Page 27 of Letters From A Stalker

Yes, Mom. I’m alive.

Tessa:

Better. Eat something.

Me:

Bossy.

Tessa:

Says the woman who just spent twenty minutes describing her therapist’s shoulders instead of the actual therapy session. Not that I’m complaining about the visuals it gives me.

My mouth falls open. I did not spend twenty minutes describing his shoulders. It was maybe three… in total. Five at the absolute most, but only because she kept asking questions. I toss my phone onto the counter without answering because some accusations are so outrageous they don’t deserve the dignity of a defense. Also because she has probably saved the voice notes that prove otherwise.

The conversation on the drive home had started innocently enough. Tessa called before I even made it out of the parking garage, despite knowing I hate talking on the phone while driving, and demanded to know how it went. I told her it was fine, which apparently counts as number one on my newly established list, and she immediately asked whether I liked him. I told her I didn’t think liking your therapist was the point. She said that wasn’t what she asked. I told her he seemed competent. She called me evasive. I called her intrusive.

Then she asked what he looked like. That was where things deteriorated. I had looked him up before the appointment, obviously. I’m anxious, not stupid. If I’m going to sit alone in a room and hand someone access to the least functional parts of my brain, I want to know who the hell I’m dealing with first.

His professional biography had been annoyingly respectable. Degrees, credentials, clinical interests, community work, publications, and a brief mention of his Native American background and the reservation where he grew up. There was nothing performative about it, nothing that felt written to make him more interesting. It was simply part of who he was and part of what had shaped his work, listed alongside everything else that had shaped the man professionally. The fact no photographs popped up beside the biography had been equally unhelpful. According to Tessa, nothing out of the ordinary because his credentials were far more important than his personal portfolio.

In retrospect, I think the universe might have done me a favor. If I had seen Kai Blackwood before walking into his office, there’s a very real possibility I would have stared at his photograph for several seconds, decided there was absolutely no fucking way I was discussing my childhood trauma with a man who looked like that, and continued scrolling until Google offered me somebody older, softer, and considerably less distracting. Or balder.

Because the man who walked toward me this afternoon looked nothing like the therapist I had constructed in my head. I told Tessa that. She asked what a dangerous therapist was supposed to mean. I made the mistake of giving him that adjective and then the absolute worst mistake of explaining .

Kai Blackwood is tall enough to make my five-foot-three existence feel particularly offensive. With broad shoulders that fill out an expensive three-piece suit in a way that suggests whatever he does outside that office involves considerably more physical effort than sitting in a chair, asking people uncomfortable questions about their childhoods. His hair is black and straight, slightly longer across the front where a few strands fall toward his forehead, and his skin has a warm brown undertone that somehow makes the charcoal of his suit look even darker against it. There’s something striking about his face that I still can’t reduce to any single feature. Maybe it’s the sharpness of his jaw or the straight line of his nose, or maybe it’s simply the way all of it comes together with an expression so controlled that the thin-framed glasses should make him look academic and approachable, but instead make him look like a man who could ruin your life while calmly correcting your grammar.

That was approximately where Tessa started laughing so hard I nearly hung up on her. I maintain that the description was objective. Mostly. What I neglected to mention was that his eyes bothered me more than everything else. Not because of their color or shape, although both are annoyingly attractive, but because of the way he looks at people. The way he looks, to be more precise.

There had been no wandering gaze when I entered his office, nothing suggestive or inappropriate, and somehow that made his attention worse. He watched the things I did when I wasn’t aware I was doing them. My hands. My shoulders. The way I sat. The way I pulled my sweater around myself when the conversation became uncomfortable. The fucking thermostat remark.

I open the refrigerator and stare inside without actually seeing anything.

“The office is seventy-two degrees.” I can still hear the calm certainty in his voice.

Smug bastard. Except he hadn’t sounded smug. That would have been easier. He had simply stated the obvious.

I reach for a container of leftover pasta, then stop when another part of our conversation surfaces.

“Who made sure you ate the food Tessa brought?”

My hand remains wrapped around the container.

I hate therapy. It has been one appointment. One. And somehow the man has already contaminated my leftovers. I take the pasta anyway because refusing to eat it purely out of spite would require explaining to myself why I’m having a silent argument with a psychiatrist who is probably halfway through another patient by now and has almost certainly stopped thinking about me. That thought lands strangely.

I close the refrigerator harder than necessary. Definitely hate therapy.

While the pasta heats, I retrieve my phone and open the notes app. There’s already a new note sitting at the top because I made it at a red light after Tessa informed me that keeping track mentally defeated the purpose.

BLACKWOOD’S BULLSHIT.

I had considered simply calling it “Therapy Homework”, but that felt like letting him win.

And then I typed underneath the title:

I’m fine: 11

Unnecessary apologies: 3