“Yeah, yeah. How disgusting. I should see a therapist. Spare me the fucking lecture.” Loïc strode ahead, then broke the stick in his hands into pieces and tossed them into the bush. The dogs watched, but then looked up at Severin for permission to follow the discarded pieces of stick.
“Therapists are only useful if you actually want to get over things. If you believe they can be fixed.”
Loïc gave a one-shouldered shrug. “Exactly. There’s nothing left to save. I should have let myself go when she died, but I wanted to meet you first. Now I’ve met you and I’m clinging to you and your life like a drowning man.”
“What do you mean, you should have let yourself go?”
“I should have blown my head off. What the hell do you think I mean?” Loïc stopped, jamming his hands into his pockets and glaring. “Don’t lie and tell me you never consider it.”
Severin shrugged, meeting his own familiar gaze in his brother’s face. “Why would I deny it? Doesn’t everyone think about it?”
“I don’t know.” Loïc’s eyes sheened with tears. “I don’t think they do.”
Severin opened his mouth to assure him fantasizing about suicide was normal, but truthfully he had no idea. Maybe normal people never thought about it – never thought through the plans in gory detail as a balm to a pointless existence. He didn’t want to die now though. Not when he finally had a reason to stick around.
He shrugged then pulled his brother into an awkward, one-armed shoulder hug. Loïc pulled stiffly away.
“I don’t need your pity.”
“No one needs pity, dickhead. You just need to know that I’m glad you chose to meet me first. You’ve given me answers I never expected to have, and I’m glad I got to meet you.”
“What? No ‘don’t do it, Loïc, you have so much to live for’?”
“What the fuck do I know? Maybe you have nothing to live for. Maybe our relationship means nothing to you, or isn’t enough incentive to put up with the rest of the shit in your head. It’s not my place to tell you whether your life is worth living. I’m too ugly to be a fucking motivational poster.”
Loïc snorted a laugh and a tear fell, but he dashed it impatiently away. He pasted on a plastic smile then let his mouth relax. “It’s strange not having to pretend I’m happy anymore. There’s no one to entertain.”
“You own your face now. You get to choose your expressions, even if they’re ugly ones. I could teach you some really terrifying ones, if you like. Years of practice.”
His brother scowled off into the distance. He let the scowl fall away then did it again as though testing it out.
“You just let yourself be angry?”
“I’ve been angry for twenty-five years. You have a lot of catching up to do.” He swallowed past the lump in his throat. “You’re also allowed to be sad here.”
The wind rustled the trees around them, whipping Severin’s hair into his eyes. He stripped it away.
Loïc shook his head reproachfully. “Men don’t get sad.”
“Men turn everything that isn’t happy into angry. It’s not good for us.”
“Your therapist tell you that?” Loïc asked, mocking him.
“Yeah, but it’s true.”
They walked for a long while, saying nothing.
His brother cleared his throat. “I’m being smothered,” he finally said. “It’s dark. Like a pillow being shoved over my face. No matter how much I want to, I’m too tired to scream. I’m too tired to push it away.”
Severin bit the inside of his cheek, remembering the feeling far too intimately.
Loïc patted one of the dogs. “The truth is even if I could scream, no one would give a shit.”
*
“So you’re basically marrying both of them? Can’t do anything the easy way, huh?” Church laughed at the other end of the phone.
Severin paced around his office then sprawled out on the padded coffee table, tolerating the attention of whichever mutt had decided his elbow needed licking as soon as he was horizontal.