Weapons of War

Riley was uncomfortable, it didn't take a shrink to figure that out. They were sitting on an uncomfortable couch in a stuffy office in downtown Nashville, waiting for the 'quack' as Riley put it. She knew this was important and that Shea was right; if seeing a therapist helped them, then it was definitely worth trying. She figured they should try anything and everything. It wasn't as if they could continue to remain the way that they were.

Sure Noah's health issues topped with having another baby were the main stressors, and they were aggravating the issues already present between Shea and Riley, but they couldn't change either of those things so their only option was to figure it out. Riley didn't want to end up one of those couples who hated each other, married solely for their kids and that's it, or worse than that. She knew Shea didn't want that anymore than she did, which was probably why they were where they are.

The door opened and a short, balding man in a suit walked in, he closed the door behind him and approached the couch. He held his hand out to Shea first, "I'm Dr. Kent, Shea and Riley, yes?"

Shea nodded and shook his hand and introduced himself, "Shea."

He held his hand out to Riley, and she reached over and shook his hand with a lot less enthusiasm than Shea had previously, "Riley."

Dr. Kent took a seat in one of the chairs across from the couch, glanced down at a notebook in front of him and then looked over at Riley and Shea and asked, "So… what brings you here today?"

Riley remained quiet, both out of lacking the knowledge of what to say and out of pure curiosity to see what Shea might say. When it was clear Riley wasn't going to speak first Shea cleared his throat and explained, "We figured it could help. Things have been… rough between us for a while. We thought we figured it out a few years ago but now all those issues are kind of resurfacing."

"And what kind of issues have you been having?"

Again Riley stayed quiet so Shea said, "A lot of them. We fight all the time, and we just have trouble with basic couple things."

As he jotted things down on his notebook Dr. Kent asked Shea, "And this is an ongoing thing?"

"We had a lot of problems three years ago. We had a really rough year, we almost ended our entire relationship over it but we worked through it- at least we thought we did. Now it just seems like we only scratched the surface of our issues and the rest of them are just piling up to the point where we don't know where to go next." Shea admitted, and Riley nodded her head in agreement. She still wasn't sure about how she felt about being here, but she knew that if things didn't change they wouldn't be able to change them.

She had thought about it once or twice since they agreed to try counseling, and since they had booked their appointment. She knew what she wanted out of this, and she knew it was likely that Shea wanted the same things as her. But she also knew that it was a very real possibility that this wouldn't fix anything between them.

As if he was reading her mind Dr. Kent asked them, "What do you want out of our sessions?"

Shea spoke first, "To find ways to work on our problems. To be able to have a conversation about something without it ending up as an argument."

Riley surprised him by being completely honest with both of them, "To know that fixing things is worth it."

There was a silence in the room for a few seconds while he wrote, and then Dr. Kent looked at Shea and he asked him, "So what do you think the biggest issue is between the two of you?"

He didn't even have to think, "Riley has emotional issues."

She shot him a glare, which didn't go unnoticed by Dr. Kent, but before she could say anything he asked Shea, "Can you elaborate on that?"

"It's hard to connect with her on an emotional level. She's very guarded with herself, and it's like she only gives a little bit of herself at a time. She doesn't like to show me emotion, which would be fine if I knew she was feeling it, but I can never figure that out. It's like… I never know how she feels or what she's thinking until it just blows up at random. It's extremely frustrating to not be able to share things with her the way I want to." Riley was staring down at her hands in her lap while Shea spoke.

"Riley, did you have a response to that?"

"Nope." She stated, making Shea lean back in the couch and force himself not to roll his eyes.

With a quick glance between the two of them Dr. Kent finally turned his attention to Riley and asked her, "What do you think the biggest issue is between the two of you?"

She thought about it for a moment, trying to decide what to say and how to say it, before she remembered they were on the clock and she told him, "We don't spend nearly enough time with each other. It is a struggle to even find five minutes in a day for just the two of us, and we don't make the time, we just let life get in the way of our relationship."

Dr. Kent nodded slowly and asked them, "How long have you been married?"

"Year and a half." Riley said.

Shea was quick to add, "But we've been together for… over a decade, probably closer to fifteen years or so. Since high school."

"And how did you meet? Can you tell me about that day?"

"We met through mutual friends. I introduced myself to her without realizing that I already knew her, she called me a string of names and I spent hours talking to her trying to convince her to forgive me. I thought she was stubborn then… it took over a month to get her to agree to go on a date with me." Shea stated, and Riley smiled gently at the memory.

Dr. Kent told him, "You know, it's not often people can remember with such detail moments from that long ago."

"Some days it feels like yesterday." Shea said, his voice soft and almost happy. Riley hadn't heard him talk that way in what felt like forever.

"And the other days?"

And just like that the glimpse of their one happy moment was crushed, "Other days it feels like a lifetime ago."

Dr. Kent turned to Riley but she didn't know what to say to Shea's statement so she stayed silent. Not that her silence surprised anyone in the room. Shea was used to being met with silence when he shared the way he was feeling, he'd been getting it for years. It wasn't like it would be any different here, in fact, if anything it was more likely that she would be even quieter here.

"What was your family life like as kids?" When Riley let out a mix of a laugh and a scoff, Shea shot her a look but Dr. Kent simply turned to her and asked, "Skeptic?"

"You could say that." Shea muttered.

"I get it, and a lot of people that come to see me are, but obviously if you're here you're willing to give it a shot." Riley nodded slowly and he continued, "And I do think this can help the both of you."

"No offense but I just can't get behind you saying that, you're a marriage councilor, you kind of have to say that." Riley stated matter-of-factly.

Nodding Dr. Kent glanced at Shea, gauging his facial expression before he told Riley, "In the half an hour that you've been here I can tell both of you what the biggest, and most important, issue in your relationship and your marriage really is. It's communication, you don't know how to communicate with each other very well and that's what's causing so many of your problems. Communication is one of the most important things in a relationship, marriage is hard on marriage and being able to communicate well is the only thing that's going to take a marriage from one or two years to twenty or thirty years."

Shea nodded his head and confirmed, "We don't talk."

"We talk all of the time." Riley exclaimed, shooting him a look that Shea nearly sighed at. Even this had to be an argument.

He shook his head, "No we don't. We talk about little things, we talk about Noah and the baby, but we don't talk about the things we need to. We pretend that those things don't exist and it doesn't help us any in the long run."

"We don't have time to talk about those things." She knew how stupid it sounded; that they didn't have the time to talk about the real issues in their relationship and to work them out and fix things so they just continued to spend their time sniping and arguing with each other. She knew it sounded stupid, but to have the conversation required to fix things between them would require them to have more than a few minutes of alone time. Something they most certainly didn't have.

Shea glanced at her, and he stated, "It's like talking to a brick wall some days."

She turned to him, with an incredulous look in her eyes, and exclaimed, "Same goes for you. Only with you its like a brick wall with a temper."

Shea wanted to quip back, he desperately did, but instead he held it in and opted to let out a sigh instead. He glanced at the therapist with a look as if to say 'see what I mean' and then he said, "We just proved his point Riley."

She let out her own sigh and Riley turned to him in surprise when Dr. Kent asked them, "What is your intimacy like? How do you feel about your sex life as a married couple?"

She turned to Shea, rolled her eyes and stated, "No wonder you wanted to see this guy."

Shea let out a mixture of a sigh and a groan, before he looked at Dr. Kent and told him, "Honestly? I think it could be better. Way better. Most of the time I feel like she isn't interested in that part of our relationship, like she does it just because I need that side of it."

She scoffed but didn't say anything so Dr. Kent asked her, "Do you have a response to that?"

"I just don't see how I'm expected to find time for that, how I'm supposed to squeeze 'have sex with my husband' into my day, every single day.There already isn't enough hours in a day for me as it is." Riley mumbled in annoyance. Figures Shea would book them in to see some quack who was more concerned with their sex life than their actual problems.

Dr. Kent looked between them, noting them sitting as far away from each other as they could on what was already a smaller love seat to begin with. He noted the way Shea would look at Riley with a mix of hurt and annoyance on his face and how Riley mostly stared at her hands in her lap. They made very little eye contact. So he asked them, flat out, "Do you want to get a divorce?"

Shea was quick to say, "No."

Two sets of eyes turned to Riley and put her on the spot for her hesitation and silence.

"Of course I don't, but I just..." She sighed, pushed her hair from her face and finished, facing Shea as she spoke, "Sometimes it feels like our entire relationship has been one big fight."

"What do you mean?" Surprisingly it wasn't Shea responding to her words, even more surprisingly he nodded along in agreement.

She sighed again, "It was a fight and a struggle to get here, and then… I can't even focus on the good years we had, because the last four have been hell for lack of a better term. I hate fighting with you, but it just feels like our entire relationship has been nothing but fighting."

"Especially the last couple years." Shea stated and Riley nodded her head.

Taking their attention back to the situation at hand Dr. Kent asked, "So what's complicated things in the last few years to make it this bad?"

"We had a baby, two years ago." Riley told him.

Shea added, "Four months ago we found out he had a tumor on his kidney, so it's been stressful for us dealing with that, and now Riley's pregnant again and things have just kind of exploded on us."

"It would be stressful enough for anyone to deal with, but Shea's gone so much for work and it makes it harder." Riley stated.

"Do you ever resent him for having a career that allows him to get away from all of the things going on in your home lives?"

Shea turned to look at Riley, watching her carefully as she struggled with herself. She didn't want to lie, she had to stop lying to save Shea's feelings, but she knew the truth would hurt him to hear and she hated hurting him more than she hated lying to him. He reached out and grabbed her hand, which surprised her, but made her admit, "Sometimes… a lot of the time… all the time."

"Have you ever shared that with him?" She shook her head and Dr. Kent pushed her forward, "Getting things out in the open is a big part of moving forward and working on your communication issues. At the risk of sounding like the therapist you're skeptical of, how does him having that option make you feel?"

She wouldn't look at him, which bothered Shea a little bit, and she twisted her engagement ring around her finger as she said to him, "Some days I hate you for it. Some days I really, honestly hate you for it. And then other days, rare days, I hate you for everything. For me coming here, for us getting married and having a baby and everything we're dealing with… I don't want to, and it's not right, but some days I really hate you and I can't stop myself for blaming you for things that you have no control over."

"How does hearing that make you feel?" Dr. Kent asked Shea.

"Like this whole thing could have been avoided if she had just told me that from the beginning." When he said this Riley rolled her eyes, even as they filled with tears. Shea, too wound up from her sudden confession that, normally, would have made him feel guilty but for some reason this time made him feel angry, went off on what could only be described as a tangent, "I never know what I'm supposed to do with her. I'm not around enough, and I offer to take time off or quit and she freaks out. I try to do things to take the stress off of her and she thinks I'm hovering and get's mad at me. I'm at a loss for what to do anymore. I try, I try so hard to fix things and make things better between us but I'm the only one who makes that effort."

"You knew when you married me that my emotional process isn't normal. You knew that, and I don't understand why it's an issue suddenly." Riley exclaimed, unable to keep herself quiet any longer.

"Because you can't even fake being happy about this baby!" The words came out before he could stop them, and when they did he sighed and put his head in his hands. Riley stared at him in surprise for a moment, and her eyes filled with tears as he continued to talk, his head still in his hands and his eyes on the floor, "It's one thing to know you're struggling, but it's another to know that you're unhappy. I get that this wasn't the way we planned it but… do you ever think about how I feel? Knowing you're unhappy, and that you hate your life and how it would feel for me to know those things? And that's on me Riley, I get it. It's on me. I did this. It's my career you moved across the continent for, it's my career that's basically made you a single parent. It's all on me. I'm the reason you hate your life."

She didn't know what to say to his words. What could she? What he had said hurt her in the same way what she had said had hurt him. This was how their relationship seemed to be lately; if they weren't hurting each other at the same time they were hurting each other one at a time. As she looked at him, her features soft while his were both hard and upset all at the same time and she asked him, "So what do you want me to do Shea? How do I fix this for you? Because I don't know what you need from me." When she said this he turned his hardened expression on her.

"What do I need? I need you to be my wife. I need you to care. I need you to make the effort. I need you to want to fix this because if we don't fix this then my answer to the divorce question is gonna change." Shea admitted to her, and she stared at him in surprise. Hearing him say that hurt her, it made her want to cry, it made her want to give up and go home. He continued to talk, "I need you to figure out how to connect with me the way I need you to. I know you struggle with the emotional side of our relationship, I know that and I've been patient but… I need that side of things. I need you to figure it out, because I can't keep doing things the way we have. The back and forth, fighting and then not fighting… I don't want to keep doing this with you Riley. I can't keep doing this."

"You think I like living like this Shea? I hate this. I hate fighting with you. I hate our life, not because of you or your job... I hate our life because I hate fighting with you all the time."

"I want us to be a family. There's nothing I want more than for the four of us to be a family… but not at the expense of our kids childhoods. I will not make them grow up with us at each others throats. I won't do that to them." Shea told her honestly, and when Riley brought her eyes up to his he told her softly, "I've hit my breaking point with us."