hands up. “Exactly.”
Patrick can feel himself settle in, go on the defensive. He can't stop it. “At the point where we could barely stand to be in the same room together, it didn’t seem like a great idea to pick up and move.”
“But this is what always happens.” David covers his face with his hands. Patrick wants to grab his hand again, just to reassure himself. They’d been doing so well, getting closer, getting better. They were past this!
Greta takes a deep breath and lays her notepad in her lap. “What always happens?”
“This! Whenever we get close to a future that is not more of the same.”
“More of the same how?”
“Living here. Running the store. Dinners at the café. It’s good but. Every week is the same same same.”
“David,” Patrick whispers, and even he can hear that it sounds too much like a warning.
“David, do you think there’s anything that would help that feeling of sameness that’s not related to where you live?”
“I’ve tried to, like, branch out or whatever. I ran for the council. And I know how this sounds,” David says, petting Patrick’s arm. “I’m not unhappy. I love our life. I just—I think it comes back to work. To the business.”
Greta jots something down in her notepad. “So the conversation in Montreal felt big, then.”
“Yes.”
Patrick interjects, “When was the last time before Montreal that we had a conversation about moving?”
“We’ve talked about it before.”
“We talked about it before the wedding. But not since.”
“Because whenever I try to bring it up, you shut down.”
“When do you bring it up?” Patrick asks.
“I don’t know, like every time we talk about plans for the store?”
There’s a retort on the tip of his tongue, he’s sure of it. Because they have had conversations before about the store. A second location. Shifting to online. Selling and trying something else. But they’ve never felt like real conversations. Like the pastry counter that David talks about sometimes but that they’ll never buy because neither of them actually wants to learn to bake. David is pushy when he wants to be, but he was never pushy about this.
They have all these tools now. Ways to communicate. But he doesn’t know how to ask for clarification, doesn’t know how to apologize for something he didn’t realize he was doing, didn’t mean to do, still isn’t sure he did. “That’s just not true.” It sounds pathetically like a whimper.
Greta lets them sit in stony silence for too long, until the air in the room gets too hot and his shirt feels too tight.
“David, what is an example of a time that you brought up the idea of moving?” Greta asks, and Patrick has never appreciated her more.
“Well.” He swallows audibly. “I suggested looking at places in Montreal.”
“As a joke,” Patrick says. “You assigned us roles to play if we met with a realtor.”
“And before that?” Greta says in her smoothest, most calming voice.
“Um. For a hot minute when it looked like Elm Glen was going to become a rural hipster enclave, we looked at relocating.”
“Elm Glen is fifteen minutes from our house.”
“Did you talk about moving to a new home? Or just relocating the store?”
“Just the store, but it came with an apartment.”
Patrick taps a clenched fist against the arm of the sofa. “How am I supposed to know that you talking about how shitty an apartment is in Elm Glen means you want to move?”
“I—” David opens his mouth and closes it.
“What happened the last time you brought it up more directly?”
“Patrick got upset. And stole my muffin. And then he said we could go, even though I could tell he didn’t really want to.”
“Okay,” Greta says, the reluctant one that means they’re out of time. “I want to keep talking about this next time, but I’d like you to do something in the interim. I want you to try not to argue about facts: what you did or didn’t talk about, how many times you had this discussion, or whose memory is correct. You won’t get anywhere with that. You have to ask yourself why it matters. Arguing about the details of past discussions is distracting you from the underlying argument. I want you to try to uncover why you, David, feel like you can’t initiate this conversation directly, and why you, Patrick, do not perceive this as a conversation that David would like to have.”
They both look at her, and then each other. The set of David’s mouth is so tender, so careful, interwoven with apology and forgiveness. It helps.
“Okay. The other thing I want you to do is a thought experiment. Tonight, when you go to sleep, I want you to imagine waking up and discovering that everything has suddenly gotten better. Not just between you, but across the board. Your whole life. I want you to describe for each other what that looks like, and how you know. I want you to try it again in a week, and then one more time before I see you again. Sound good?”
“Mmm, thrilling,” David says with a grimace.
Greta just smiles sympathetically.
“We’ll try it,” Patrick says, to get them moving. He’s ready to go home.
Patrick opens the bedroom windows a crack while David folds back the blankets on the bed. The weather is mild, perfect for summer; some fresh air might help this conversation they should probably have. Their next appointment is tomorrow, and they haven’t done the thought experiment yet, about what a better life would look like. Patrick isn’t sold on the homework, but he’s not sure what it says that this is the first one they’ve both tacitly decided to skip. They’ve been blaming this past event for all their troubles, but now he’s worried that if they look into the future, they’ll find things there that scare them more.
They lie in bed next to each other in the dark for a long time, silent. David is awake. He isn’t pretending not to be.
“If we don’t do it, she’ll ask us why.”
Patrick rolls onto his side to face him. “Yeah.”
David turns his head on the pillow, the strands of silver in his hair catching in the moonlight. “If you woke up tomorrow, and everything had suddenly gotten better overnight, what would be different?”
Patrick closes his eyes, tries to picture it. “I think the first thing I would notice is that you’re huddled up to my side, like you always used to.”
David rolls onto his side so they make brackets on the bed, trying to limit all the space between them. “What else?”
He tries to think. “I don’t know. That’s the problem. My stuff is just about you. I wouldn’t feel like I let you down anymore. I would feel like you can trust me again. I wouldn’t feel like I’ve forgotten how to make you happy. I wouldn’t feel… lost.”
David exhales a heavy breath.
“What about you?”
“I would wake up to your cock being very rude and demanding,” David says, and Patrick’s laugh helps shrink the tension. “I would take care of you, obviously.”
“How?” Patrick whispers.
“A nice, tidy blowjob, I think. I’d have to worry less about morning breath, and I’d get to hear all those sounds you make in your raspy morning voice.”
Patrick makes a strangled sound in response.
“You’d let go for me,” David says quietly, and that sobers him. “You’d let me make you feel good again. Without even thinking about it.”
“I will,” he promises.
“We… we might be in a different bedroom. The light would be different. And the noises outside.”
“Like traffic?” Patrick asks, because he can’t bring himself to ask if David means New York or Toronto or L.A. or somewhere else.
“Maybe.”
“Do I like it there? In the new place?”
“You love it. That’s the only reason we left.”
“Okay.”
Patrick rolls onto his back to mull it over. He can’t look at David for the next question. “Do we still have the business?”
“Yes. But maybe we have more help, so we can do other things we’re interested in.”
“Like what?” Patrick asks.
“Whatever you want.” Whatever you want. It ricochets in the quiet room. He’s never done well with open-ended choices.
“Maybe we’re still here,” David says, “because we decided we like this better. But. We decided.”
Patrick knows what he means, that it would be something they talk about. Even something they argue about. He lets that sink in, tapping his fingers against his sternum. He’s going to have to do something about how fizzy and unsettled he gets every time they get close to this topic. That feels like a him thing, not a them thing.
“Remember the list of next steps for the Apothecary that we made in Montreal?” Patrick asks finally. “Do you still have that?”
“Yeah. In my notebook.”
“We should pick one of those to try. See if it helps expand our options.”
David lifts his head off the pillow to get a better look at him, but he isn’t sure he can say anything else.
“We should.”
Summer is busy, which seems to help, actually. Their birthdays mean visits from his parents and the Roses. Baseball occupies his Saturday afternoons. The Apothecary’s Summer Series means two nights a week are spent welcoming the community into their store for concerts and workshops and special shopping events. His garden demands nurturing to transform into a blooming source of satisfaction and nutrition. And some of his best memories with David belong to the summer, etched into every heat-drenched surface in town, as fortifying as the sun.
Summer also means Pride. As the founder, Patrick is probably biased, but SC Pride is the best one in Canada, maybe the world. He’s not sure what to think when Ronnie offers to help him with it this year.
“I’m sorry, you want to what?”
“Nope. Don’t put words in my mouth. Nobody said anything about want. I said I would. If you needed it.”
“Huh,” Patrick says, stopping at David's desk to unroll the poster he’s about to affix to the message board at Town Hall. There must be a catch.
“Am I wrong in assuming you might have your hands a little more full than usual?” she asks, raising her eyebrows meaningfully, so he’s clearly as transparent as he’s ever been when it comes to this whole situation with David.
“Fine. What did you have in mind?”
“I don’t know, Brewer. Give me something to do. Preferably something that doesn’t involve Roland.”
“Okay, well for now, I need help distributing posters.”
He tears his list of addresses in half neatly along the edge of the desk and hands her enough posters to cover all the Elms to the north and west.
Over the next several weeks, Patrick isn’t able to figure out why Ronnie’s being nice to him, but he only has the energy to deal with one interpersonal crisis at a time, so he tries to take advantage of her continued ceasefire. Between her connections and her no-nonsense, to-do-list-devouring attitude, she’s a huge help. It keeps his nights a little shorter, which gives him time for the work with David. He’s decided they’re calling it work. He’s not sure what else to call it.
Ronnie also offers to take care of all the parade and event permitting, which shouldn’t be necessary since he’s married to a council member, but he accepts gratefully. David likes to say he’s following his mother’s tradition on the council, which means a somewhat scattered interest in the day-to-day proceedings.
Two days before the events are scheduled to start, Patrick heads to Town Hall to pick up the permits.
He’s planning to take them and go, but she nods toward the chair in front of her desk and he sits, like a reflex.
“I just have a couple things to finish on them,” she says, narrowing her eyes at the computer.
He manages not to mention that she could've just told him to come later.
Town Hall is empty apart from the pair of them, and the click-click of her mouse and clack-clack of her typing isn’t enough to keep him from remembering the way it looked filled with flowers and family and friends on their wedding day.
“You know I got married here, too,” she says. How does she do that?
“You did? I thought you guys moved here later.”
“We did. Karen was from here, though. So we got married here a few years before I moved back with her.”
“So then, after… Did you ever think about leaving?”
“Nah. Not seriously.” She shrugs, and he thinks he understands. As different as they are, they both fit here.
“I can’t imagine David staying here if we weren’t together,” he says.
Her fingers hover over the keys, temporarily frozen.
“I mean we are. We want to be. Together.” They’ve reaffirmed that for each other more than once. “I just wonder if that means I should offer to go.”
“Are you asking for advice or punishing me for delaying you with bureaucracy?” she asks.
“Aren’t those the same thing?” He grins and gets a very reluctant smile in return.
“So go,” Ronnie says, like she’s been waiting a decade or more to run him out of town.
“It’s just, I did that once,” he says. “I left my home.”
“Worked out pretty well for you didn’t it?”
“Yes. But. David wasn’t the only thing I found here.”
“You’re about to inflict a week of sequins, feathers, rainbows, and tourists on us that didn’t exist before you got here. You found something, but you built something, too. You can do that again.”
She takes his papers off the printer and stamps them before handing them over, rolling her eyes when she sees his soft smile.
“Sometimes I think I get more out of your reluctant advice than I do in an hour of paid counseling.”
In the same manner her eyes told him to sit, they tell him to get going. So he does.
“I’ll send you my bill,” she calls after him.
As the summer wears on, their appointments with Greta feel steadier and less fraught. Most of the time, when he leaves, he feels better than when they sat down. Part of it is that things are better at home. It still feels like a mountain sometimes, but they’re finally climbing it together.
At the end of July, Greta suggests they try meeting monthly instead of every two weeks to see how that feels. After a nervous conversation about ruining their momentum, they decide to try it.
As they’re saying goodbye, Patrick squeezes David’s arm, hands him the keys, and says he’ll meet him in the car.
Greta stops next to her desk when she sees him lingering in the doorway. “Is there something else I can help you with, Patrick?”
“Uh, yeah. I was just. Wondering if you might have a recommendation for another therapist. For me!” he adds quickly. “For me to see alone. I think… I think I would like that.” He tries to look like he would indeed like that, when in fact he’s not sure.
Some days, like today, their sessions still sit heavy on his shoulders, a weight that builds in the hours after they go home. At the beginning of this, he was annoyed that there was work to do. Now, sometimes he’s overwhelmed by how much of it there is.
“Of course. Just give me a minute.” She unburies a pad of sticky notes and flips through her Rolodex, copying down information.
“Ezra Wilde was my mentor when I was just starting my practice and would be a great fit for you, I think. He’s been working with LGBTQ+ folks for two decades.” She turns the dial on the Rolodex and writes down another name. “Maya Kumari is also fantastic. She is more solutions-focused, I would say, but in a really gentle, approachable way.” She pauses to look at him, gauge his reaction, and then flips the Rolodex again. “And Jamie Tremblay is a psychologist who has done a lot of work in mindfulness. Her website has information on her approach if that sounds like something you might be interested in.”
She finishes writing down the web address and hands the sticky note to Patrick, who slides it into his back pocket and thanks her.
“If you decide you want more names, just shoot me an email and I’ll give you some others.” She pats the Rolodex. “It can be overwhelming, and I’m happy to talk through the different options with you if that would help.”
“Thank you,” he says, hoping he has the guts to call one of them. “See you next time.”
“Take care.”
He leaves before he asks her to just pick someone for him.
David already has the windows rolled down and the stereo playing Mariah by the time he gets out to the small parking lot. He’s singing along with “Open Arms.”
Patrick stops a car-length away and just watches him. David can’t do Mariah’s vocals, but he’s got the emoting down. If someone would have told Patrick a year ago that he’d soon be standing in the their therapist’s parking lot, crying over his husband pumping his fist along to Mariah Carey, he wouldn’t have believed them. He doesn’t want to ever go through another year like this one, but he hopes he hangs on to the feeling of falling in love with David all over again.
The song changes to “Always Be My Baby,” and David’s face changes five times in two seconds. He doesn’t move to skip the song, though. He just tilts his head back against the headrest and closes his eyes. And smiles. He smiles.
Patrick smiles too and lets out the breath he’s been holding.
“Do I have to buy tickets to this parking lot concert?” he asks when the song finishes.
David tucks a shy smile into the corner of his cheek. “This is just the sound check.”
“Sounds good,” Patrick says, and kisses him.
“Did you find someone?”
“She gave me a few names. Although sharing my deepest secrets with someone who doesn’t look like Ms. Frizzle will be weird.”
“That’s who it is!” David says. “I’ve been trying to figure out who she looks like for eight months.”
“I kept seeing it at first. It faded though. I feel like Ms. Frizzle would have more answers than Greta does.”
“Maybe.” David brushes imaginary lint off his tunic. “Adelina always told me that The Magic School Bus was about transformation. That sometimes you have to change yourself, or your vantage point, to learn something new.”
“Huh,” Patrick says, pondering that as he puts the car in reverse.
“She also told me moths were not dangerous, so.”
Patrick laughs.
David sings along to the rest of Daydream on the way home, and Patrick thinks about transformation. When they get home, he makes sure to take the sticky note out of his pocket right away, so he doesn’t forget it in the wash, and then, since he’s holding his number, he calls Ezra Wilde and books an appointment.
<< FALL >>
David does a valiant job of pretending to be surprised when their car crunches on the gravel driveway of the little house Patrick rented on the lake in Pine Falls.
“Stevie told you,” he says.
“No, you told me with your shifty-eyed attempts to sneak around behind my back, and she merely confirmed. In fairness, we’re working on my trust issues and you know I hate surprises.”
“Yes, but you once told me an all-expenses-paid vacation is the only acceptable surprise. So.” So he told Stevie the plan on purpose because he knows them both that well.
“Those generally include spa treatments and valet service and a Michelin star chef? At a minimum. So.”
“I see,” Patrick says as they get out of the car. He would be annoyed if he weren’t so thrilled that David is comfortable enough again to file complaints to hide how excited he is. “Well, I’m no Michelin star chef, but I can probably arrange for a massage. And I’ll carry your bags in. You don’t even have to tip me.”
David smiles, and Patrick kisses his dimple as he opens the trunk.
Patrick carries David’s bag inside first and turns around to see David returning the favor with his smaller duffel. “You don’t even have to tip me,” he says, tucking his smile into the side of his cheek as they pass.
“Hey,” Patrick says, stopping him with a hand on his arm. The look that passes between them is loaded with how far they’ve come. Gestures like this aren’t the same as they used to be; they’re bigger and smaller at once. “Thank you.”
“For what?” David asks, fishing.
Patrick kisses him again, on the lips this time, and shakes his head. “For another anniversary.”
"Happy anniversary," David murmurs before he continues inside.
The screen door closes behind David with a slap and Patrick stands at the car, looking out at the quiet lake. This far north, the trees along the shore are just starting to turn red and yellow. It feels like fall. Like change. It feels good.
The next day, after sufficient grousing, David joins him for an easy hike along the lakefront. When they get back, Patrick delivers on the promised massage. Patrick presses into the knots along his shoulders until they yield with David’s soft groan. He alternates between firm circles and slower, sweeping motions down his back, pausing to kiss his shoulder blade and the back of his neck and the darkest freckle on his bicep. His body feels slick and strong under his hands, familiar and relaxed and… and trusting.
“If you make me any more relaxed, I won’t be able to reciprocate,” he says, voice muffled into the pillow.
“There’s always tomorrow.”
David snorts and settles in.
Eventually, Patrick pats his hip and asks him to turn over. Patrick is half-hard, and it takes some willpower not to skip ahead. He works up his legs, then down from his shoulders, gentle rubs, slow kisses. He doesn’t joke about a happy ending. There’s no end in sight.
He settles in next to his side and skates his fingertips up and down the hollow of his hip. “This okay?”
“Yes. Please,” David says, shivering into his touch.
Patrick closes a loose fist around him and tugs, turning his wrist just how David likes it. Patrick wants to watch, wants to see all of him, so he limits himself to just his hands and watches in awe as David gives himself over to them.
During one of their first meetings with Greta, they were supposed to tell her what they loved about each other. It was harder than it seemed, not because the list is small or finite, but because it’s infinite, something that grows and changes shape and shuffles.
“You’re so close,” Patrick whispers in his ear, tightening his grip, matching the speed of David’s jittering hips.
David’s breaths change, faster, messier, lovelier. Any number plus infinity is still infinity, but the list gets longer anyway. He comes between them, so gorgeous, head turned toward Patrick so Patrick can feel David’s gasp as he’s spent. He’s so close that all Patrick can see are his eyes when he opens them, deep brown and familiar and warm.
He blinks slowly and then cups his hand around Patrick’s face, the four gold rings hot against his skin. “I remembered what worked before, when I worried that I couldn’t trust you.”
“Just now?”
“A few minutes ago, before my brain...” he waves a hand in the air.
“What was it?”
“You never stopped being sure about us.”
Patrick grips his hip as he leans in and kisses him. “Neither did you.”
They’ve never been here before, which was on purpose. He wants some of their good memories to be new ones. The bed is cozy, and the private hot tub is inviting, and they spend most of their time between the two, making that happen.
The rest of the time, they talk. Well-rested, away from home, away from town, away from their worn-in patterns, it’s easier to focus on the new patterns they’re trying to establish.
“We can just move here, right?” David asks on their last full day. “You know how to fish. I can probably figure out foraging. We won’t starve.”
“Might be cold in winter.”
“We’ll have heating installed. Now that you and Ronnie are… whatever you are, we might even get a discount.”
Patrick laughs and sets his book on the table next to him. David looks up from his lap, where he rested his head in an attempt to take a nap.
“I’d go with you anywhere, you know that, right?” he says. They’ve haven’t talked about what’s next in a long-term way since the thought experiment and subsequent conversation in Greta’s office.
David tucks his knees up so his feet slide under the blanket on his lap. “I know. I think that’s part of why I’m afraid to ask.”
“I know.”
“But if was only up to you?”
“I would want to take it slow.” Patrick combs through David’s hair, watching his fingers vanish into the thick, dark wave. “Figure out what we want to do with the store. Visit a lot of places and decide what we want.”
“What does that look like? Taking it slow?”
“At least a year,” he says, but he knows, now, that David gets frustrated by constant deferral. “Less than five. I promise.”
David pleats the edge of the blanket between his fingers while he considers that. “What if you decide you want to go, and then I want to stay?”
“I’ll be insufferable.”
“So, the same, then.”
“I think we’ve learned that my capacity for personal growth is limited.”
David grins. “It’s fine. We’ll keep Greta’s phone number handy.”
He’s joking, but that feels nice, actually. There’s a limitlessness in having someone on standby. An easy-to-locate pressure valve.
They sit in the stillness, listening to the wind rustle through the leaves. A few of them drift down outside the window.
“That’s not true,” David murmurs, sitting up. “About your capacity for personal growth. You know that, right?”
Patrick turns to blink away the tears in his eyes. “Yeah. I know.”
Ronnie shows up to the season’s first meeting of the curling club with a mailing tube, which she sets in front of him without preamble. “I brought you something.”
“What is this?”
She flicks an annoyed hand at him. “Just open it.”
He pulls off the cap and slides out a drawing. A map, actually. “What is this?” he asks again, much more softly.
“You live here. Can’t you tell?”
Of course he can tell. The streets of Schitt’s Creek are familiar even artistically rendered like this. Patrick grins. “Did you get me a present?”
“I have a friend who makes these, and she owed me a favor. So. Happy anniversary.”
He’s going to snark about it being a month late. He’s sure. Any minute now. Once he can get it past the ache in his chest. You ask other people to invest in marriage with you, Ronnie said, months ago. She’s been buying up stock all year.
“I love it.”
“Figured no matter where you end up, it might be nice to have.”
He clears his throat, nodding. He can tell she can tell he’s on the verge of tears, which is making her uncomfortable. So. “Now if only it was framed. There’s no such thing as a safe frame decision in my house.”
She shakes her head in faux annoyance and turns to go. “That’s between you and your husband. I’m not your decorator.”
“Hey, Ronnie?”
She turns back, bracing herself.
“Thank you. For this and for Greta and for… everything.”
She raises an eyebrow at him. “Oh, I did that for David.”
“Course you did,” Patrick says, but her smile blooms before she can fully turn away to hide it.
He thinks she’s going to leave it there, but she turns just before she gets to the locker room. “Glad it worked out for you, Brewer.”
“So we’re coming up on a year since the accident,” Greta says after they exchange hellos.
“Next week, yeah,” Patrick says, sliding his hand into David’s.
“How are you feeling?”
“Okay I think,” David says, after checking in with Patrick. “We decided to treat it like a normal day. We’re just going to work and then get dinner with our friend Stevie.” And fuck, hopefully, but David edits that out.
“We decided we’d given it enough power over us,” Patrick says, and cringes a little bit at his word choice.
“I’m glad,” she says, and smiles at them.
She asks a few follow-ups, asks about their anniversary, their plans for the holiday shopping season, the booth they’re planning at the Elm Valley Winter Festival, and their developing plan to spend Christmas with the Roses. The appointments are easier than they were at the beginning. He’s more comfortable with Greta, with David, with himself. With how imperfect all of them are. Less scared about what might happen if he lets her change them.
Having his own therapist is helping take the pressure off these sessions too. Ezra Wilde’s office is less cluttered but messier than Greta’s. He’s queer, in his fifties, has worn double denim every time Patrick has seen him, and uses phrases that become contagious like “You’re giving that too much power over you.” And he makes Patrick feel seen and whole no matter what else he needs to work on.
In Ezra’s office, he can say all the things he’s afraid to say out loud. And once he’s said something once out loud, he can say it again more easily to David, to his parents, to Greta, to anyone else he needs to. He’s starting to feel like himself again, but he doesn’t have to ignore and deflect and box away what’s uncomfortable to maintain that feeling. Which is really, really nice.
“So when would you like to come back?” she asks as they near the end of the hour. “Six weeks? Two months?”
David looks to him for the answer. They’ve been meeting monthly since August, but they’ve been hesitant to stretch it longer.
“Two months?”
David nods, his smile shy. “Two months sounds good.”
They iron out the date and time, and then she stands and opens her door for them.
“See you in two months. Take care of each other.”
Patrick presses a fond kiss to David’s shoulder as he loops an arm through his.
“We will.”