"We are spending Christmas together." Olivia bit her lip, sliding her hands beneath her thighs. Her hands sunk into the overstuffed chair, making her feel almost childish. Meanwhile, her therapist sat with a raised brow, his eyes widened. It didn't make her feel any more confident about the decision to spend the holidays at Fitz's.
"Are you okay with that?"
"It's kind of a bad time to move out. Jake took everything. Fitz and I talked about it and...he was right when he made the suggestion." She bounced her legs up and down, feet tapping against the carpeted floor. It was a nervous tic that her therapist probably wouldn't miss. It did bring Olivia some comfort, though, and that was all she cared about.
"Fitz was right about what?" Gone was Nathan's notepad - it hadn't been present since their first session. Instead, he was drumming his fingers against the armrest of his own chair - drawing Olivia's gaze. She generally found it easier not to look him in the eye.
"About saving money by staying with him for now and not worrying about trying to come up with gifts for the kids." She moved her hands from beneath her thighs, interlacing her fingers and squeezing. The pressure, bordering on pain, was a way to stay grounded. It helped to keep her thoughts from drifting to the long, often heated, conversations that had led to that decision.
"That is a logical decision. What about you and Athena? Last time you had mentioned that you were in the process of telling her of your diagnoses."
Fingernails digging into the skin by her knuckles, Olivia swallowed. She blinked rapidly, teeth worrying at her bottom lip. Resting her head against the back of the beige chair she sat in, Olivia tilted her head to the side and let her gaze slide to the window on the wall.
"She's scared. She won't admit it. Athena won't let anyone know when she's scared. She's so used to having to be the strong one. I guess that's my fault."
"Do you truly believe that is your fault or is that what you think you should say?" Nathan crossed his arms, leaning back in his chair.
Olivia sighed. She had been called out for many things since starting therapy. Asking if her feelings were genuine or if they existed only because she thought they should was a weekly thing. Normally, it could be boiled down to one cause: a lack of empathy on her part. Just another of the long lists of negative side effects that had now been given a name.
"It is my fault," Olivia asserted, moving her gaze back to her therapist and unlacing her fingers. Small, crescent shaped indentations marred the skin around her knuckles. Inhaling, she placed her hands on the armrest of the chair. "Jake...I don't like to think about what he might have done to her. She was there for Lio and Seph every time I couldn't be."
"Why stay? He was abusing you. Stealing from you."
"I'd already fucked up. Leaving Jake wouldn't have changed that."
"No. It wouldn't have changed the decision you made that led to your relationship with Jake. It would have lessened the level of abuse he was able to engage in."
"I chose to go with him -"
Nathan lifted a hand, holding one finger up and toward Olivia. Pursing his lips, he waited for her to quiet down.
"I don't mean to interrupt, Olivia, but did you think you deserved what he did? Do you believe you deserved what he did?"
Tilting her head, Olivia frowned. Thoughts swirled through her mind. Too many for her to speak right away. She would have to pull on her boots and wade through the muck before answering that question. The cheating. The divorce. Dating Jake. All of that was a blur to her. It was like looking at her life through the eyes of someone else. Did she deserve Jake? She was the one who decided to sleep with him. She decided to date him. She moved in with him. And she stayed.
"I don't know," Olivia whispered, working her bottom lip between her teeth and chewing on her already chapped skin. "I...I...Something was wrong with me."
"What was wrong with you?" Nathan crossed his legs, leaning forward and angling his body toward Olivia.
"I craved sex. All the time. It…"
"Was this after the SSRI?"
"Yes."
Nathan slumped back into his chair. He took a moment to rub his hand over his face, exhaling sharply. "Increased sex drive can be an indicator of a manic episode, Olivia."
"So all of you continue to say," Olivia shrugged. "Either way - it was a problem. Especially when Fitz was never home. Jake and Mellie had me convinced he wasn't home because he was seeing someone else. I believed them. It wasn't hard to get me to believe something like that. I was already paranoid enough that I thought pictures were watching me -"
"You've never mentioned this paranoia before, Olivia." Nathan frowned, leaning across his chair to reach for the notepad that lay atop his desk. He scribbled a few notes before asking: "Did you mention this to Dr. Freeland?"
"Yes," Olivia nodded, "Apparently bipolar psychosis is common when there has been an extended manic episode."
"It is. Did you have any other psychotic symptoms?"
"Just the paranoia. I was able to stifle that at first, but eventually…"
"You could no longer separate reality from fiction."
"And hearing that one of my best friends at the time had personally seen my husband cheating...Well, when Jake offered a shoulder to cry on, I took it." Olivia shook her head and snorted.
"So you do blame yourself."
"I guess? Fitz wasn't cheating. I know that now. I cheated. I left him. He asked for the divorce, but I was the one who left. Then I put my kids in a situation they shouldn't have been in. I couldn't leave Jake. I'd already made so many mistakes and it was like I was sinking. Jake was the only thing keeping me afloat."
"He abused you."
"What if I deserved it?" Olivia tilted her head, her wet gaze meeting her therapist's.
"No one deserves abuse, Olivia."
"After what I did, I'd say we'll just have to agree to disagree."
"A little to the left." Athena craned her neck, eyeing the string of lights her father was in the process of hanging across the front of the house.
"How about now?" Fitz glanced over his shoulder, waiting on his daughter's thumbs up before securing the string of lights. Slowly, he climbed back down the ladder.
"Are we putting lights on the trees again?" Seph was excitedly rummaging through the box of lights that Fitz had dragged out of the attic.
"If you're doing that again, at least let your father help you!" Eleanor had stopped in the middle of hanging lighted snowflakes on the windows to look at her son. Lio bounced impatiently beside her, a snowflake in his own hand. His nose, peeking out from just over the collar of his black puffer, was a nice, ruddy tone.
"One little accident last year." Fitz rolled his eyes, yanking his gloves from his pockets and pulling them over his hands.
"Oh he'll be fine, Ellie." Jerry came from around the side of the house, a box in his hands. His head twisted toward the driveway at the sound of tires hitting gravel. The red Wrangler rolled to a stop beside Fitz's Dodge.
"Here, Ath." Jerry passed the box in his hands to his granddaughter and watched as Olivia got out of her vehicle, locking the doors behind herself. Olivia was about halfway to the porch before she seemed to realise that everyone was standing outside - working on decorations.
"I didn't know we were decorating."
"We decorate every year," Athena mumbled, her eyes trained on the contents of the box her grandfather at just handed her.
"What Athena means," Jerry began, giving the young girl a pointed look, "Is that this has become our tradition. A nice little bonding exercise."
"Yeah that's -"
"Ath, why don't you go help your father get the lights ready for the pine trees? No tangled messes. We don't want a repeat of last year. I'm not sure your mamaw could handle that again." Jerry tilted his head toward Fitz, waiting as Athena trudged, slowly, toward the trees closest to the road. Once she was out of earshot, he turned back to Olivia.
"I can help."
"Is that what you want to do?" Jerry raised a brow as Olivia shifted the strap of her purse higher on her shoulder.
"Yeah, it is." Olivia smiled, a soft laugh escaping. "Thank you, Jerry. You're the only one who ever asks if I'm doing what I want."
"Go get some warmer clothes on," Jerry advised, waving her comment off and meandering back toward the group huddling at the base of one of the pine trees. He reached the group in time to hear the tail-end of Fitz's comment to Eleanor.
"Because we broke up."
"Why? She was a lovely girl." Eleanor stood with a string of lights dangling from her hands, trailing behind her as she unraveled the cord.
"We...can have that conversation later." Fitz's gaze fell over his mother's shoulder, landing on Olivia as she trudged through the snow toward them. Eleanor twisted to look behind herself, a slight frown forming.
"She's making an effort, Fitz. But don't forget the past."
"Mother…" Fitz sighed, shaking his head and turning toward the ladder that leaned against the tree.
"Isn't this dangerous?" Olivia wondered aloud minutes later as Fitz and Jerry were balancing at the top of the ladders they had leaned against the large, pine trees. Snow had begun falling, light at first and then in large, swirling flakes that worked to minimise the visibility in the area.
"There's only been one accident," Athena shrugged.
"Daddy fell last year," Seph added.
"We don't remind your grandmother of that!" Jerry's voice reached them from the ladder, muffled a bit by the falling snow.
"He fell?"
"We had to go to the hospital." Lio practically ran around his mother, tossing a line of lights toward his father's outstretched hand.
"It wasn't anything serious. I've been told that I overreact." Eleanor turned her back to Olivia, rummaging through yet another box.
Olivia shuffled awkwardly in the snow, wiping snowflakes from her face every so often. Her eyes darted from child to child - watching as each one effortlessly ran around the adults. They seemed to know exactly where they needed to be and when.
"We haven't decorated the tree yet. We waited for you." Athena came up beside her mother, arms crossed.
"That's sweet, Ath."
"Yeah. Seph wanted to do it with you."
"I am still freezing," Olivia complained, wrapping her hands around the warm, thick mug of hot cocoa.
"I could have carried everything in by myself."
"There was a lot." Olivia sat the mug on the coffee table to her side. She reached blindly for the scissors she had placed on the floor.
"Are you sure you don't want any help wrapping?"
"You? Wrap?" Olivia laughed, reaching for a roll of wrapping paper.
"It's not as good as yours, but I've learned a thing or two." Fitz shrugged, easing his butt onto the floor across from Olivia. Crossing his legs, he cradled his own hot cocoa between his hands.
"I've got it, Fitz."
"The kids like having you here," Fitz broke the silence some moments later as Olivia shoved a wrapped present to the side, smacking her hands together and watching the silver-gold glitter fly.
"This wrapping paper was a terrible idea. I look like I got into a fight with a stripper."
"Seph likes glitter," Fitz laughed, shaking his head at the amount of glitter that was flying. He could imagine weeks of vacuuming before all of that glitter would be gone.
"I like seeing the kids more often."
They fell into a comfortable silence. Fitz disappeared for a few minutes to take their empty mugs to the kitchen.
"I haven't seen Tiffani lately," Olivia remarked when Fitz returned, his knee cracking as he settled back onto the floor. She grimaced at the sound - football had been hard on his body.
"We...decided that this isn't what we wanted."
"Is it because of me? I would have -"
"Liv, it wasn't because of you. I made choices for my kids because, as always, they come first. She didn't understand that and I can't be with someone who isn't okay with me putting them first."
"I wish I would have...could have...damnit I don't even know how to say this without sounding like a heartless bitch. I also don't know why I'm concerned about that because you already think that about me." Olivia shook her head, roughly tearing a piece of tape and angirly attaching it to the wrapping paper on the box before her.
"Liv -"
"Heartless bitch. Soulless whore. Don't try to deny it. You definitely said those things. And they were definitely true."
"I was very angry. And hurt," Fitz sighed, leaning back on his hands and watching as Olivia furiously continued wrapping, "You were the love of my life and I didn't think I would recover from what happened. I didn't understand how that could have happened and with Jake of all people. You threw away our family."
"That's fair." Olivia bit her lip, pushing yet another finished present away. Fitz shoved off the floor, silently transferring Olivia's small pile of gifts to under the Christmas tree.
"Are you almost finished?"
"Almost," she answered.
"I'm going to head to bed, then. Seph and Lio will be up bright and early."
"They love Christmas."
"Goodnight, Liv."
"Fitz?" She waited for him to stop, turning at the end of the staircase to look back at her. Head still lowered as she focused on Athena's last present, Olivia said, "You never asked why I did it."
"Honestly, Liv, it wouldn't have mattered."
A/N - I thought hard about not writing anymore. It had absolutely nothing to do with guest reviews and everything to do with me crashing. Hard. In the end, though, I love writing too much and I just had to trust my gut that all of you would understand my need to step back for a few weeks while I recharged.
Liv made some heavy revelations in therapy and, despite Jerry's efforts to include her, she obviously still feels a bit like an outsider. I think it was important that she and Fitz have this heart-to-heart as well. It's clearly not over. This conversation barely touched on their problems, but they're getting there. This isn't a fast 'reveal everything and fix it'. There are a lot of pieces and feelings involved and that just isn't realistic. Christmas is over, though, and who knows what New Year's will bring for these two and this broken family?
Until next time,
Gabi