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36 - Lucas
Manson must have noticeda change in me.
I wasn’t sure how he knew. When he came into the garage the next morning, I had a fresh mug of coffee on my tool bench and the orange kitten in a large cardboard box nearby. The sides were low enough that she could see me, but not enough for her to attempt an escape. Jess had named her Cherry, and I thought the moniker suited her.
None of the guys had been surprised when I brought home a kitten. Not even slightly. Apparently I was losing my touch, or I wasn’t as subtle as I thought I was. Manson saw me walk in the house with Cherry last night and all he’d said was, “About damn time you got a cat.”
Vincent was instantly obsessed with her. Jason made a face and said the last thing we needed was a cat shredding the furniture with its claws, but I still caught him making friends with her by offering her bits of lunch meat from his sandwich.
“How’s the fluffball doing?” Manson said, squatting beside the box to offer Cherry his hand. She let him know what she thought of his intrusion with a loud hiss. “Grumpy, isn’t she? No wonder you two get along.”
“She’s a warrior,” I said, looking down at the tiny spitfire proudly. Introducing her to the dogs last night had been one of the funniest things I’d seen in a while. Jojo, as expected, feared her. Haribo ran in circles around her, barking, while she faced him with claws out and her tail puffed up. He hadn’t even been brave enough to get within swiping distance.
They would get along just fine.
But Cherry was still small, and I didn’t want to leave her alone while I worked. So there she was, peering around the garage, standing up on her back legs to see more of her new domain. I had music on but I wasn’t blasting it; the little one needed time to adjust to all the new sights and smells.
Manson was usually the one to turn the speaker on, preferring to work with sound rather than silence. I’d never cared much either way, but today, the upbeat playlist felt right. It kept me going, kept me energized.
But it wasn’t the only thing energizing me.
You deserve to heal, Lucas. You deserve to be loved.
Those words refused to leave me the fuck alone. They’d been stuck in my head for days, intruding to the front of my mind every time a text from Jess popped up on my phone, every time I saw her face around the house.
It made me mad, at first, because what the hell did that even mean? Life had nothing to do withdeserving. You get what you get and you deal with it. Implying anyone inherently deserved one thing or another felt naive, like a child’s dream.
No one deserved shit. Life was unfair. You fight to survive or don’t.
But then the anger dissipated. I didn’t know if I deserved anything, but Iknewthe boys deserved someone who didn’t fly off the handle at every random provocation. Someone who didn’t push them away the moment things got too raw. They deserved better, Jess deserved better. Maybe I deserved better from myself.
The wrench slipped from my hand and clattered on the ground, making Manson flinch in surprise. “You good?”
“Yeah, yeah...shit.” Crouching down to pick up the wrench, I paused for a moment. My brain was a wreck, wildly fluctuating between giddiness and despair. Jess loved me —fucking hell. She wanted me to improve —Christ, it was too hard.
She wasn’t the only one who wanted to see better from me. Not just better from me, but betterforme.
I wasn’t a good man; I never had been. But Jess made me feel like I was; like I could be.
Left to my own devices, I would have let myself wallow. Fuck it all, I was trash and I’d stay that way. But I couldn’t do that, not when I had people around me who cared about me so damn much. People who could soothe my pain, who didn’t judge me for how much I struggled.
Trust was terrifying. Intimacy even more so. But I was learning to be vulnerable. Maybe this was what it felt like to heal. It was stunning.
“Hey, Manson?” He nodded his head to acknowledge that he’d heard me. “I think I want to go to therapy.”
He paused, reaching over to turn the music down before he turned to look at me with a stunned expression. “You...you what?”
There it was, my chance to take it all back. Deny I said anything. Shut the fuck up.
Not this time.
“I want to try out therapy. For my...you know...all the trauma and shit. I think maybe if...if I talked to somebody, maybe they could tell me how to get the fuck over it...or something.”
