Frustration -SERIES- [Part 2] Headphones & Reveries [boyxboy]

Chapter Twenty Four

'Morning,' he said, nudging me.

'You wanna do that interview today?' I asked.

He looked up at me from his continental, surprised. 'Yeah. Are you sure? We'd have to do it on the bus.'

'We can use one of the bunks. They won't listen if we ask them not to.'

'Okay,' Jackson agreed. When Conor finally made his way down to breakfast Josh and Rachel had already taken the two remaining chairs at our table so he ruffled my hair as he passed but sat with Sally and Daniel.

'Come on,' I muttered to Jackson as we all trekked onto the bus an hour later for the ten hour journey to Miami. Conor pulled me down onto his lap as I passed and hugged me tight, pressing his face into my collarbone and kissing me all over my face as the others jeered and laughed. So I was even more confused but in a much better mood by the time Jackson and I crawled into one of the bunks and closed the curtain around us.

'I'm gonna lay like this,' I said cheerfully, laying down flat with my head on the pillow, 'and you sit there, like therapy. You're my therapist.'

'I'm under-qualified,' he reminded me.

'Yeah, don't worry,' I said darkly. 'I'm pretty sure Conor already has an appointment made for me with psychiatrist for after the tour.' I paused and lifted my head to look at him. 'That's off the record, by the way.'

Jackson laughed. 'I'm gonna let you read it before I send it in,' he said. 'You get final approval.'

'No,' I shook my head. 'Don't. I don't want to read it until it's published. I'll just freak out.'

Jackson looked surprised. 'Are you sure?'

'I'm sure. I trust you.'

He shrugged. 'Okay.' He opened his backpack and took out a voice recorder, then unlocked his laptop and propped it up on his knees to take notes. 'So. If I ask anything you don't want to answer, just say so. No pressure. If you say anything you regret or want to rephrase just tell me and we'll do it over. If it gets, you know, bad, in your head, or you start to panic or want to stop, or have a flashback or anything, it's okay, we can stop, take a break, whatever. Conor, Josh, Rachel are all ten feet away.'

I nodded. 'Understood,' I said, and took a deep breath. 'Let's do it.'

We ended up talking for almost three hours. Jackson asked the occasional gentle, leading question, but once I got started it was pretty difficult to shut me up and he didn't really have to say much. I quickly got used to the soft clacking of his keyboard as he jotted random comments, his frequent murmurings of, 'Mmhm,' and 'I see,' and 'Okay,'.

'How'd I do?' I asked once we had finished and he was packing away his voice recorder and laptop.

'My only real problem is going to be cutting it down to two pages,' he said. 'There's almost too much usable content.'

'Is that a bad thing?'

He laughed. 'It's a journalist's dream job,' he told me.

'Sweet,' I said, folding my arms behind my head and laying back down.

'How are you doing? You okay?'

'Yeah, I feel good. That was pretty therapeutic actually. Maybe there's something to this therapy business after all.'

'My parents made me do therapy for a while,' Jackson admitted thoughtfully, and I looked up at him.

'You never told me that,' I said.

'I know. It was after all that business with my school not putting on my play. They thought it might leave me with some lasting issues.'

'Did it?'