“Is this true?” Dr. Sunshine asked.
“Well, yeah, but I was just fucking with them.”
Dr. Sunshine nodded and then wrote down some more stuff.
“What are you writing?” Craig asked, leaning forward in his seat.
“Just some notes.”
“Like how they need the help and I’m not involved at all, right?”
She smiled and continued to write.
He pointed to her pad. “Write down that I don’t need to be here. Write down that I’m in no way involved in their relationship.”
“Besides being here,” she smiled at him.
“Yeah, but…” He stood and started pacing the room. I glanced at Alec and we both grinned at each other.
“Craig, I think the real question is why you feel so strongly about being involved in Alec and Florrie’s relationship. You’ve gone to great lengths to involve yourself with them, even taking it as far as waterboarding your friend when he cheated on Florrie, someone that you seem to connect very deeply with.”
“Yeah, but that’s what we do for each other. I mean, when I was trying to get my wife to marry me, Alec shot me, what, three, maybe four times?”
“On purpose?” Dr. Sunshine asked.
“Yeah, I mean, it was all in the name of keeping my lady love. See, she couldn’t see at the time that we were meant to be together, so I had to convince her.”
“By having Alec shoot you?”
“Well, it racked up the sympathy points.”
Dr. Sunshine flipped her book closed and leaned forward slightly. “We’ve covered a lot today, but I have to say, I’m most disturbed by what I’m hearing from Craig today. I think we need to bump up your sessions to twice a week and possibly consider some time off work if this level of involvement continues.”
“See?” Craig scoffed. “I told you that you two needed help.”
“Oh, I’m talking about you, Craig,” Dr. Sunshine clarified. “I’d like to see Alec and Florrie alone in my office next week, but I think if we can figure out how your involvement with Alec and Florrie truly meshes, we’ll have you straightened out in no time.”
We walked out of the office, Alec and I grinning slightly, and Craig slumped over. I wrapped my arm through Craig’s and sighed, “I told you to keep your mouth shut.”
✯✯✯✯✯
“Alright,” Dr. Sunshine smiled. “I’d like to talk a little bit more about what you told me last week in our session.”
It had been two weeks of sessions with Dr. Sunshine, and Alec and I were still on bad terms for the most part. Basically, we’d recapped with Dr. Sunshine what had happened since Reid came into our lives. I did my best to not get angry while I was talking about it. After all, we were here to get past everything, not make it worse.
“Alec, I’d like you to tell Florrie what led you to cheat on her that night.”
I turned to Alec, not sure I wanted to hear what he had to say, but needing to know at the same time.
“I uh…I came home that night and I wanted to talk to her. I wanted to get through to her that I was still here for her. I wanted her to talk to me, but she was so angry and…I could never talk to her.”
“You didn’t talk to me about anything,” I snapped. “You didn’t talk to me before you invited the Fullers to come stay on the property.”
He clenched his jaw in anger and Dr. Sunshine stepped in. “Let’s get through that night first, Florrie. You have to let him tell you what he was feeling or you’re never going to be able to move past this. Alec, please continue.”
“It’s like right now. This is the same shit that I dealt with for months after Reid was gone. I would try and talk to her, but she just yelled at me or insulted me. And I took it because I loved her and I wanted to work it out, but that night…she told me I didn’t matter to her. I had heard it a million times before over the months, but this time was different.”
“What was different about it?” I asked curiously.
Alec turned to me, a little angry, but mostly sad. “I was tired of fighting with you. I was tired of feeling like I was getting kicked in the balls nonstop. I wanted…” He shook his head slightly, running his hand across his jaw. “I went to her because she made me feel like I wasn’t worthless. That wasn’t the first night I met her. I had seen her in the bar before and we talked. It was all innocent, and it was just a regular conversation. She wasn’t bitching at me or telling me I was a piece of shit. I ran into her at the store and she asked for my help with picking out paint. That was it. Just something as simple as needing paint. And for the first time in a long fucking time, I felt like I could do something for a woman.”
When he stared me down, I got the feeling that this went a lot deeper than just what happened with Reid. I got nervous, because if this was more than just about Reid, we had deeper issues than I thought.
“You’re a hard woman to love, Florrie. You do everything for yourself and you don’t let anyone help. And I knew this about you all along. Hell, half our problems revolve around my inability to let you do your own thing and you not letting go sometimes. But when I ran into that woman in the store and she needed help? It gave me such an ego boost that I didn’t even realize I was missing. And I know that sounds so fucking stupid, that I would need to feel propped up like that, but I want
