Sucker Love

Chapter Two

"Disarm"

The first time he meets up with her outside of school, they go on the Hollywood Murder House Tour. It is also the first time she sees his house.

It is he who comes up the idea, inspired after witnessing the cock sucker spray water over yet another open coach full of horror enthusiasts. However, he doesn't mention the idea to her out of some selfish desire to show her just how terrible his life is, it is nothing self pitiful like that. He suggests it because he wants to know if she can feel fear, and more importantly, if she wants to.

He calls her on that same day she gave him her phone number, no less than a minute after getting through the front door from school. It rings three times and then a familiar male voice answers, but he thinks nothing more of it when she comes to the phone.

She scoffs at first at the idea, but at the same time pledges herself to it almost immediately. It is she who picks the time and the meet up spot, he is more than happy to oblige.

He rises early on the Saturday morning, and stays in his room, his nerves wracking havoc on his insides, until at long last it is time to go. They meet outside the tour office, he in his favorite green and black striped sweater; she in a straw pork pie hat with a polaroid camera dangling around her neck. Together, they sit in the back of the coach as the sweaty faced guide takes them past 3301 Waverly Drive and the site where the Black Dahlia's body was discovered.

Outside of school, there is a softness to her edge; she laughs freer and harder, and smiles with her teeth. He knows that this is because she is not the type of person who will allow herself to be defined by her high school years. Westfield High is just a place she goes to, much like him, it does not know her and she will not let it.

For most of the tour he watches, captivated, as she takes snaps of the older, more wilted bouquets that have been left outside the crime scenes by sympathizers. He tries as often as he can to say clever, impressive things that will make her look at him and listen, really listen. Not listening in the cold, analytical way of Doctor Harmon, but with both ears and eyes wide open like she can truly understand him.

He also tries to make her laugh. He likes it when she does, she puts her whole self into it with the way she leans forward, a little to the left, her mouth pulled wide to expose all of her teeth. Sometimes her body shakes so hard when she laughs, it makes him wonder if she is about go tumbling off the face of the earth and into the endless expanse of space.

He only half listens to the guide as he watches her, which is unusual for him. His obsession with all things bloody and dead stretches to the point where he feels compelled to chase after any information there is regarding a murder, no matter how old, like a smack junkie would a hit.

Finally they reach his house. It is the last stop.

As they pull up outside of it, he quickly scans the driveway to see if either of the cars are in. Thankfully they are not. He does not care if they catch him, he just doesn't want them to see her. They will try to speak with her, and they have no right in doing that.

The house itself is not bad. It is old and imposing with stained glass windows and creaking doors like something out of a real horror story. He likes the building in fact, and all the rooms, but he does not like the people who fill them, or more, he does not like two of them.

"Imagine living there?" she says about halfway through the guide's graphic description of the first owner, Doctor Charles Montgomery's illegal abortion clinic.

It is a story he has heard before and often, he has researched it thoroughly as well. As a child, he used to creep around the basement with his frightened sister, looking for the monstrous thing called Infantata. In the end, all they found were a few jars of pickled guts and other dead things.

Of course he hid them away at the time. To him they were the most wonderful treasures he'd ever seen, and if literature had taught him anything at such a young age, it was that treasures were to remain hidden. Admittedly he had long since forgotten about them, but now that he remembers, he wonders if he'll be able to find them again.

"Would it scare you?" he asks her.

She looks him straight in the eye. "No."

And he doesn't doubt her for one second. If he has learned anything at all from the tour, it is that she is not someone who fears the unseen. She needs the horror to be there, right in front of her, so that she can reach out and touch it. His thoughts turn once more to the jars.

"It's not that great," he tells her. "There's no ghosts and the owners are pretty shitty, plus the shower water's always freezing. I once found a jar with a baby's head in it down in the basement... that was cool. I guess some parts of the Montgomery story are true."

Originally, he had not intended on telling her that he lives in the red brick period house, but then he likes to spring things on her when she least expects it. It amuses him to watch the way her eyes widen and narrow so quickly at times. He knows that she likes it as well, the fact that she cannot pin him down, or predict what it is he is about to say or do.

His confession is met with a very long and hard stare. "...You live there? You're screwing with me." She searches his face for any deceit and when she finds none, her eyebrows knit together with interest. "...Really?" At his nod, she shrugs and raises her camera. "Say cheese."

There's an unhealthy swirl as the ancient machine kicks into life. The mouth spits out the undeveloped picture, she hands it to him but he shakes his head.

"I'd rather have one of you," he confesses.

Slowly, the left corner of her lips curls upwards in a Mona Lisa smile. "Take it then," she passes him the camera. "But you better let me see that jar sometime."

In truth he doesn't know exactly why her fearlessness fascinates him so much. Maybe it's because he wants to see if she is brave enough to stare into the eyes of the monster deep inside, and not flinch away.

The first time a conversation about her happens at the dinner table, it is not by his own volition.

He is not the one who mentions her. He never had any intention of ever telling his shamble of a family about her. She was supposed to be his alone; a safe house for his sanity that would make that one hour in the evening time allocated to family socializing almost bearable.

So when the cock sucker slips her into the conversation, somewhere between Shih Tzu breeding and the Mexican infestation, it takes all of his will power not to drive his fork through her eye.

"A girlfriend? That's wonderful," says Larry, all surprise. He's wary though, he always is. There's a small glint of fear hiding in the depths of his eyes as he looks at him.

His wife lets out a hiss of irritation. "A fine looking boy like him, of course he's got himself a girlfriend!"

Slowly the anger begins to bumble up from deep inside. He is not just pissed off because they now know about her. It's the absolute disregard they have for his privacy, her privacy as well. His day had been going so well up until that point. It had been brilliant in fact, for the first time in a long time, he felt something remotely close to human. He takes a sip of water, only to realize that the hand holding the glass is trembling with rage.

"Is she a pretty girl?"

From across the table, his sister, Addie beams at him in her wide, childlike manner, her round eyes crinkled at the sides with curious joy. He tries to match it with the same enthusiasm, but the guilt in his gut makes it feel forced and awkward. He has not been a good brother to her. Back when the world was closing in on him, he used to imagine what it would look like if he were to slice open her throat.

Sometimes he still thinks about it.

He shakes it off the horrible thought, and tries at a smile again; this time it feels more genuine. "She is," he answers. He means it too, every syllable of it. "But she's not my girlfriend."

The cock sucker snorts and pulls out a cigarette from her purse. There's a faint click and a small blue and yellow plume erupts from the tip of her lighter. With a deep inhale, she leans back in her chair, her elbow crooked up like Bette Davis. She does not pay the slightest bit of attention to the way Larry's eldest, Margaret eyes the orange ember at the tip of her cigarette with fear. Nor does she notice when the other, Angela starts to visibly shake. Of course, neither does their father.

"Stop." He snatches the cigarette from her hand and dumps it in the jug of water, it distinguishes with a hiss. "You're scaring them."

She shoots him a shrewd look and with an elegant shake of her head, takes out another one. "Oh my sweet child," she sighs heavily. "The only thing those girls are afraid of is you. And don't take my cigarettes."

It's the truth, and it stings all the more because he cannot deny it. Of all the lies he has told Doctor Harmon, fantasizing about killing only the people he likes has been the greatest. There are plenty of people he hates that he wants dead as well; the cock sucker, his father and Larry certainly take the top spots there.

He's even tried to do it once, kill Larry that is, about three months ago, before the therapy and the pills. They help control it a little better now, but the desire to kill him, to kill all of them, is still there. He doubts that it will ever go away. Sometimes he's not sure if he wants it to, and that scares him. It isn't normal and that's just what he wants to be, normal.

It is not as if he hasn't tried to stop his murderous urges. It is not his fault that his summer long diet of electric shock treatments and horse tranquilizers did nothing to quench it. It creeps up on him at times, in the quieter moments, when he's least expecting it. Sometimes the flashbacks are so vivid, he can even remember how warm and soft the flesh of Larry's neck felt beneath his hands as he tried to squeeze the life out of him.

"Tanya Stapleton's daughter says she's been seeing you with her all the time in school," the bitch continues. "And you're telling me that she ain't your girlfriend? People are going to start thinking that you're one of those types of boys, Tate. Do you want that?"

He says nothing. He stabs at his peas with his fork, imagining that every little green ball is her head, or better yet, Larry's. He knows that he should be grateful towards the man for not selling him out to the authorities, but then Larry didn't stay silent on his behalf. He did it for the cock sucker. He'd do anything for her. He even abandoned his dead ex-wife for her.

"-I've said it once and I will say it again, all them girls will wanna throw themselves at you if only you'd allow yourself to smile every once in awhile..." She places a hand on his arm and he shoves it away, just the thought of her touching him makes his skin crawl. She is not deterred however, she goes on as though nothing happened. "How about you rejoin Track? Have you thought about that? You're a good runner, Tate, and the girls like athletes, believe me. You are so good in fact, that Polak coach from your school has been calling the house nonstop since the start of term asking for you."

Although he continues with his refusal to interact, he does allow himself to smirk a little. The glory days of his freshman year have long since turned to dust. He burned them, quite literally, trophies, kit and all, in the furnace down in the basement the moment they moved back into the house with Larry. He knows that she still keeps some of the burnt relics upstairs in the drawer of her vanity. He found them there one time while he was searching for razor blades.

It had made him angry at first. He had very nearly thrown them out in the trash just to be free from the shackles of her expectations once and for all; but then the poetic justice of if all stayed his hand. Burnt and warped by the heat, they were no longer a reminder of happier times, but of the boy she destroyed.

Even five months after his discovery, he still checks the drawer every now and then just to see if they're still there. It fills him an enormous sense of self-satisfaction to know that every time she looks at them, she will have no one to blame but herself for what he has become.

"What's her name?" asks Larry between a mouthful of ham.

He glares in reply. That is one thing that he will not give to them. Not now, not ever. He cannot bear the thought of her name being mangled by his mother's acidic tongue. Out of the corner of his eye, he catches the cock sucker rolling her eyes at her husband.

"Oh bless me Lord with patience..." she mutters at the ceiling. "So when will this young lady without a name be coming over?"

"She won't," he finally speaks.

This makes her sit up straight. "And why not?" she demands. "Aren't you going to introduce her to your family?"

He stares at her incredulously. "Why would I do that to her? I like her— Sorry Addie," He glances at his sister who smiles. "You'll meet her someday; I promise. You too," he nods to Margaret and Angela.

Through the bumpy, melted skin on her face, Angela shoots him a shy smile. Margaret keeps her head down however and pushes around her carrots on her plate with her less burnt hand. She is older, more afraid, and rightfully so, she had been there when everything happened.

"Ha!" The cock sucker's hand shakes as she takes a sip of her white wine. "You want to introduce her to a Mongoloid and two cripples that aren't even related to you by blood? Do you want her to think your entire family are the starring act of a freak show? Good Lord does your spite know no bounds?"

He puts down his own drink and wipes his sleeve across his mouth.

"Aren't we though?" he replies in a cool, disaffected tone, he feels anything but however. His legs shake underneath the table. Larry touches his neck nervously, the girls are frightened, even Addie has sunk down low in her chair to hide. "-Isn't that why you made sure no one will ever see Beau? Tell me, how long is it going to be till you have Addie carted off as well because she doesn't fit into your picture perfect—"

She slams her hand down so hard on the table that her purse of cigarettes falls off and onto the floor. There is a tense silence. Everyone is looking at him, watching, waiting for him to snap. He does not, he will not, not this time. He won't give her the satisfaction of that this time, no matter how much the demons inside him roar for it.

Larry coughs awkwardly. "Well, I have to say that this ham, Constance is-"

"Do not!"

His compliment dies a short death on his lips and he retreats back into nervous silence as the full fury of his wife's rage finally breaks upon her son.

She raises a trembling finger towards his face, her voice barely above a whisper. "...Do not try to blame that on me. How dare you? They took him from me! I would never..." She draws in a ragged breath and blinks back the tears forming in the corner of her eyes, some of them fall regardless.

He watches, cold and emotionless as she pats them away with the tips of her fingers. It's impossible for him to feel anything towards her anymore.

After a few sharp breaths, she gathers herself together, and then with renewed fury, she turns to look at him once more. "Now you listen here and you listen good; you are all my children. My babies, you got that? Other mothers would have tossed your brother and sister out with the bath water without a second thought-"

"Well, aren't you just a saint?" he snarls.

"I would never give any of you up willingly, no matter how hideous or disfigured, or selfish— Get back here!"

He quickens his pace at the sound of her footsteps thundering behind him. He's had enough. All communication should have died between them the day she married a swine and let his brother be taken away, she just hadn't read the memo.

His bedroom door slams closed behind him with a bang. He turns the lock just as her fists collide with the wood.

"How long, Tate...?" her voice cracks, exasperated and broken from behind the door."How long are you going to go on punishing me for? I-"

He doesn't hear the rest of it. He presses the play button on his stereo and the distorted guitar cords of Nirvana roar into life. He cranks up the volume until it's at full blast, until at last her sobbing and his own murderous thoughts are all but drowned out. She does not linger in the corridor for long, it's pointless, she understands that by now. He will not come out again until morning, by which time she will have smoothed over the cracks in her mask once more.

About five seconds into the first track, he sits up on his bed and goes over to his CD rack. He runs his fingers over the plastic cases as he searches, deliberating quietly to himself over which band he wants to listen to more, Pearl Jam or Hole. Eventually he picks one, presses the stop button, opens the stereo and replaces the CD.

As Eddie Vedder's dragging baritone fills his ears, he relaxes into it, knowing that at some point, maybe not tonight, maybe not even tomorrow, but at sometime in the not so distant future, she will be listening as well.

The Polaroid snap he took of her that afternoon, smirks out at him from above his desk. As he looks at it, he grins back.

The first time he goes over to her house is on the Sunday morning following the latest in his disastrous family dinners. He meets her weak mother at the door, he's polite to her, just because she warned him to be so before hand.

He also brings the jar with him. He found it hidden behind a loose brick in the basement. It now sits on her desk beside her ornamental birdcage while he studies the contents of her bookshelf.

He is not surprised to find that her collection is largely made up of autobiographies, popular cult fiction and classics, with very little fantasy or romance to be seen. There are no old toys in her room either. She is the type of person who probably, on the eve of her first day in Junior High, gathered her childhood up in a plastic bag and tossed it out onto the curb for the garbage truck to collect.

He admires her all the more for the conscience decision she has made to move into adulthood. He finds it interesting that she would readily do something people twice her age meet kicking and screaming. Growing up by definition is not something left up to individual choice however, it is done out of a necessity to survive. He becomes all the more mindful to this, the second he catches sight of the purple framed family photograph sitting on the top shelf.

Once he sees her father's face, everything falls into place. Even with the unfamiliar happy and relaxed expression in his eyes, Doctor Harmon's square jaw and boy band hairstyle are unmistakable.

The sudden realization that she is his therapist's daughter does not shock him as much as it probably should do. She has told him once before that her dad is a psychiatrist, and their surnames are also the same, and now that he thinks about it, the male voice who answered the phone only a few days before could not have been anyone other than him.

He quickly moves his attention away from the photograph, and picks up her already well read copy of the Virgin Suicides. He tries to read the first page but he can't, his concentration is in tatters.

No matter what, he cannot tell her, not yet at least. Not until she knows that she can trust him, and he has already, no matter how unintentionally, violated her trust by telling her father about her self harming. He didn't mean to, he didn't know. It's all his own fault though, he had a feeling at the time that he shouldn't have spoken about her, but he did anyway. In fact, none of this would have happened if only he had remembered to ask her name earlier. He's furious with himself for being so stupid and he swears, over and over again, that he'll never mention her in another therapy session. He swears it on his life.

"What's eating you?"

A confession nearly leaps straight from his mouth at the sound of her voice, he stops it just in time. He can't tell her, she'll be angry for sure. She'll hate him.

"Earth to Tate?"

He turns her head towards her. She's smoking out the window but she's lit no incense or sprayed no air freshers to help counteract the smell. The door is locked however, and although she has done nothing other than that to disguise the fact that she's smoking, he gets the impression that in her household, cigarettes are considered a greater sin than underage sexual activity.

"Me?" he counters with, trying to look as natural as possible.

"C'mon, I've told you everything about me, and I know next to nothing about you. I don't even know your surname."

He closes over the book and slips it back into its place in the shelf. If he acts normal then maybe she won't notice a thing, and then he won't have to worry about telling her. He can just pretend like he didn't know when she finds out. Acting normal is his thing, he's good at it. He's gotten away with it for years. It's not right though, in fact it will probably make things worse, and he really doesn't want to lie to her.

"I thought you got it from my library card," he says eventually.

She arches an eyebrow. "You're handwriting's crappy, I could barely make out your first name."

He laughs because it's true. He's never had the best handwriting in the world, it looks more like a gyrating spider has dipped its legs in ink. Doctor Harmon would probably say that it is a reflection of his deeply disturbed mental state. The thought makes him frown.

"It's Langdon." he answers, and it's not a lie. So far he has not lied to her which is good. It was the cock sucker who put his name down as Harvey on the medical form. Turning his back from Doctor Harmon's smiling face, he walks towards her bed in an effort to place as much distance between himself and the photograph as possible. "It's my Dad's."

She needs no further explanation. He's told her that much at least, and besides, she's intuitive enough to know what he means. Flicking the butt out the window, she sits up against her brass headboard, her legs stretched out in front of her.

"Do you ever see him?"

He stops by the foot of her bed and shakes his head. "Nope. He's got a new life now in Florida now, new kids too. His wife sends me a card and my mom a cheque every year on my birthday with no return address. She probably knows that she'll hunt them down with an elephant gun if she ever writes one. Her and Dad do all of their talking through their solicitors."

"I thought you said your mom remarried as well?"

"She did..." He pauses for a moment while he deliberates over just how much of his history he should tell her. He decides against most of it in the end, he does not want her to be scarred as well. "It wouldn't stop her from killing them though..." Sometimes he wonders if his homicidal inclinations were a hereditary trait, it would certainly explain a lot. "When I was six, she was the prime suspect in a missing person's investigation surrounding a maid of ours who went missing from our house..."

She waits for him to continue, but when he doesn't, her eyes widen in almost comical shock.

"Geez! No wonder you're on meds."

He smiles. He likes it that she thinks he is on drugs so that he can cope with the world, and not the other way around like most people do. She is kind that way.

"They later found the maid, alive and well, in Florida with my Dad," he then continues on. "They're married now. She seems nice from what I can remember... used to smell like lavender and bleach— You wouldn't think she'd be nice cause of what happened— What she did and all," He adds, glancing into her face. "No one ever tells you that they can be nice..."

She is angry however. She glares back at him. For one terrifying moment, he fears he is caught, that she knows all about what he said to her Dad, that she knows how he's betrayed her.

"You asshole, you deliberately said it like that just to fuck with me," She revels in his uncomfortable confusion. She has finally gotten one up on him.

Relief hardly covers the mixture of feelings which flood his stomach as he stares down at her. He decides then and there that he will tell her eventually, when it's right that is. The probability that he will run into the man while he's with her is too great to ignore, and he wants to be around her as often as he can. What he needs is time so that he can think of a way to tell her without making her angry or worse, hurting her.

More than anything else, he really doesn't want to hurt her.

He drags the toe of his sneaker across the floor. "...You said your Dad cheated too, right?"

"With a twenty one year old student." She tries to shrug it off but she's tired. Life's hard knocks have left her with the world weariness of someone twice her age. "...He's a dick."

Normally he would have given himself a pat on the back for his near accurate synopsis of Doctor Harmon's character, but he finds no victory in it this time. His therapist is not just some sad, middle aged loser desperately trying to cling to his lost youth, he is her father, and she deserves so much better than an adulterous scum bag like him. Before he knew who he really was, the good doctor was already floating precariously on the surface of his contempt, now he has sunk far beneath it.

His demons group together and between them, they make a new category of people they desire to kill, and they put Doctor Harmon's name at the very top of it.

To be continued..

A/N: Remember, the house is of no supernatural importance in this fic, so just forget about that, and there's no ghosts just crazy, crazy Tate. Things that I've touched upon in this chapter, such as Tate's various issues with his family, his hatred of Larry, etc, etc will be explained as we go along. Think of this as an introduction to it. It's a lot of information, and it would just read like word vomit if I dump it all in one chapter. Plus, that's not how you tell a story.

Thank you guys for the overwhelming response in your reviews. Really, thank you so much. You're all brilliant. It's great to know that you like it so far. As before I would encourage you to sign in because that way I can write you a personal response.