Page 50 of Belong to Me
"Don't say anything," she warned, setting his plate down. "I know it's not great. Artem told me to stir constantly and I may have gotten distracted by a video of a baby otter, but the point is I tried."
He picked up his fork. She sat across from him, and her eyes were on him, waiting, and the hope in them was so naked and so unprotected that he couldn't bear it.
He ate.
It was terrible.
"It's fine," he told her.
"You're lying. Your left eye does this thing when you lie."
"I'm not aware of a thing."
"It does! It sort of twitches. Very subtle. Very micro. I've been cataloguing your tells since I was sixteen. I have a mental spreadsheet."
He ate another bite. It was still terrible. "You've been cataloguing my tells."
"Someone has to. You're basically a vault with legs." She ate her own risotto, grimaced, and put her fork down. "Okay, that's truly bad. I'm so sorry."
"It's not your worst."
"Name something I've made that was worse."
"The scrambled eggs when you were sixteen. You used sugar instead of salt."
Her face broke open into a grin so wide it rearranged the whole room. "You remember that?"
He remembered everything. Every meal she'd burned. Every voicemail she'd left. Every exam she'd stressed about. Every time she'd fallen asleep on his couch while he worked late, and he'd carried her to bed, and she'd curled into his chest in her sleep and murmured something that wasn't quite words, and he'd set her down and left the room and stood in the hallway with his hands against the wall and his eyes closed.
He remembered all of it. That was the problem.
"I have a decent memory," he offered.
"You have a terrifying memory. You once reminded me about a dentist appointment I'd made eight months earlier."
"You would have missed it."
"I would have missed it," she confirmed. "Because I forgot about it thirty seconds after making it."
They ate in something that wasn't silence and wasn't conversation. It was the space between, the domestic hum of two people sharing a meal, and it was so ordinary and so dangerous that Alexei felt it in his teeth.
She didn't bring up the morning. She didn't push. She didn't mention the text. She told him about her first day at the clinic, about Dr. Vasquez and the broken espresso machine and the nine intake forms and the one she'd spilled coffee on. She talked about the counsellors, about the clients, about the courtyard with the fountain.
"I met someone interesting," she added, collecting the plates. "A client. Morgan. Blond, charming, very self-aware about his gambling issues. He actually brought up the dopamine-and-anticipation thing before I could explain it to him." She carried the plates to the sink. "I think he'll do well in the programme."
The blond man. At her desk. Leaning in. Making her laugh.
"He's starting Tuesdays and Thursdays," Mia continued from the kitchen, running water over the plates. "Dr. Vasquez assigned him to the group sessions, but he asked if I'd be the one doing his check-ins. I told him I'd ask."
"No."
The word came out before he could stop it. Hard and sharp and stripped of every layer of composure he'd rebuilt during the drive home.
Mia turned off the water. She turned around. Her eyebrows were up.
"No?"
"His check-ins should go through a certified counsellor. You're not trained for individual sessions." The justification was flawless. Professional. Entirely rational. And entirely a lie.
