Page 116 of Wicked Angel
And say what?
There’s nothing for you to say that won’t ruin it.
You already said enough.
With another app on my phone, I slid open the glass doors to the patio to let in the fresh night air. Every detail of the house had been seen to by a top designer, to meet my exacting needs and preferences. I’d spent the most time planning out the bedroom.
Maybe because it was the room where I knew I’d be entertaining women the most. And there was something hotel-like about it, wasn’t there?Come in, maybe awe at the amenities, enjoy yourself knowing you won’t have to clean up afterwards, and get the fuck out in the morning if not sooner. Someone else will be checking in soon enough.
I wanted it to feel that way.
Weirdly, I didn’t want it to feel that way for Angeline. I knew that, because I was actually wondering what she thought of this room. She’d been in here when she cleaned my house, but she really did do a terrible job. From the looks of things, she’d skipped cleaning this room entirely. Couldn’t really blame her for that, after she saw Brianna stroll out of it.
I had no idea how I was ever going to make Angeline feel safe enough with me to walk in here again.
What was she doing right now?
Was she pacing, thinking about me?
Was she sleeping?
There were security feeds from the cameras in Shayla’s house I could’ve looked at on my phone, windows I could’ve looked through, to try to get a glimpse of her. I had keys. I could call her phone. I could get to her in any number of ways, and yet… I couldn’t. Not if I wanted to respect the line she’d drawn between us.
Did I want to respect it?
I wasn’t even sure, and it was driving me crazy.
She’d kissed me back tonight, practically sucked my lip off, but I knew she didn’t trust me. She told me she hated me, like two nights ago.
But she didn’t really know me, did she. She just knew certain things.
Maybe she didn’t want to know me.
As I paced around the room, I felt… uneven. That was the only way I knew how to describe it. After all the years of talking to Rory and close to a dozen other therapists, I still didn’t have language to connect words to my feelings.
I didn’t have feelings.
They told me I did. That most of my emotions were just buried, deep.
If you were Rory, you told me I’d locked them inside the fortress with the boy.
If you were another therapist, you said I used alcohol or drugs to avoid them, that I was self-medicating with liquor or sex or music, or that I was a sex addict, or that I was codependent or self-loathing or self-sabotaging, or that I had anxiety or insomnia. None of their diagnoses ever seemed to agree with one another.
If I went to a medical doctor, he wanted to prescribe pills. If I went to a talk therapist, he wanted to talk. If I went to group therapy, they wanted me to talk to other survivors. People, even professionals, only saw what they were trained to see.
Any way you wanted to look at it, though, I was disconnected from my feelings. So disconnected, I didn’t know how to influence them on my own most of the time, control them. Or even access them. That was what Rory said. And the other therapists I’d seen over the years generally agreed with that, at least.
But no one had ever really understood me like Rory did. Or maybe no one had ever been able to get through to me like Rory did; maybe that was all it was.
I couldn’t exactly call Rory in the middle of the night, though. Even if he might be awake anyway. I had to respect his life, his marriage, his health. There had to be boundaries.
I went to him too much as it was.
So all I knew in moments like these, alone, with no one to talk to, was that I felt uneven. Unsettled. Unbalanced.
I used to combat this loss of equilibrium by staying up around the clock doing lines of coke. Disturbing my thought processes until I was no longer aware of the unevenness.
But nurturing a cocaine habit wasn’t exactly the course of therapy any doctors prescribed.
