Page 57 of Letters From A Stalker

The heavy door closes behind her, and this time I don’t remain standing there wondering whether I made a mistake by letting her walk out of it. She’s fine. Actually fine. The distinction matters more than it should.

I return to my chair and go through the notes while the session is still fresh, adding a few things in the margins before my next patient arrives. Work. Competence. Boundaries. Mother. Then I reach the section where she told me about the man at the firm.

There is a sentence beneath the clinical note that I don’t remember consciously writing.

Fucking asshole.

I stare at it for several seconds. Then slowly remove my glasses.

“Well, fuck.”

Apparently some part of me has opinions. I should cross it out. Instead, I look at it long enough to acknowledge that the disturbing part isn’t the sentence itself. It’s how natural writing it apparently felt.

Eventually, I draw a single line through the words, close the notebook and spend the rest of the afternoon doing my job while pretending a man I have never met has not somehow managed to piss me off simply by being attractive to my patient.

By the time I leave the office, I have no intention of going to Julia’s house. This remains true while I change out of my suit, eat dinner and answer two emails I’ve been avoiding since this morning. It even remains true while I spend twenty minutes half-watching something on television without absorbing a single scene.

Then I pick up my motorcycle keys. At this point, the lies are becoming insulting to my intelligence. The route to her neighborhood is familiar now. I know which intersection backs up after eight, which light takes unnecessarily long to change and exactly where I can kill the engine without the sound carrying toward her house. I leave the bike at my usual spot and make my way through the same line of trees I used before, stopping far enough back that the shadows keep me hidden while the large windows of her house remain visible between the branches. Her kitchen light is on. So is the living room.

For a few moments, I don’t see her but the she walks into view carrying a glass container against her hip and something wrapped in plastic beneath one arm. She looks nothing like the woman I followed home six days ago. Her hair is piled into a loose knot that appears to be surviving entirely through optimism, she’s changed into leggings and an oversized T-shirt, and there is music playing somewhere inside the house. I can’t hear enough through the glass to recognize the song, but I can see the effect it has on her.

She moves around the kitchen while she works, opening the refrigerator, pulling out containers and dividing whatever she cooked into portions for the next few days. Every so often her head moves with the beat, and at one point she lifts the wooden spoon in her hand like a microphone, sings something I can’t hear and turns toward the counter with a little movement of her hips that makes a smile pull at my mouth before I can stop it.

This version of Julia is new to me. There is no careful stillness I see in my office, no hyperawareness of another person watching her and no visible effort to manage how much space she occupies. She tastes something from the spoon, wrinkles her nose, adds more seasoning and starts moving with the music again while she stirs.

Good — that’s what she looks like tonight. Not healed or magically untouched by everything we’ve discussed, just good. Present, happy enough that the sight of it loosens something inside me that has been tight since the afternoon she disappeared in front of me. Today was a good session for her. I know therapy isn’t measured by whether a patient leaves smiling, but after last week, I’ll take it. Julia stacks the containers inside the refrigerator and leans back against the counter with her phone in one hand. Whatever appears on the screen makes her smile.

My own disappears almost immediately.

That fucking asshole.

There is absolutely no evidence supporting that conclusion, but that does fucking little to stop me from reaching it. Maybe he texted her. Maybe he has already decided accepting her answer politely was merely step one in some patient strategy to change it. Or maybe she changed her mind all by herself and decided an attractive attorney with good manners and healthy respect for boundaries was worth reconsidering. My jaw tightens.

She is a grown woman standing inside her own kitchen, entitled to smile at whoever the fuck she wants. The rational part of my brain supplies that information effortlessly.

The part that wrote fucking asshole during her therapy session remains unmoved.

11

Julia

By my fourth therapy appointment, I have discovered that it has the deeply irritating habit of continuing long after you leave the therapist’s office. For the past seven days, I have heard Kai Blackwood’s voice at the most inconvenient times. Well, not him, exactly. The things he says. Questions. Mostly annoying ones.

Every time I start typing an apology for something that isn’t actually my fault, my brain helpfully supplies his voice asking me what I believe I’m apologizing for. When I offer to do something before checking whether I have the time, I remember him asking whether being useful is something I choose or somewhere I hide. Even telling my mother no when she casually suggested I stop by after work on Tuesday turned into a five-minute internal debate over whether I’m tired and want to go home qualifies as a sufficient reason. Apparently it does, because I went home and Mom survived. So did I.

Michael has also kept his word. Nothing changed after he asked me out. He still comes by my desk, still talks to me exactly the way he did before and has made no attempt to turn my refusal into a negotiation. If anything, his ability to behave like a perfectly normal adult about the whole thing has made him slightly more attractive, which feels deeply unfair considering the entire point of declining him was to make my life less complicated.

Daniel remains committed to being an idiot at least twice a day, Tessa has been out of town but checked in regularly, and somehow an entire week has passed without my nervous system setting anything on fire. I’ll take the win.

The strange part is that Blackwood has stayed somewhere in the back of my mind through all of it. Not in the way Tessa would undoubtedly make filthy if I admitted it to her. I know he’s attractive. I would need to be blind, dead or unusually committed to denial not to know that. I’m also very aware that he is my psychiatrist and I am paying him to help me figure out why half my emotional coping mechanisms were apparently assembled by a traumatized twelve-year-old.

Still, his questions follow me. Sometimes I catch myself wondering what he would say about something before immediately getting irritated with myself for wondering. Which probably means therapy is working.

As I reach the clinic Thursday afternoon, the sky over Minneapolis has turned the pale gray that always makes the city look as though someone lowered the saturation. The air has cooled enough that even being parked in a garage has me rubbing warmth back into my hands when I push through the oak doors into reception.

Mara looks up from behind her desk. “Early again.”

“I’m trying to build a reputation.”