(ON HOLD) Spellbound (BxB)

Chapter 5 | Cathartic

It was the following Tuesday when Lilly Whitman supplied Asher with a leather-bound notebook and a pen that bled ink from a sharp, angled tip.

"This is yours," she said, "and only yours. I won't be looking at your journal. Not to verify you've been using it, not to know what you've written. As we go through this process together, I want you to write to yourself. Your future-self, your past self or your current self. Pick one."

Asher sat there in her office chair, curling the pen between the slats of his fingers. "If you won't read it, then what's the point?"

"The point is, therapy shouldn't feel like a chore. It's meant to be cathartic, Asher. It's meant to heal."

She had the radio on that day, Van Halen playing lowly on the speakers. It was by the ironic grace of God that the lyrics and up-beat temp to Jump frizzled in the air while he was tediously skirting around the topic of his own misunderstood suicide. Asher tried often not to think of that day, the phantom hands around his throat, the searing water in his eyes. His aching lungs turned to bubbles, tugging one another wildly to the surface.

He'd been unconscious for five minutes when Rodger Greenly had broken down the bathroom door and ripped his son from the guttering belly of an over-pouring bathtub. He was soaked to the toe when medics arrived. Soaked and shivering. Soaked and pacing. Soaked and cursing. Soaked and crying.

At least that's what Asher had been told. There was no single reality when it came to his father. Rodger was a man with a million avenues and sometimes they were hard and sometimes they were soft and sometimes they embraced and sometimes they were knuckle-white and trembling with anger. And sometimes Asher feared him, and often he didn't. And always, he loved him. And always, he was sorry for the things he'd taken away. A home, a life savings, a wife. He was always taking. Always taking. Alwaystak—

"Asher."

He realized then, how intensely he'd been staring at the page with wet, burning eyes. Lilly surely noticed them but gave no acknowledgment as she delivered a pamphlet to his lap, laid crooked along the center of his empty journal.

Kingsly Sports and Recreation, it read.

"I think it would be good for you to choose one and stick to it." Her voice was hardly loud enough to beat the hum of the office air vents. "It will allow you more leniency as an integrated...special case student."

"I don't do sports," Asher bit out.

Lilly sunk back on the edge of her desk and peered thoughtfully through the window. It was a long while before she spoke again, and when she did, it was with a strangely revitalized timbre. "I'll tell you what. Take the rest of our session to go down and see them for yourself. The baseball club should be practicing right about now, and there are sign-up sheets near the gym."

This piqued at Asher, because from what he had come to understand, he wasn't supposed to step foot outside the building without another student or staff chauffeur. "Alone?" he asked.

Lilly released her lungs and slunk back against her desk. At the oddest of times, she hardly seemed like a professional at all. He imagined her in another place, the parking garage, perhaps, sparking up a cigarette and watching her nicotine-buzzed day carry by without her. Existing and surviving and nothing more than that. "Who cares, kid. Go watch them play for a bit. And promise me you'll write some things down in your journal."

Asher didn't promise her anything, but he brought his journal with him down to the first floor of Kingsly. He was a hound who'd just realized his cage door had been left open, thirsting for air after days trapped between walls. And when he tasted it, for some reason it wasn't the same as the air of the courtyard. Of course, it was the same in theory—the same Willowbrook oxygen that'd been gassing his veins since he stepped foot into town—but something was different about it. The air untouched by Kingsly was sugar-sweet.