AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“It’s perfect!” she declared, turning back to them, grabbing a pile of CDs as she went. “Look!” she said, slipping them into their specially sized shelves. “They fit perfectly! I think we’re going to have extra space even when we shelve everything!”
“Not for long,” I said, smiling at her excitement.
“Well, get over here,” she said. “We have a lot of work to do.”
That was how we spent the rest of the night. Organizing CDs and vinyls while we slipped different music into the player, and discussed our feelings on the different tracks.
Eventually, we fell onto the couch, turned on the TV, and she curled up on my chest.
She was asleep in moments.
And I stayed up, running my fingers through her hair, and watching fucking Forensic Files.
It was the best night of my entire damn life.
Lexy - 8 months
Obviously, I hadn’t been pregnant.
I did eventually remember to take that test.
It turned out that the glow the audiobook narrator had remarked on hadn’t been pregnancy. But, rather, something a lot more simple.
Happiness.
I was so happy that I was glowing.
It wasn’t until I started to see it in my own face each morning when I went to put my makeup on that I finally understood.
Hell, I actually started to cut back on my makeup, feeling like I didn’t need so much of it anymore.
“Ready?” Finn asked as I walked into the living room.
I’d never had a problem settling into Finn’s house. But I had to admit that after he and Callow built the shelves, it really started to feel like home to me.
Sure, we now had two record players. But, hey, that meant we got to have one in the living room and one in the bedroom. Save for the boombox. And my wireless speakers were in the kitchen, so we could listen to whatever we wanted anywhere in the house.
“Yep,” I said, giving him a smile as I followed him out of the door.
This was one of his lifestyle changes that I was totally on board with.
Once, I’d gotten a wild hair and thought I would take a run with him in the morning. I got to the end of the block before I was wheezing for air, covered in sweat, and calling him a masochist for enjoying that kind of torture.
But occasionally going with him to therapy? Yeah, I was totally on board with that.
He was religious about going to his visits where, yeah, he did have to… gloss over certain aspects of his life, but he claimed he’d gained a lot of insight on how to handle his dark moods when they popped back up on occasion.
I only went twice so far, once just to meet his therapist. The second time, we discussed my past history with depression, and my current mental state.
This visit was just a check in.
I loved his therapist. She was a mix of compassionate and stern. She knew when she was not being given the whole story, and she wouldn’t accept half answers or avoidance.
She never said so, but I was pretty sure she knew that Finn was operating on the wrong side of the law. So she didn’t press about the specifics of his job, or why he said he was stressed because of it, but instead focused on ways to work around that stress, so it didn’t compound and lead to those hopeless feelings that would lead to him going down in the hole again.
No, there was no guarantee that he was never going to fall down in it again. Depression was a sneaky bastard like that. But his lifestyle changes and his commitment to understanding his mental health, and, yes, to a much smaller extent, music therapy, would all make it easier for him to recognize the signs of depression earlier, before it completely overtook his life.
His family knew he was seeing a therapist, and I was really relieved and pleased how readily they seemed to accept it. Not worrying about him sharing secrets or getting any of them in trouble. And definitely no toxic “you just need to buck up and power through it” rhetoric.
He really did have an amazing support system. And now that he was not only standing outside that hole he’d been in, but steadily filling it up, he could see those blessings he had, too.
A mom who begged him to make changes, to seek help. A father who never thought he was any less of a man for having mental health struggles and trying to find a way through them. A sister and brother who, yes, teased the fuck out of him for just about everything… except this.
On a selfish note, I had to admit that being with Finn also allowed me to heal in ways I didn’t know I needed to.
Yes, I’d always had a close bond with my sister. But Finn’s therapist had been the first to gently remind me that I was just that. Her sister. Not her mother. That while our father’s disinterest had forced me into a parental role at a young age, and I’d needed to assume it for Lottie’s well-being at the time, that we were both adults now. She didn’t need me to babysit her, to lecture her, to play her bodyguard when she went out with friends.
