Author: Anna Martin
Category: LGBT
Go to read content：https://onlinereadfreenovel.com/anna-martin/page,18,529683-the_lost_boy.html
“Can I ask you something?” Stan asked.
“Yeah.”
“Have you ever been properly treated for your anxiety?”
“Sort of. I talk about it quite a lot with Greg.”
“Before him, though.”
“Not really. All my therapists wanted me to talk about my traumatic childhood, and I didn’t have a fucking traumatic childhood. We moved from Otara to Oxford and that sucked. I got through it, though. I was fine for a long time.”
“I’m no therapist, and you seem to be doing really well with Greg, so I definitely don’t want to take his job. It just seems to me that you’re clearly struggling with anxiety in certain situations, which makes you want to take drugs to stop the noise in your brain.” He hesitated before adding, “I’ve been there.”
“You never had social anxiety, though.”
“No.” Stan wondered if he was saying too much. Then again, Ben was talking, so it couldn’t be all bad. “I have a debilitating mental illness that means I have a very negative, very toxic voice in my head that drives me to behaviours that I know, logically, are bad for me.”
Ben pushed himself up to brace himself on his elbow and look Stan in the eye.
“You’re better now.”
Stan nodded slowly. “I am. That doesn’t mean I don’t still fight with my anorexia, Ben. It’s there. I’ve accepted that it’s always going to be there. I’ve just learned certain techniques to help me deal with it so I can go on living my life. Maybe that’s why I really believe that you can get help too.”
“I hadn’t thought of it like that. It’s not always bad, though.”
“Tell me.”
Ben huffed. “I like a lot of aspects of what we do. I like writing music with my friends. I like performing for an audience that appreciates us. I like playing big stages in incredible places around the world.”
“You can’t do that all the time, though.”
“No. I find press stuff hard. I don’t want to talk to people about my private life. It really fucking pisses me off when reporters are stalking my mum or my brothers and sister to try and get a story on me. I hate—”
“Go on.”
“It sounds really fucking ungrateful, but I hate some of the fans. They take things too far, you know? I love them, but when they show up with tattoos of our faces, that freaks me out. I don’t want to be a role model. I don’t know how to be a good role model, and I really don’t like that people look up to me. Especially now.”
“I understand.”
“And the more I hide away from them, the more they try and chase me down. That’s why other people run my social media now. Because if you don’t feed them with something, then they’ll go fucking nuts trying to get what they want. And when you break it down, there’s not that many fans who are like that. It’s a really small minority, but they make shit so fucking hard.”
“Did you ever get, like, a mentor?” Stan encouraged Ben to settle down again. They ended up lying on their sides, facing each other. “Or anyone to talk you through what was happening?”
“Not really. We had a different manager at the beginning, not Melissa.”
“Jordan?”
“Yeah. He was a fucking arsehole and all.”
Stan grinned. “I didn’t like him much.”
“I know you didn’t. He gave us the ‘don’t do drugs, kids’ talk, then sent us off on tour with a band who were fucking renowned for doing that stuff.” Ben shook his head. “I suppose it’s not really much of a surprise that we ended up where we are. Where I am.”
“I think there are things that can help you,” Stan said carefully. “I know we can’t turn the clock back and change the way things have gone so far, but there’s no time limit on getting help.”
“I didn’t want help for a long time. The drugs helped when nothing else did, so I wanted that.”
“I think that makes sense. But you don’t want to keep taking drugs every time you find yourself in an uncomfortable situation.”
“No,” Ben muttered. “I fucking don’t. It seemed like a good idea at the time, though.”
“Believe it or not, Ben, you’re not the first person to suffer from anxiety,” Stan said, gently teasing him. “I know you’re in a really unique situation, but that doesn’t mean you can’t change.”
“I know,” he grumbled.
“It’s hard. It’s so fucking hard, and it’s going to hurt. Well, it might not. The things that helped me might not work for you.”
“What worked for you?”
“Time,” Stan said honestly. “Giving myself permission to find a therapist who worked for me and not just struggling on with someone who wasn’t getting it. Being myself.”
“I don’t know if I can ever have that, though,” Ben said. “The band is too big. There’s too much pressure on us to get the next thing out, to do the tours and the promo and all the shit that comes with the music.”
“Ben.” Stan reached up and touched his face, hoping to calm down the panic in his eyes. “You don’t have to do something you don’t want to do. Not now, not ever.”
“But I—”
“I’m serious,” Stan said, interrupting him. “I’m going to arrange for someone to go to the recording studio and pick up your guitars. You can finish recording at the studio at the house.”
“We need the techs, though,” Ben said miserably. “We need someone who can do the mixing, and—”
“Then we can hire someone to come to the studio and do it. If we have to hire in the equipment, we can do that too. Look, I’m as invested as you are in getting this album finished now. I don’t care if it’s awkward or expensive or unusual. We’ll do what we need to do to make it happen in a way that doesn’t stress you out.”
That made Ben smile, at least. “I was talking to Tone yesterday. Fuck, was it only yesterday? Anyway. We need two more songs on the album. In his words, ‘a banger and an eleven o’clock number.’”
“Tone knows what an eleven o’clock number is?”
“I know; it surprised me too.”
Ben wrapped his hand around Stan’s waist and up under his T-shirt to stroke Stan’s lower back with his fingertips. It sent tingles up Stan’s spine. Ben probably knew it too.
“So you’re going to write a new song?”
Ben shook his head slowly. “No. I want to just go into the studio with the others and jam. Like we used to.”
“You don’t do that anymore?”
“Not for a while, no. Sometimes we do. But usually Jez and Geordie, or Geordie and Summer come up with a tune and hand it over to me to add lyrics. Then we go into the studio and put it all together, and Tone works out the drums on the fly.”
“That sounds very….”
“Disconnected?”
“Yeah.”
“It is,” Ben admitted. “But we got thrown out of so many recording studios for the crazy arguments we used to get into, it was easier to do it like that than to stoke the rumours that we were breaking up.”
Stan sighed and shuffled closer so he could tuck himself under Ben’s chin.
“I really don’t know what to do with you guys.”
“I think we need to make Therapist Stan a permanent member of the band,” Ben murmured against Stan’s hair.
Stan laughed. “I’ll start charging you,” he warned
“I’d be okay with that.”
Chapter Twenty
When Ben woke, he was alone in the flat. Stan had left a sticky note on the bedside table saying he’d gone out for a walk and would be back soon.
Ben rolled onto his back and let the vicious self-loathing envelop him.
One line of cocaine didn’t necessarily cause any physical hangover effects—not like the wreck he turned into when he was coming off an opioid high. This was almost worse, though. When his body was being ravaged by physical symptoms, he could concentrate on those and his brain didn’t have time to wander. When it was like this, he had plenty of time to contemplate
all the ways he’d fucked up.
These days there was a new voice in his head, one that spoke in the calm, softly accented tones of Dr Greg. This voice told him that recovery isn’t linear and to make mistakes was human and he had to forgive himself for them.
It fought alongside the other voices that reminded him he was a worthless piece of shit who couldn’t keep control of his own fucked up impulses. Those voices had been around longer, so they tended to be louder.
To do something, anything, other than lying in bed fighting the effects of nightmare-laced dreams, Ben got up and took a shower.
His hair was getting longer, and he wanted to go back to Dominic to get him to fix it again. He also wanted Dominic to see that he was getting better. Compared to the wreck who’d walked into that barber shop the first time, Ben had made progress.
“I’ve made progress,” Ben mumbled to himself as he scrubbed shampoo through his hair. “I don’t want to die.”
He heard the front door close as he was brushing his teeth, and continued to vigorously scrub until he was spitting blood. The sudden need to feel clean wasn’t a new sensation, and logically Ben knew this was a side effect of spending so many mornings after lying in his own stench, unable to move.
“I’m back,” Stan called when Ben stepped out of the bathroom.
“Hi.”
He closed the bedroom door behind himself to get dressed.
Since they’d got back to London, Ben had been wearing the same half-dozen outfits on repeat because that was literally all he owned. He’d borrowed—and not given back, so technically he’d stolen—one of Tone’s plaid shirts that was definitely too big for him. Ben liked that, though. It hid how skinny and scrawny he’d become.
Once dressed, he went through to the kitchen where Stan was unpacking a few things into the fridge.
“I have some things I need to do today,” Ben said, grabbing a banana from the counter and peeling it.
“Oh?”
“Yeah. Do you—I mean, if you’re not doing anything—”
“I can come with you,” Stan said. “I’ll warn you, though. It’s already starting to get busy out there. Saturday crowds.”
Ben nodded. He usually hid away on the weekends, not wanting to throw himself into the melee of Camden market and its tourists.
“It’s not local.”
“Okay,” Stan said easily. He closed the fridge and offered Ben a smile.
It hit Ben like a punch in the chest.
Stan had brought all his clothes back from New York, and Ben was being treated with a whole new roster of outfits that made Stan look amazing. Today he’d dressed in a khaki green shirt dress, lots of gold jewellery, and strappy sandals. Ben decided those bare legs should come with a warning.
“I don’t need to do anything else. I’m ready when you are.”
“Let me find my wallet.”
“And your phone,” Stan called after him.
Shit. Yeah. His phone. He used it to book a car so they didn’t have to try and hail a cab.
“Okay, I’m good,” Ben said as he walked back to the kitchen. Stan was sitting on one of the barstools with his bare legs crossed at the knee while he texted someone. Ben fixed his eyes on Stan’s face.
“Where are we going?” Stan asked as he locked the door behind them.
Ben took a deep breath. “Oxford.”
“To see your family?”
“Just my mum,” he said.
“Does she know you’re coming?”
“Yeah. Mark has the kids today. He’s taking them to the football or something.” Ben’s stepdad was better at rounding up Ben’s siblings—the triplets—than anyone else. An afternoon screaming at the football would be good for burning off some of their apparent limitless energy.
“Okay, then we should go.”
Stan had met Ben’s parents before, once for Christmas and once over the summer when Ben decided to go home for the triplets’ birthday, so it wasn’t going to be the most awkward thing ever. Though Ben was still expecting it to be pretty awkward.
He’d been living independently for years before the band really made it, having moved to London when he was still a teenager. His mum had her hands full with three babies, which depleted the time they could have spent together even more. He didn’t blame her for it, though. She was happy with a house full of kids.
It took about an hour and a half to get to Oxford with a driver who seemed satisfied to totally ignore the conversation they were having in the back seat. Stan was good at noticing when Ben was nervous and distracting him. It was stupid—he shouldn’t be nervous to talk to his own bloody mum—but it had been a long time since he’d spoken to her.
They pulled up outside of the nice house in a nice area near good schools, where it was quiet and peaceful and not anywhere Ben wanted to live again. He took hold of Stan’s hand and refused to let go.
It only took seconds for his mum to answer the door after he knocked.
“Hi, mum.”
Ben always felt like a stranger in this house. He’d never lived here—they’d moved out of their nice three-bed semi near the town centre when his mum got pregnant with the triplets and moved to a bigger house near a better primary school.
While he hugged his mum for a really long time, Stan shut the front door behind them and went to make tea, because even though he’d been born in Russia, he was now British through and through.
When he heard the kettle boil, Ben wrapped his arm around his mum’s shoulder and led her back to the kitchen.
“Oh, Stan love, you don’t need to do that,” she said, fussing.
“I don’t mind,” he said, taking down three mugs from the cupboard. “You can catch up.”
Ben sat down at the kitchen table and let his mum and his boyfriend figure out making tea and getting the biscuit tin out and tried not to freak out. He didn’t have a plan for this. He didn’t know what to say or how to say it, and he hadn’t practiced with Dr Greg the best way to approach it all.
The house looked tidy, which meant his mum had probably spent all morning rushing around to clean it. That wouldn’t surprise him—she did things like that when she was nervous or stressed. Ben hadn’t picked up the habit. The thought that he was the one leaving her nervous and stressed was humbling.
The triplets were nine, now, so the kitchen wasn’t covered in drawings that they’d done at school and multicoloured plastic toys. They were into games and stuff. Ben had bought them all Nintendo Switch consoles for their birthday. At least, he’d told someone from his management team to get them that.
“You look good, Ben,” his mum said when Stan brought over the mugs of tea.
“Thanks.” He took another deep breath.
He reached for Stan’s hand, needing that connection more than ever.
“Are you two dating again?”
“Yes,” Stan said carefully. “Only recently. But yes.”
“Good. I’m so pleased. He was always happiest when he was with you.”
Stan smiled, and Ben felt some of the tension ease from his shoulders.
“I need to get some things off my chest.”
How was he supposed to apologise to his mum? He didn’t have the first clue about what he’d really put her through. For the band it was different—they were there, every day, watching him self-destruct. She’d heard it second-hand, through the press, or that one time when Tone had called her and asked her to talk to Ben because he’d gone off the rails again.
Despite everything, she was still his mum. They’d had plenty of arguments over the years, especially when they moved from New Zealand and he was terrified of the changes that were disrupting his life as he knew it. Their relationship had survived plenty of ups and downs.
In the end, he decided to be honest.
He couldn’t tell her everything—hell, he couldn’t face a lot of things himself yet, let alone confessing to anyone else—but he talked her through the gist of it. The anxiety, the way he felt let down by
the people who had led them into the music industry, the way drugs were an easy way out. He told her about the tours that he didn’t remember, about the gigs they’d played that had changed his life, about the music that he still loved, despite everything.
She listened. And held his hand, and forgave him. Just like that.
When he was done, Ben folded his arms on the table and put his head down for a minute, not sure what his body was going to do next. From past experience, he could maybe throw up or cry or just shake until it was all over.
“Can I say something now?” she said, rubbing slow circles on Ben’s back.
“Yeah.”
He sat up then, and looked at her. He’d inherited a lot more of his looks from his mum and her Maori father than he had from his dad. When he was a kid, people had called Ben her little doppelgänger. These days she still wore her dark hair long, down to the middle of her back, almost as long as Stan’s. She had tattoos, too, similar to Ben’s. Maori tattoos. Their tattoos meant something, in their family.
“Some of the things you’ve told me, I knew already. Some of them I guessed.” She picked up Ben’s hand, with its chewed fingernails and ragged cuticles, and held it between both of her own.
“I know.”
“I put you through a lot as a kid. I put you through a lot when you were too old, really, to be a big brother to a bunch more little toerags. I thought—” She broke off and looked away but didn’t let go of his hand. Ben stayed very still. “I thought you’d always know that I love you. No matter what. You’re my big boy.”
He laughed, then sniffed and tried not to cry.
“Don’t you ever dare cut me off again, you understand? I don’t care how bad it is. I’m your mum, Ben.”
“I don’t plan on letting it get bad again. Now that we’re here… now that I got through that worst part.”
“Good.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You don’t have anything to be sorry for. You hear me? Just don’t do it again.”
It was something he’d been told many times during his childhood, so the scolding made him laugh.