Page 41 of Best Served Cold
Katherine Myers offered a very specific smile to Sienna; a smile she reserved only for her. Lee wondered at that moment if Sienna noticed such things. She silently hoped that she did. “I understand that,” Kat said. “I understand, and I also respect it.”
Lee Holmes appreciated the levels of communication that they could provide one another so effortlessly. Morgan had provided that to her only days earlier, only, days earlier was unfortunately overdue. This was something she had kept to herself, acknowledging that this particular day was about Sienna, and Sienna alone.
It was for that very reason that when Lee Holmes said goodbye, instead of telling them that she had booked her very first appointment with a therapist, she told them instead that she had yoga. Shame didn’t factor into her decision, she would tell the group when she was ready, but this was about herself becoming more independent with the help of a trained professional. This was about her learning to live with herself even if she decided eventually to live with another. This was about neutralizing the nightmares to the best of her ability. This was about her.
As she walked along the sidewalk, her hands sitting firmly in the pockets of her pleated pants to protect them from the cold, she stopped at her favorite local supermarket, purchasing a bag of marshmallows and some chocolate to melt over them, deeming herself worthy of a treat after her appointment.
It was only then that it struck her that perhaps she would never be worthy of something she enjoyed ever again. Thiswasn’t unusual—she had sat with that feeling all week, and yet it came and went in sputters—flickers of bloody, intrusive thoughts coated in both remorse and doubt. She supposed that this was one of the very reasons she had decided upon seeing a therapist, only, when she did arrive within the office of Dr Trisha Lang, she acknowledged silently when she sat down that this was going to be harder than she had previously thought. If some therapists accused their patients of dancing around the issue, she was going to have to pirouette and tango around hers at the same time.
Essentially, she needed to devise a way there and then to gloss over each and every topic that would prove useful to her session, whilst discovering the benefit of the session simultaneously.
Dr Lang took a seat opposite her in a large brown leather chair, sitting with gentle precision, as if the therapy had already begun before either of them had even uttered a word. Her thinly framed gold painted glasses sat at the tip of her pointed nose, and her blue blazer adopted shoulder pads that looked as if they belonged in the 1970s, and Lee Holmes tried not to think about the fact that she looked exactly like the image that she had in her mind about what a therapist should look like.
Whilst she had an image in mind, she didn’t quite know how a session was supposed to go. Was there an etiquette to therapy? Did she talk first? Would Dr Lang? Should she be calling her Trisha? All of these questions floated into the forefront of Lee’s mind, and she found it ironic, because perhaps this was also why she was here in the first place. Namely, because she couldn’t settle on one singular tangible thought. Her mind was like a broken traffic light, and she was never quite sure when to start driving again. It was then and there that she began to start breathing heavily, cogitating over the existential crisis in her mind, imagining a scenario whereby the vehicle in her mind had crashed into another.
“Lee,” Dr Lang, or perhaps, Trisha, said. “I can understand that an initial session can be quite daunting. In fact, I’ve lived it myself. My first session with my therapist went a little like how this one is going.”
As her breathing continued to rise and fall, rise and fall, she thought about the time in which she had first smoked marijuana with her friend Kirsty when she was fifteen years old. She remembered how heavy her tongue felt, and how dry her entire mouth had felt, and most importantly, she remembered feeling like she was unable to stop the truths inside her mind that could spill out of her at any given time like word vomit. After taking one drag too many, Lee had confessed at the time that she was gay, or bisexual, or queer, she wasn’t sure, only, she was sure that she was in love with Kirsty.
That was the last time she had ever seen her friend.
Now, in that very room, as she pondered over memories she wished she could repress, she felt almost…high. The high that came with truths she would rather keep hidden. Her tongue felt heavy, her mouth dry, and the inevitability of her confession sat upon her lips, taunting her.
And yet, her breathing settled, the session continued, and by the end of it, she even found herself smiling. She smiled because the truths that lay hidden remained in such a way, and she smiled because despite the session being mostly introductory, she felt as if she had taken one step forward as opposed to one step backwards for the first time in weeks.
When she left Dr Lang’s office that evening, she told herself that she deserved something good—even if it was only chocolate covered marshmallows.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Lee Holmes wasn’t particularly fond of her work’s WhatsApp group chat, but she decided that there was always a first for everything after clicking upon the news article (alongside multiple party popper emoji’s) that morning that one of her coworkers had sent. Arthur Strickland had been found two hundred miles outside of New York and arrested on the 27thof September, and whilst it didn’t completely mute the cataclysmic noise inside of Lee’s mind, it did, however, allow for a new, vacant space to open up in its place that was seemingly quieter.
Her manager, Perry, had texted her that same day to inform her that her article regarding the subject had been her most popular article to date. Lee Holmes was two glasses of wine down in celebration, cogitating ideas as to how to fill that newfound space inside of her, when a knock at the door dripped the remains of the third glass onto the floorboards below as her body jerked in response to the sound. She set the glass down on the kitchen island upon where she was sitting and stood up.
Answering the door to an unknown guest in her dinosaur pajamas two weeks ago would have been enough to paint her adeep shade of embarrassed, and yet, given all that she had been through in recent events, it made greeting someone in her most comfortable clothes trivial in comparison.
The hallway, with little to occupy its space now without the hyacinths besides a desk and an office chair, felt desolate and morbid in ways that only Lee herself could presently understand. Somehow, the absence of the flowers felt equally as macabre as their presence had felt prior to her disposal of them, as if each and every petal, every root, had a ghost floating across each and every stem.
Instinctively, she flattened down her pajama pants, as if offering herself a mental reset, or perhaps a vague attempt at seeming more presentable, as she exhaled, and opened the door. The face that greeted her was the same face that she had fallen in love with five years ago. Just as she had not grown horns the day she had disposed of Edward Beckett, Morgan Finch hadn’t either. As she stood in the doorway, her eyes were already glassy, from crying previously, or being on the verge of it, she wasn’t sure. What she was sure of, however, was that she looked delicate.
Morgan Finch had not used her key to enter the apartment, but she did retrieve her set of keys from her navy bomber jacket pocket, twirling the apartment key around the hook on her keychain until it came off entirely. When the singular key had been separated, she placed it into the bowl beside the door next to Lee’s. To Lee, it felt like the modern equivalent of waving a white flag. It also felt like abandonment.
“I could leave, if you need me to. I could also wait outside the door if you want to talk but need some time first. Or I could wait only for you to realize that you aren’t ready at all. I guess what I’m trying to say, and it’s really out of fucking line for me to do so, is that all I can think about is lying in bed with you the other day, and how that might have been the last time, and howI wouldn’t be able to function, or do anything for that matter, if I didn’t come here and see what you thought about that.”
The obvious reasoning as to Morgan showing up unannounced would be to discuss Arthur Strickland, and yet, it appeared that Arthur was not on Morgan’s radar at all.
There was a sense of irony in the notion that despite the fact Morgan had shaken her entire world, she was always the one who kept her grounded simultaneously. Looking at her felt like looking through the windows of a building on the verge of collapse, only to be pushed towards safety before it all came crashing down. Somehow, Morgan Finch looked smaller now, as she stood within the doorway, her left hand across her right arm, hesitant, and uncomfortable.
“Perhaps now would be a good time to try out my new teapot,” Lee proposed, smiling through the few tears that had begun to form, turning her amber eyes into a watery haze.
Morgan Finch exhaled a sigh of relief, settling in ever so slightly as she removed her hand from her arm, the awkwardness dissipating. “I think I’d like that.”
As the teapot boiled, so too did the tension in the room, stewing silently, building to a simmer. Only, when the water was fully heated, the temperature in the room did not spill over. Lee Holmes retrieved two mugs from the cabinet, acknowledging Morgan’s own favorite mug after grabbing her own. She was struck by the normality of it all upon placing them down onto the counter, which, given everything that had happened between the both of them, was a rarity that she had greatly missed.
Morgan Finch was no stranger to her, even if their goodbye upon breaking up had made her feel like one. She knew withoutasking how many sugars to put in her cup of tea as she poured the liquid from the teapot to the mug, which was to say, far too many. She knew the appropriate amount of milk, and which kind, namely, oat.
When she offered her the mug, Morgan offered a simple thanks in exchange, blew on the contents, and took a sip.
Lee Holmes placed her own mug down upon the kitchen island, allowing it to cool down, as she retrieved the teapot with the remaining tea inside of it, simultaneously placing it to the left of where she had placed her mug, before taking a seat.
