Chapter Thirty-Three
It was funny how loud silence could be when it was unwanted—a first for Breen. He was used to silence offering him a welcome invisibility, a place he could go to keep attention off him while he made calculated observations, got the lay of the land so he could decide what to do.
But sitting here next to Charlize in Karrell’s office—practically able to hear his hair growing—the silence wasn’t about him getting his bearings. It was a reminder about how he never knew what to say to make it okay for Charlize to be with him.
Easy. Let’s watch a movie together.
He’d obviously needed to say more on the night of their date…or homework assignment…or failed date. But hell if he knew what. So he’d gone with his standard, “Okay, ’bye,” when Charlize asked him to leave, and then he left, trudging back to his apartment to sit in his living room with an empty head. And heart. And now, as always, there remained nothing between them. Decide a course. Act. Yeah, he got that already. He was all about doing something. He just needed to know what.
“Good morning,” Karrell greeted them as she settled into the chair across from theirs. “So how did the homework assignment go?”
The silence that followed was complete enough to hear the low moan of air through one of the cave’s wormholes outside, where oxygen entered the community.
Charlize smoothed her thumb across her fingernails, keeping her eyes down.
Breen tapped his fingertips on his thighs. His knife wound didn’t need a bandage anymore, but the scar was still pretty red. Maybe Karrell should’ve tried a little warm-up small talk to get things going first.
Karrell un-crossed then re-crossed her legs. It was an easy, relaxed movement that said she had all the time in the world.
The silence stretched to Buzz Lightyear’s infinity and beyond. Breen finally filled it. “We weren’t able to do it.”
“Okay.” Karrell didn’t sound very surprised. “What happened?”
“It was a stupid homework assignment, that’s what,” Charlize accused. “I felt choreographed the whole time, like I wasn’t free to be myself.” She crossed her arms in a blockade of bone and muscles over her chest. “I told you I’m here for the sex. It was the one thing I wanted, and I didn’t get it.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Karrell said, sounding sincere. “I’m confused, though. You said doing the slow ride was okay for you.”
Charlize paused, then her chin firmed. “It is.”
“All right,” Karrell went along. “So why do you think you felt choreographed this time, with Breen?”
“Well, for one, he kept looking at me.”
Breen lifted his chin. Blinked once. Glanced over at Charlize. “I’m not supposed to look at you?”
“Not all lovey-dovey-like. Jesus. I’m so sick of everyone trying to make sex into some ridiculously intimate act, like it’s supposed to involve all this barfy caring. That’s not a social construct I buy into, okay? Sex is physical pleasure. That’s it. It’s a cock in a cunt, going at it with mad-ass friction until orgasm is achieved. That’s all. I don’t need you”—Charlize jabbed a finger in Karrell’s direction—“or you”—now toward Breen—“ruining it for me.”
Karrell nodded slowly over this answer. “Okay. So just to confirm, sex for you is the pleasure of the physical act only. If feelings become involved, you don’t like it.”
“Exactly.”
“Why do the feelings bother you?”
“They don’t bother me, necessarily, just… Well, shit, I don’t know.”
Breen had an idea, but saying it would piss off Charlize. He was supposed to talk in therapy—he’d said he would. It’d just be a lot easier to talk if Charlize wasn’t so mad all the time. He picked at a frayed spot along the hem of his shorts, waited another second, then cleared his throat.
Karrell and Charlize looked at him.
“I think caring about me scares Charlize.”
“God, not this again.” He could hear the eye-roll in Charlize’s tone.
He kept his focus on Karrell. “She once told me she wouldn’t allow herself to care because I could die at any second. And when I came home from the botched mission covered in blood, she got really upset.”
“The blood was gross,” Charlize countered in a surly voice.
“You fainted.”
“All right, so it was really gross.”
Karrell reached behind her to the desk and picked up a water bottle. “Is Breen right, though?”
Charlize’s brows narrowed. “About what?”
“About caring for him being scary for you?”
Charlize’s tone cooled. “I told him before, and I’ll tell you now. Relationships are a bunch of obligations and stress. That’s what I don’t want.”
“Fair enough.” Karrell unscrewed the water bottle cap. “What kind of obligations are you trying to avoid?”
“All the usual stupid crap that goes with having a boyfriend.” Charlize made a snap-wrist gesture at the room. “Being required to constantly text the fucking sap so he knows you’re thinking about him. Having to check with him before you can go out with your girlfriends. Having to…to, I don’t know. Crap.”
“Having to build trust?”
Charlize vented a loud sigh, like dealing with incompetent therapists was such a ball-ache. “That’s the route you’re taking? Really? ‘Trust issues.’” She wrapped these last two words in air quotes.
Karrell shrugged. “It’s actually a reasonable question to ask someone who doesn’t want anything to do with feelings. Avoiding intimacy is a great way to protect yourself. You cut your losses.” Karrell took a sip of water. “’Course you cut your gains too.”
Charlize tsked. “I’ll believe the gains when you show me the money.”
“It’s not something I can show you, unfortunately.” Karrell put the cap back on. “You have to experience it for yourself.”
“I guess that’s an okay-thanks-buh-bye for me, then. I’m not going to form a relationship just to have it turn into the inevitable shit-show. So, yes, I guess you’re right—I am all about cutting my losses.” Charlize rounded on Breen. “I’m offering you sex, Breen, that’s it. Take it or leave it.”
The muscles along his belly twitched as he thought about how to answer her, thought hard. He turned away, his eyes pulling taut around the edges. He was already feeling the loss. Scanning the shelves behind Karrell, he read the book titles, though none of them really made sense to him: Reviving Ophelia and Identity and the Life Cycle and On Becoming a Person… How was that last one so difficult?
Charlize gripped her armrests. “Were you ever going to answer me?”
“I don’t know what you want me to say, Charlize.”
Karrell turned to set down her water bottle back on the desk. “This isn’t about saying what you think Charlize wants to or needs to hear, Breen, but sharing your own thoughts.”
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“Charlize can’t read your mind,” Karrell went on. “You’ll never have your needs met if you don’t let her know what they are.”
“I don’t really have needs. I just want her to be happy.”
“Everyone has needs, Breen. For example, what is it you want out of your sex life with Charlize? Is engaging in the physical act only okay with you?”
“It’s not a matter of what’s okay, but what I can do. I can’t turn sex into nothing the way she wants.” He looked at Charlize. “I like you, and when I’m inside you it’s kind of impossible to ignore.”
Charlize froze. Then her cheeks colored. “You do not,” she bit out, “like me. I’ve never done anything to make you like me.”
But she had. She’d gifted him with those glimpses of her soft, scared, lonely side, her vulnerable core.
“What do you like about Charlize?” Karrell prompted.
Impossible to answer that and not get his balls handed to him. “Charlize’ll get mad if I say.” He went back to the bookshelves. EMDR Toolbox: Theory and Treatment of Complex PTSD and Dissociation. What the hell was this stuff?
“I think she needs to hear.”
He messed with the fray on his shorts again, tugging out a long thread. “Charlize works hard at being tough when she’s actually soft. I think she believes her soft side makes her weak, so she’ll get pissed hearing me say she’s soft, because she doesn’t want to be weak, though really, that side just makes her…I don’t know. Sweet and nice.”
Charlize’s chest started to rise and fall. Because she was, yeah, getting pissed off.
He should probably just shut up. But shutting up had gotten him exactly nowhere with her so far. Even if he said all the wrong stuff, he had to say it, or he’d never figure out anything about her.
Charlize ground out a curse. “You know what, Breen? You don’t know jack shit about me.”
He slid his attention over to another shelf. 4 Essential Keys to Effective Communication, Breaking the Chain of Low Self-Esteem… He focused on this last title. “I don’t think you like yourself very much.”
Charlize hissed.
Karrell jumped in. “Why’s that?”
He tried to take a deep breath, but the air hurt his lungs. “The first night we had sex, Charlize got really upset because I was a virgin. When I asked her why she was so mad, she said she didn’t want to be the memory for my first time, like…I don’t know…like maybe she wasn’t worthy of being that memory.” He bounced his leg a couple of times. “And now I’m sitting here listening to her say she doesn’t want me to have feelings for her during sex, and I can’t help wondering if it’s because she thinks she doesn’t deserve them.”
Charlize glared at him in fulminating silence, her eyelashes spiked out from her lids.
Karrell waited. “Does any of that fit for you, Charlize?”
Charlize rotated her jaw a couple of times. “Who doesn’t hate themselves sometimes?” She sharpened her glare on Breen. “Do you think you’re mister hunky-dory all the time?”
“No.”
“Yeah? See? It’s normal.”
“Not,” Karrell contradicted, “when it interferes with a person’s ability to form relationships.”
Charlize’s face pinched. “I form relationships just fine. How I want to form them. Not how all your stupid books”—she made a panoramic gesture at the floor-to-ceiling shelves—“say I’m supposed to form them.”
“Yeah. About that.” Karrell shook her head. “I’m not buying into this whole social anarchist role you’re trying to sell, Charlize. See, the thing is, sex is intimate. I believe very strongly that you know that. In fact, I would argue that the reason you have so much sex is because you desperately want closeness. Problem is, you never achieve the intimacy you truly want and need because you ruin it for yourself.
“Why do you ruin it?” Karrell folded her hands in her lap. “I suspect Breen is right: caring for someone scares you. So when the tenderness of sex grows too intense, you turn the act into something violent in order to strip away the intimacy. You protect yourself, yes, but you end up always leaving these encounters feeling dissatisfied, so you go back for more, then do the same thing again, and… Well, do you see where I’m heading with this? You’re stuck in an unhealthy loop of pull-push with the men you’re with.”
Charlize’s face was a translucent white. The whole time Karrell was talking, the flesh across Charlize’s facial bones had been steadily thinning.
Karrell continued. “I see this happen with people who didn’t experience healthy parental bonding. Makes sense, right? If you never had a good model for forming relationships as a child, how do you know how to manage intimacy on your own as an adult? It would also explain self-doubt.”
Charlize gave the therapist a rigid look. “I know you’re the one with all the diplomas on the wall and all, but you’re way off the mark on this one. I experienced perfectly healthy parental bonding.”
Breen bolted his head around. “What? No. You didn’t. I mean…you told me your mom disappeared on you for three days once. That doesn’t sound like—”
“It was nothing,” Charlize snapped, her eyes taking on a weird glitter. Either from tears or something maniacal and tragic, he couldn’t tell.
He glanced aside once—Parenting from the Inside Out—then pushed on. “I saw the look on your face when you told me the story, Charlize, and it wasn’t nothing. I think you—oh, shit.” He went back to Karrell. “One time when Charlize and I were in Toni’s office, Charlize found out her mom was in the drunk tank again. I think her mom’s an—”
“Shut up!” Charlize screamed at him, shouting so loud the corners of her eyes squeezed down into thin lines. “Stay out of my fucking business, Breen. You want to talk about families, talk about your own damned family, not mine.”
He closed his mouth and turned away. Handbook of Philosophical Companionships, Psychiatric Pharmacogenomics.
“Maybe it would be a good idea to let this subject rest for a bit,” Karrell agreed. “So, yes, let’s find out a bit about you and your family, Breen. Why don’t you talk about your parents?”
He swung back around to stare at Karrell. What? How would talking about his parents be useful here?
“What’s your relationship like with them?”
“Um…” He felt Charlize’s gaze boring into him, hot and challenging. “Pretty normal, I guess.”
“Does that mean you’re close to them?”
“Yeah…I mean, no. I don’t know. Not really, probably.”
“Why’s that?”
“We’re kind of a family of loners.”
“Both your mother and your father?”
He looked down, his bangs sliding over his right eye. “My father mostly.”
“Ungar Dalakis is your father, right?”
“Yes.”
“What’s he like? Other than being a loner.”
“Like all fathers are.” Breen squinted at his lap. How did he get a mustard stain on his shorts?
“Which is…?”
“You know.” He reached around his neck and scratched his shoulder blade. “Impossible to please.”
“Ah.” Karrell nodded slowly. “That can be rough on a kid.”
He shrugged. “He just wanted more for his sons than he ever had.” The mustard had to have come from a burger, but he hadn’t eaten one for at least a week. When was the last time he did a load of wash?
“More, how?”
“I suppose for us not to be working class. Ungar hated that he came from simple people. In Transylvania, our ancestors were hay farmers, and in England, the Dalakises grew wheat. When the Vârcolac race escaped to this community, my dad figured he’d finally leave behind the agricultural business he inherited—here we are, underground, right?” Breen studied a book tipped over on its side. It had a multicolored cover. When Art Therapy Meets Sex Therapy: Creative Explorations of Sex, Gender, and Relationships.
He scratched his temple. “Roth saddled Ungar with sanitation disposal. Honest work in my mind, but nothing that raised the status of the Dalakis name. My father resented the hell out of it. Still does. He always believed the Dalakis family was better. He even thought we were above the race’s procreation problems. He kept trying to have kids after Roth banned breeding among the race. So Barbu was born when he shouldn’t have been and ended up as a Stânga Town kid, and the baby after Barbu was a stillbirth. My mom refused to get pregnant again after that.”
Karrell’s lips bent sympathetically. “I’m sorry.”
Breen lifted a single shoulder. “It’s our race’s cross to bear, right?”
Charlize was quiet now—a quietness different from not yelling or not speaking. It was more like the defensive hostility rolling off her had toned down. He glanced quickly at her, but only caught a glimpse of the shadow of her long lashes against her cheeks before Karrell was asking him more questions.
“So you and Barbu are the only children?”
“That’s right.” Breen scraped his thumbnail over the mustard stain. He didn’t want to talk about his little brother. He was still figuring out how not to be a nonentity when it came to Barbu, and all the details weren’t straight in his mind yet. Although, actually, it probably just took more doing than thinking.
“And how did your father show you and your brother he wanted more for you?”
Breen looked up. “What?” No Barbu?
“You said that Ungar wanted more for his sons than he ever had. How did you know?”
“Know?” Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills Training with Adolescents. He scrunched his face at the therapist. Dialectical…? “What do you mean?”
“For example, did your father try to give you everything he never had?”
“Give us stuff?” Breen caught back an expression of shock, the skin along his cheeks stretching. “No. Um… No. Ungar tried to make Barbu and me better than everyone else.”
“Ah. How?”
How? How did the carpenter who built that bookshelf make it so none of the nails showed? Did the trick affect its load-bearing capacity?
“How did Ungar try to make you and Barbu better than everyone else, Breen?”
He went back to the mustard stain. He flaked it up and swept the particles away. “Any time we didn’t act like men, he gave us static about it.”
“And what does it mean to act like a man—according to Ungar?”
“Don’t cry, that sort of thing.” There was probably more to it, but Breen was starting to feel tired. Funny, though, how words just kept coming out of his mouth. He’d never thought about any of this before, but the answers seemed to be there.
“How did you measure up to Ungar’s expectations?”
Breen used the toe of his right Converse to scratch his left heel.
“Earlier you mentioned your dad is impossible to please. I’m going to guess this means you didn’t measure up so well.”
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“Breen?”
“No.” The back of his neck felt tight. “I didn’t.”
“And since Barbu is a Stânga Town kid—and so probably, unfortunately, considered incapable of much—I’m also going to guess the lion’s share of pressure for fulfilling your father’s hopes and dreams fell onto your shoulders.”
The tightness in his neck moved into his throat. “Maybe.” He’d watched Barbu take a lot of crap.
“Would it be fair to say that you’ve endured a great deal of criticism from your father?”
“Yeah. I mean…” He couldn’t come up with a way to defend his father for that. “Well, yeah.”
From the side of his vision, he saw Charlize’s chin sink toward her chest.
“And how do you deal with your father’s criticism?” Karrell asked.
A dull ache was forming behind his eyes. He was losing track of why they were doing this.
“Does it make you feel bad?” Karrell asked.
“No. Not really.”
“No?”
“I ignore what he says.”
“Ignore it?” This clearly surprised Karrell. “Really?”
“Yeah. I learned to.”
“So that kind of stuff doesn’t bother you anymore?”
“No.”
“Not from anyone?”
“Not much.”
“So when Charlize called you a ‘fucking piece of shit’ after the food-tasting gathering at Three Friends’, it didn’t bother you. You were able to ignore it.”
The backs of his ears warmed. Everyone knew everything about everybody in this stupid town.
The side of Charlize’s face he could see quivered and clenched.
“Everything’s just A-Okay with you,” Karrell pressed. “Is that it, Breen? You don’t have any needs?”
“It bothered me,” he admitted, “when she said that.” His voice felt far away.
Charlize’s lips did something. He couldn’t tell what.
Karrell pressed her fingertips to her mouth for a moment. “Do you know how I experience you, Breen? As very thoughtful in the way you answer questions. At first you seem almost slow about it. But, no. What’s actually going on is that your father trained you to search for landmines in everything people say.” Karrell leaned toward him. “And, no, Breen, Ungar is not like other fathers. No kid should have to endure constant criticism.”
A book in the far corner of the top shelf had a partially ripped spine. A piece of the fabric was flopped down, covering the first part of the title.—Introverts. Master Your Personality.
“I’m sorry.” Charlize’s voice was squeaky and raspy, nearly unrecognizable.
Breen looked over at her. His eyes felt strained and overworked. It was a weird feeling.
A tear was dangling off the end of her nose. “I know what it’s like to feel like you can’t do anything right. Ever since I was eight years old, I haven’t done anything right, and it’s the worst feeling ever. If I…I-I-I…”
Breen’s chest ripped in two like a soggy newspaper. Don’t cry, Charlize, and Don’t worry about it. He didn’t say those things, though. As bad as he wanted to let her off the hook, he had the sense that if he did she would just feel worse.
“If I contributed to you feeling awful about yourself by calling you names, I’m so sorry. It’s just the way I vent anger. I-I mean, I’m not trying to make excuses. There is no excuse. I just… I want you to know I didn’t mean anything by it, and…and…” She looked at him.
Her eyes were extra-shiny with tears, and even though he’d rather eat half-decomposed roadkill than see her cry, her eyes were the most beautiful he’d ever seen them. And he was no longer lost about why Karrell had done this. By bringing out his own family mess, the therapist took away Charlize’s anger at him and replaced it with understanding and kindness. Charlize saw him differently now, as someone she could relate to, who could sympathize with her and her mess. And whether she liked it or not, or realized it or not, now there was intimacy between them.
She dragged the back of her wrist across her cheek. “I won’t ever call you names again.”
“I believe you,” he said, and his heart tumbled in his chest. He couldn’t be sure, but he thought the thing might’ve been doing a hoo-yah fist-pump.