Page 93 of Regal Feather
Ev
You can’t just leave me like this!!
Santos
Oh, I can’t?
Ev
Please
Santos
Have fun, Ever
Be a good girl for me
Ev
Fuck
TWENTY-NINE
santos
“Ihave one…” Fuck. Why was it so difficult to parse out sentences now? “Requirement? I don’t know, that’s not the word, but…”
I hadn’t sweated so much in years, and that included training camp. For fuck’s sake, I was clammy all over.
It was a good thing I had gone for in-person therapy. This would only be worse if I started going paranoid about Ever, or anyone else, listening in.
“A nonnegotiable,” I breathed out, the word suddenly there.
The woman who had been listening to me go on in circles for the last forty minutes just gave the subtlest of nods. She wasn’t easy to read, I’d been trying. She wasn’t even writing down much, because she recorded everything instead. The first ten minutes had been her explaining her process and her approach to therapy and a bunch of other big words. I had been expecting it, but I didn’t know if it had put me at ease, or if it had only made me grow impatient to just blurt everything and get it out of the way.
“Let’s hear it, then.”
Right.
Deep breaths.
This was fine.
She was a professional, and I had rehearsed this before getting out of the car.
“I’m not changing anything with Ever.” I forced my voice to sound steadier than it felt. “I don’t care if you think I’m using him as a crutch, or if you think our relationship isn’t normal, or…whatever. I need him. He stays.”
I thought maybe she’d give out something. No one could have a perfect poker face all of the time, but aside from a tilt of her head to the side, nothing.
“I would love to have you elaborate on that next time, what you see as a crutch or as normal,” she enunciated slowly. I fidgeted with a pen on her desk she had said I could grab earlier. “That said, I’d only voice a concern if I thought a relationship was a threat to your or someone else’s wellbeing. You said your goal coming here is to make sense of what happened with your superior, and to learn coping mechanisms to both deal with that trauma and adjust to your new life. That’s going to be my focus.”
“Okay.”
I hated the way that word felt—trauma—like a punch to my gut. It made me want to recoil. I didn’t fight, though. I just stayed still. She had about a dozen pens in the mug I’d grabbed mine from, all different colors. I wondered if there was a meaning behind it, and she was psychoanalyzing me now for my choice. I only grabbed the green one because it reminded me of an oversized hoodie Ever had been wearing the other day. It hadn’t been one of mine, but it was cozy. Very fluffy.
Unaware of my inner rambling, my apparently new therapist went back to explaining how she organized her appointments and what to expect from the first few weeks. She wanted to keep digging into a bunch of things and assessing over two appointments next week, and then we’d come up with a plan to work on stuff.
I wasn’t fully listening. It might be a common response. She had a softer smile on her face when she stood up from her chair, as if she knew I was going to need a physical cue to figure out that our time was over.
