Secrets 11

“Are you sure about that?” The doctor asked. He smirked in a such a patronizing way that I wanted to hop off the bed, snatch that pen out of his hand and jam into it his brown/green eye.

“I didn’t kill him,” I said softly. The coldness of the room, the harsh, pungent smell of bleach in the air, everything was making it worse for me. “I didn’t do anything to him.”

“What reason would I have to lie to you, Sean? I’m trying to help you…”

“How the fuck are you trying to help me? You’re sitting up there trying to convince me that I killed Patrick, when I didn’t.”

“Not once did I ever say that you killed him, Sean.”

“You don’t have to say it. You’re implying it.”

The doctor leaned back in his chair and just examined me for a minute or two. “Sean, can you tell me who Kevin Ford is?”

His eyes were green again.

* * *

You go to sleep and I wake up. That’s how it goes. The thing is, how can I find a way to keep you asleep and me awake?

* * *

“How long have I been out?” I asked Patrick. I was on the ground, looking up at him. Felt like somebody had just bashed a fuckin’ brick over my head or somethin’.

“Almost a week,” Patrick told me. “I was hopin’ you would come back soon.” Patrick helped me off the ground. It took a few minutes for the sensation to come back to my body. I looked around, almost forgetting where I was for a second.

“I’ve been away for too fuckin’ long,” I said. “We need to hurry and try to find a way to fix this shit. I can’t keep doin’ this.”

“I’ve been trying to figure out ways to get rid of him without getting rid of you,” Patrick said, “but I haven’t figured out anything yet.”

“Yeah,” I said. I looked down at the clothes I was wearing and grunted in disgust. “What the fuck is this shit?” I said. I ripped the shirt off of me and threw it on the couch. The jeans I had on were too tight around my nuts so I peeled them off, just standing in a pair of tight, white underwear. I looked down at my body, at all my tattoos. My body was still the way it had been before. Patrick stood there, admiring my body. “Come `ere,” I told him. He came close to me, our bodies close enough to feel the heat coming off each other. I brought my lips close to his mouth and whispered, “Did you miss me?”

Patrick reached inside of my underwear and squeezed my dick, which got harder and harder in his hand, until it was too big to fit in my underwear any longer. He pulled it out and exposed it, all thick eight inches of it. “Fuck yeah, I missed you,” he said. Patrick pressed his hot mouth against mine and our tongues went wild in each other’s mouths. I unbuttoned Patrick’s shirt with one hand and exposed his hot, muscular chest and his quarter-sized hard nipples. I pinched both of them hard with my thumb and index finger until Patrick groaned out loud. With my other hand, I unzipped his jeans and found his large, hard dick, waiting for me, already leaking. “It’s been too fucking long,” Patrick mumbled.

He went to his knees and before I knew it, my underwear was around my ankles and his tongue was flicking the head of my dick. I grabbed the back of Patrick’s head and shoved my entire cock into his mouth in one easy motion. I closed my eyes and lost myself in the thick, moist wetness of Patrick’s mouth. He went on for about ten minutes, gliding his pretty mouth down to the base of my dick, to the very tip of the head, almost making me shoot my nut in his mouth, when all of a sudden it felt like someone had whacked me in the back of the head with a metal baseball bat. I stumbled backwards and cried out loud. Patrick quickly stood up. “What’s wrong?” he asked. I could see him, but at the same time he looked so blurry and so far away.

I rubbed the back of my head. “Not yet, I just got here,” I muttered to myself.

Patrick was saying something to me, but I could barely hear a word he was saying. Everything started to lose focus. It felt like I could barely stand up. I was losing myself again. Last time it had been a couple of hours, this time it was less than half an hour. I felt Patrick’s hands on my shoulders, shaking me, but it was too late. As strong as I thought I was, I wasn’t strong enough to stay longer. I could see the darkness moving in from the corner of my eyes. It didn’t take too long before the darkness covered me, like a big, heavy blanket, and I was lost underneath it.

* * *

“I don’t know who you’re talking about,” I said to the doctor.

The green-eyed doctor continued to reference his notes. “You keep journals, don’t you Sean?”

“Yeah, so what?”

“Several times you talk about someone named Kevin Ford,” the doctor began. He started to read from his notepad. “…He comes out of nowhere and talks to me like he’s known me my whole life or something…he usually only comes when nobody else is around and he tells me things…” The doctor stopped reading momentarily and glanced up at me. “Do you have any idea about who I’m talking about now?”

“No,” I lied.

“Then let me go on,” the doctor said. “His body is perfect. Almost too perfect…and he has all these tattoos all over him. He has one of a dragon that goes across his chest and around his back. I wonder if it hurt when he got it.” Again the doctor stopped reading and asked me, “Do you remember anything now, Sean?”

“Why do you want to know about him?” I asked.

“Because he’s important in all of this,” the doctor replied.

“In what way?”

The doctor stared at me for about a minute; the silence between us was so cold I could’ve gotten frostbite. “There’s something I need to show you, Sean. And then you’ll see why he’s important in all of this.”

* * *

“He’s been asking all these questions about you.”

Kevin and I were on opposite sides of my bed. I was folding seven red shirts and he was folding five black shirts. He was naked, his muscular body glistening with sweat. My eyes were fixated on the dragon tattoo wrapping itself around his hard abs. “The doctor? You haven’t told him anything have you?”

“Not really. Not yet.”

“Good don’t.”

“He read my journal. I don’t know if he’s read all of them, but he’s read some of them at least.”

“Don’t worry about that, it doesn’t matter. You got other stuff to worry about.”

I looked around my bedroom. Everything looked so neat, just like I had left it. When I looked down at myself, I wasn’t wearing the loose-fitting, paper-thin white clothes I had on before, but my regular pair of blue jeans, and a comfortable, plain, white T-shirt. For once, in a little while, I felt kind of normal.

“It’s gettin’ late,” Kevin said. I don’t know why he said that, because that didn’t seem to be true. His back was facing the window, and bright sunlight, almost too bright sunlight was spilling through the window. It felt like summer. It felt like the day would never end. I kinda didn’t want it to. “Don’t trust him,” Kevin told me. “He’s gonna act like he wants to help you, but he really doesn’t.”

“He told me that I killed Patrick.”

Kevin stopped folding his shirts. He looked me directly in the eyes. I’d never seen him look so serious before; he had such haunting rectangular, dark brown eyes that seemed to just dig through my brain. “Don’t you remember the other night?”

“No, what happened?”

“Patrick took you home. I guess the two of you had gotten into a fight or somethin’. Anyway, he left and then came back to your house later. I was there. You don’t remember any of this? Anyway, you guys started arguing again. You kept telling him that Rose was behind of all this, that somehow she was doing all of this so that you and Patrick couldn’t be together. You told him about Danny, how he had been hiding in your house the whole time, even though he had shot himself in the head. You told him that you shot him again, the gun was still upstairs, but Rose was already gone. You and Patrick looked around your house but Danny wasn’t there and there wasn’t a gun either.”

“I don’t remember any of that…” I said.

Kevin continued to fold his shirts. For a while I wondered why it was taking him so long to fold all of his shirts, when there were only five of them. But I saw that he was unfolding and then refolding them over and over again, each time better than the last.

“And then what happened?”

“You guys started screaming at each other, really bad, so I thought the best thing for me to do was just to go. I don’t know what happened between the two of you after I left. That’s between you and Patrick. I hope you didn’t do anything stupid, Sean.”

“Me either.”

* * *
The doctor was holding something in his hand. It took me about a couple of seconds to figure out that it was a mirror, an oval-shaped mirror about the size of his hand. For some reason my heart began to double in speed when I saw that. He was holding it in such a way that the light bounced off it and reflected on my face. “When’s the last time you remember seeing yourself in the mirror, Sean?”

I wanted to say yesterday, but the truth was that I really didn’t know at all. How long had it been? “A little while ago.”

“Tell me what you look like.”

“What for?”

“I just want to know…tell me, what color are your eyes?” the doctor asked.

“Light brown.”

He wrote something on his notepad. “What color is your hair?” he asked.

“Regular brown,” I replied. There was high tension in my voice. It was getting hard to breathe. Again he wrote some more notes down.

“Describe your body type: slim, muscular, or overweight.”

“I guess slim.” More notes.

“Do you have any tattoos or piercings on your body, Sean?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“Why are you asking me all of these stupid questions?”

“Because…” The doctor stood and walked toward me. He held the small mirror in his hand almost as if he were holding a weapon. “I need you to look at this.” He extended the mirror told me, but I didn’t want to take it, I didn’t want to look at it. I turned my head away and told him no. “You need to look at this, Sean,” he told me. His voice almost sounded like Patrick’s when he said that. Again I saw no. “Why don’t you want to look at it, Sean?”

I didn’t want to look at my reflection because I already knew. I already knew what was going to happen if I looked at the mirror. “You need to see this,” the doctor told me, but I refused to listen to him. “At some point you’re going to have to look at it, and it might as well be right now.”

He wasn’t going to stop until he got what he wanted, and really there was no use in trying to fight against it anymore. Slowly, I turned my face in the direction of the mirror…and looked at my reflection. Maybe three weeks ago I would’ve been surprised, maybe even a couple of hours ago I would’ve been surprised. I would’ve said, “This isn’t real”, or something like that. And I still wasn’t sure if any of this was real. Maybe all of this was just one big dream that didn’t have an end. But what I was looking, whether it was real or not, was pretty convincing.

I didn’t want to believe it, I probably shouldn’t have believed it, but I felt like I had no choice to. I had no choice but to admit that the face looking back at me from that smooth, shiny glass wasn’t mine. I saw none of the characteristics I had just described to this man. Instead I saw a face with short-cropped black hair, thick, dark eyebrows, a rich, wheat-colored complexion, and the deepest set of rectangular dark-brown eyes, eyes so intense that they seemed like they could pierce right through the glass and into my mind. It wasn’t my face that I was looking at it…it was Kevin’s.

To be continued...