Running for Home - 42. January 1, 2022

January 01 2022

I’m in L.A. now. I’m staying at a Hilton. I probably should have gone somewhere cheaper, but fuck it. I want to sleep on a nice bed with some good amenities, free wifi and a decent gym. And I didn’t want to deal with families vacationing on the cheap with their screaming children, or get eaten alive by bedbugs while worrying a cheap hooker high on crack was going to fall out of my closet.

I was late getting to the airport – well, later than I wanted to be. There was still plenty of time before my flight. You just never know what the fuck is going to happen with airport security, and despite the supposed guarantees from the government that my record was wiped clean I still didn’t trust that someday something would happen and I’d suddenly find myself on a no-fly list and stranded, or worse, locked up with no idea what the fuck was happening or why. Anyway, I was late for obvious reasons. Extricating myself from Drake’s bed was next to impossible. Neither of us wanted to get up. I mean, we both had it up, but I still insisted that we hold off on becoming more sexually intimate. Just a little more kissing, cuddling, running a hand through his hair, quiet talk.

I shouldn’t have slept so well last night. Not in his bed. I never sleep well when I’m travelling, when I’m in a strange bed. Even when I was with Dominik, I never…

I’m trying not to read into things. I’m trying to not get ahead of myself. I can’t let myself fall into this too quick. It’s too dangerous. I don’t know what I will do if I fuck this up. I don’t know what I will do to myself if I fuck this up.

Tomorrow’s going to be brutal. I’m meeting up with Jubilee for breakfast, which is going to be awesome, but then I have a long meeting with Vange to go over details about how the hearing is going to work and what to expect. She’s optimistic that we have enough for the judge to rule in my favour without requiring a more drawn out process. I can only hope. Emma told me I can have as much time as I need to get things sorted out, so at least there’s that.

Even though I slept well last night, my body is still a bit of a jumble. Part of it is about what I have ahead of me in the next few days and part of it is from writing out everything that happened last night while I was on the plane. My head keeps replaying parts of it, as if even my subconscious mind is having trouble accepting that last night with Bobby was truly real. All of those moments, those words exchanged, the looks, the touches, the feelings… all of that interspersed with thoughts about Dom, about our relationship, about how fucked up everything was and about how-

About how I’d loved him, too.

I need to go to sleep now, but I’m having trouble. I need to feel it again, the good. The new. I need to feel that this new love is for real. No, not new. Just finally coming to fruition. Finally. I keep wanting to reach for my phone. I want to hear his voice, even just for a minute. We exchanged texts confirming I’d arrived like he asked, but that was it so far. I feel stupid, like a needy teenager.

Am I regressing? Am I turning back into the person I was when I left Xavier’s? Or maybe fifteen-year-old me, the me that existed before Marie stumbled into the picture? I fucking hope not. That kid, that version of me, had a lot of issues. I still have them, in one form or another, of course, but time has smoothed out the edges. The pain. That’s what I tell myself, anyway. I mean, I’ve had years of therapy, right? It wasn’t just all the bullshit in the Brotherhood and things that happened in Freedom Force that I talked about with my psych team in that government hospital program after I was rescued. It wasn’t just that stuff, in edited version, that I talked about with my therapist once I was out in the real world again.

But even if I still have all these issues, lurking deep inside me, at least I have a new lens to look through at them. I remember when we were at the Drake’s all those years ago and Bobby went upstairs with Marie, alone, to find her something to wear beyond her nightgown. I remember looking at this picture, this family picture, and feeling like it was staring at me and judging me for who I was, for my broken family, for all the lies. And I hated that picture, hated Bobby just a little in that moment for having the perfect family that fit into a picture like that. I was so stupid.

I’m not going to blame myself, though. I wasn’t in a good place at that moment. Hell, not that entire year. That entire decade. I know from Bobby’s letter that his family isn’t nearly as perfect as I thought in that moment, and became much more fucked up than it already was in the aftermath of his brother Ronnie’s phone call to the police. I remember him telling me things back in school, sometimes, about his dad and how helpless he made Bobby feel sometimes. Like Bobby was never good enough. I dismissed it like an asshole back then because how the fuck could it ever compare to the things my own father had done to me?

I’m not stupid. I have a lot to learn, now, about who Bobby is. I need to listen and listen well. I need to watch him. Reflect on him, on what he tells me, on what he says and what he doesn’t say. I can’t just let myself act like he’s the guy I knew back in high school and the image of him that I carried with me in the intervening years. Both the good one, the one I kept secret and close to my heart, and the bad one that I used to shield myself from how much everything hurt. I can’t afford to make stupid mistakes because I just assume he’s the same person, that he’ll react in the same ways that he did when we were teenagers. We both have to do this, really. I hope he knows that. He hasn’t given me much reason to think he doesn’t, especially given some of the things he said last night.

All of this is giving me moments of feeling overwhelmed, of being scared that there is no way I can actually do this. That I can make this work. That I won’t fuck it up. Can’t I just have some self-confidence for once in my life? Some true self-confidence, not the fake kind that I’m so good at bluffing, of using as a shield? I don’t know. Maybe it’s not self-confidence that I need. Maybe it’s just patience, effort, and a mindfulness of him and his own worries, fears and issues. Maybe I just need to trust myself, trust him, trust us to work through everything. Together.

My phone is ringing.

It’s him.