Billy's Bones (13 page)

“Calm down, Kevin….”

“Oh, sorry. I keep forgetting you’re going to leave me unless I stop acting crazy.”

Tom tugged at his beard nervously. “I didn’t say that.”

“Maybe I should take some notes about you,” Kevin interrupted. He stormed around the table and snatched the notepad up off the floor. “Let’s see,” he said, flipping to a blank page, “‘Crazy Shit Tom Does.’ We can start with the way you tug at that goddamned beard every time someone calls you on your bullshit. That’s some kind of OCD behavior, isn’t it? And how about this obsessive note-taking habit?”

“Look, Kevin, I’m sorry—”

“Or the way you think other people are too helpless to solve their own problems without you?”

“I just want to help you.”

“No!” Kevin practically shouted back at him. “No! You aren’t trying to help me. You’re trying to
fix
me so you can have a normal boyfriend. One who likes to suck your cock and take your dick up his ass! And if I can’t be
fixed
, then fuck me! You’ll go find somebody else.”

He threw the notepad on the table and stormed out of the kitchen through the back door. He was naked, as usual, and the weather outside on the deck was miserable, but Tom let him go. There was nothing he could do to stop him.

On one level, he knew exactly what all this was about. Kevin was projecting his fears onto Tom—the fear that Tom wouldn’t be satisfied with a nonsexual relationship, the fear that Tom really did think he was crazy. Neither was true, of course. But lecturing Kevin about “projection” clearly wasn’t going to fix things.

Tom fumed about it for a few minutes, convinced Kevin had acted childish, and it was up to him to get his ass back inside if he wanted to warm up. But when he looked out onto the deck, Kevin was just leaning against the railing, looking out into the acres of forest behind the house, not moving. Eventually, Tom gave up feeling self-righteous. He removed the bathrobe he’d been wearing, since he knew he was about to get soaked to the skin, and went outside.

The drizzle was just as cold and wretched as he’d thought it would be, and the wind was picking up, so he went over to the hot tub and dragged the lid off it. Kevin turned to glare at him as he climbed into the water, but when Tom said “If you get in here with me so we can both warm up, I might consider apologizing” he sighed and joined Tom in the tub.

“First of all,” Tom said, having to raise his voice against the wind, “there’s only one thing that’ll get me to just straight-up leave you, and that’s if you keep hitting me. I know you were out of your mind when it happened, and I should have listened when you told me to get the alcohol away from you. But I won’t keep giving you a free pass on that if I start to feel threatened.”

“I know.”

“The rest of it… well, I guess you’re right.” The anger in Kevin’s eyes seemed to be dying down to a smolder, so Tom risked moving a bit closer. “I do want to fix everybody. That’s why I became a therapist. Most of the time, I’d argue that’s a good thing, but… well, I guess you’re right about me trying to fix you so you can be my boyfriend. Part of me was probably thinking that if I helped you figure out why you had such an aversion to sex, then we could
have
sex.”

Kevin looked away, embarrassed. “Sounds logical.”

“But selfish,” Tom admitted. “It was more about what I wanted than what you wanted. And I can see where you might get the idea that, if you don’t eventually satisfy whatever criteria I have for a good relationship, I might give up on you and move on to someone else. But that’s not going to happen. I’m not that fucking shallow, okay?”

For a moment it looked as if Kevin might relent, but then his face hardened again. “You said I was a pervert.”

“I said you were hypersexual,” Tom corrected, “which isn’t really a legitimate diagnosis. I simply meant that I found it odd that someone so averse to sexual contact was, in other ways, raunchier than many people I know.”

“You don’t like me because I’m not sexual enough, and you don’t like me because I’m
too
sexual….”

“I like you quite a lot, Kevin. I like it when you’re cute and shy, and I like it when you’re running around naked with your morning wood waving around. God, I
love
that! I find your raunchy sense of humor kind of sexy, even when you’re being crass. You’re full of contradictions, and I find you puzzling, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to be with you.”

The rain had begun to pick up, and as sexy as Kevin looked with the drops beginning to form rivulets of water down his face, Tom had just seen a flash high up in the clouds. He was beginning to worry they’d be struck by lightning if they stayed out there much longer.

Kevin wiped the water out of his eyes and said, “I know where you’re going with all this. You think it means I was molested or something, as a kid.”

“Maybe. I’ve read that those experiences can make people averse to sex later in life, or just the opposite—extremely sexual. But it’s not really my specialty. You’re the only one who knows if it applies to you.”

“No.” Kevin shook his head. “I don’t know. I don’t remember.”

Twelve

“D
IDN
’
T
Tom already tell you all this?”

Kevin was sitting on the couch in Sue’s office on Friday afternoon, fidgeting as he always did when he felt he was on the spot. But despite the argument he and Tom had had that weekend, he hadn’t backed out on the idea of going to therapy again. Sue had agreed to see him and to allow Tom to sit in on the session, though she hadn’t been happy about the latter.

“No, Kevin,” Sue replied calmly. “Tom told me that he was seeing someone he’d counseled three years ago, which I have to confess I wasn’t thrilled to hear, but he never told me what you’d been counseled for. That would have been a breach of his professional ethics.”

“Why didn’t you want him to see me?”

Sue glanced at Tom, who was sitting on the couch beside Kevin, feeling extremely uncomfortable. “Because it isn’t uncommon for someone who’s been through therapy to develop feelings of attachment to or even affection for his therapist. It can be a natural reaction to somebody who has guided you through a rough time in your life. A therapist needs to be aware of this and not take advantage of the situation.”

Kevin seemed to find that funny. He laughed and looked over at Tom. “Did you take advantage of my fragile psyche, counselor?”

“I saw you once, three years ago,” Tom said defensively.

Kevin snorted and turned back to Sue. “I know what I’m doing. I don’t need to be protected from the big, bad doctor.”

“I don’t have a doctorate,” Tom muttered, but the other two ignored him.

Sue took a sip of her coffee and said, “It’s all rather a moot point now, I think. What interests me more is your history.”

“Tom can tell you about it.”

“Tom is here to support you,” Sue replied, “but he isn’t the one being counseled. If you’d like help, you’ll have to do the work.”

Kevin grunted and said in the surly tone of voice Tom suspected Sue heard a lot from her clients, “Yes, ma’am.”

“Would you care to tell me why you came to Tom in the first place?”

And so the story slowly unraveled, with Kevin dragging his feet in places, but Sue nudging him forward relentlessly. Her no-nonsense approach appeared to work with him, and Tom found himself a little jealous of her ability to extract details he hadn’t yet managed to uncover.

Such as the specific reason Kevin was sent to Hampstead.

“I burned down the toolshed,” he said. “That was kind of the last straw, I think.”

“Which toolshed?”

“The one in the backyard. It was actually my mom’s gardening shed. It was this flimsy old wooden thing that she kept her pots and tools and shit in.”

Sue shifted in her chair and regarded him thoughtfully. “Why did you burn it down?”

Kevin shrugged. “Probably just to piss people off.”

Sue wasn’t able to get more out of him on that subject, but a short while later, when they were going over the nature of Kevin’s panic attacks and what triggered them, the mysterious “keeraylayzah” came up.

Sue’s response startled Tom. “Do you mean ‘Kyrie Eleison’?”

“What?” Kevin looked just as shocked as Tom. More so, in fact. He’d turned pale, and that leg was going a mile a minute. “You know what it is?”

Sue stood and walked across the room to where she kept a stack of CDs near a CD player. “I’m not sure. It just reminded me of a section of the standard mass liturgy.
Kyrie eleison
. It’s a Greek phrase meaning Lord, have mercy’, and it’s usually followed by
Christe eleison
—‘Christ, have mercy’.” She removed one of the CDs from the stack and placed it into the player. “There have been thousands of musical settings for the phrase, so I don’t know how we would isolate a particular one you might have heard. Was your family Catholic?”

“No,” Kevin said, “Baptist.”

“Then you probably didn’t hear it in church. Although choral masses are performed all the time outside of Catholic mass—they’re very popular at Christmas, of course, and you might have heard it in a movie. Would you like to hear one from Mozart? It’s a popular one.”

Kevin nodded, but Tom could see he was already starting to sweat. Tom wanted to reach out to him, but how could he do that when his touch only made things worse? He tried to catch Kevin’s eye, but the man was staring intently at the CD player, as if it were about to fire a bullet at him.

Sue forwarded to the correct track and then pressed Play. Tom didn’t listen to Mozart very often, but the piece sounded familiar. Perhaps it had been used in the film
Amadeus
, which he’d seen years ago. But Kevin immediately shook his head.

“No,” he said quickly, sounding relieved. “That’s not it.”

Sue turned it off and went back to her seat. “I would have been surprised if it was. As I said, there are thousands of musical settings for the
Kyrie
. And perhaps I’m wrong about the phrase you keep hearing in your dreams. It might not be
Kyrie eleison
.”

Tom could practically see the gears turning in Kevin’s mind as he tried the phrase on for size.

“I think it might be,” Kevin said slowly. “I’m not sure, though.”

“Well, perhaps it will come to you before our next session. You do plan on coming back?”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

Sue went to her desk and reached for her appointment book. “Perhaps we could do without Tom next time?”

Kevin looked distressed at this suggestion, so Tom immediately jumped in with, “I didn’t really contribute anything.”

But Kevin gave him a dark look. “I need you here. Or I won’t do it.”

“All right,” Tom said, seeing no reason to fight over it. To be honest, he wanted to be there anyway. “No problem.”

T
OM
had about forty-five minutes after the session to grab a quick lunch before he had a client of his own due, so he and Kevin walked down to Tony’s Pizza & Sub Shop on Main Street and bought some Italian grinders.

“How do you feel?” Tom asked Kevin on their way back to his office.

Kevin shrugged. “Okay.”

“You were looking a little freaked out by that
Kyrie eleison
thing.”

“No shit,” Kevin said, giving Tom one of his cute little smiles. “I feel like it’s crawling around in my brain now, worse than before. I thought I was going to hurl when she turned the CD player on.”

“But that wasn’t the right music.”

“No.”

Tom took a bite of his grinder, chewed, and swallowed before he asked, “Do you mind if I do a little digging to see if I can come up with a more likely possibility?”

“I guess not,” Kevin answered carefully, “but how will you know if something is more likely than Mozart?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I can search through old news articles for the area, from the time you were, say, five, up ’til you were about fifteen. Look for anything with
Kyrie eleison
in it—concerts, performances of masses, stuff like that.”

Kevin gave a loud, short laugh. “Good luck with that.”

Tom had to admit, it didn’t sound like a great plan. This wasn’t a big city, with decades of news archives available in searchable databases. He’d have to go to local libraries and see if they had newspapers on microfiche or something. “Well, I’ll start on the Internet and see what turns up. I might not find anything, but I just wanted to check with you that it was okay for me to research it.”

Kevin reached over with his hand and brushed a finger along the side of Tom’s face, tracing a path through his beard. It was a gesture he’d adopted a couple of days ago, and it was Tom’s new crack cocaine. That simple gesture seemed to validate their relationship, to prove that Kevin really did feel something more than friendship. Tom craved and reveled in it. “Go right ahead, counselor.”

When they reached the door to Tom’s clinic, Kevin said, “I have to get over to Lee’s. He asked me to put up some chain link fence in his yard to expand his dog pen. You want me to come over tonight?”