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“It wasn’t normal bickering. You know how we are. We fight about stupid things and then one of us says something worse, and ten minutes later we’re eating each other’s food as if nothing happened.”

Joanna nods once.

“This was different?” she asks.

“Yeah.”

The word sits heavily between us.

“It got intense,” I say. “And he said something, and I—” My jaw tightens. “I smashed his mug against the wall, which scared the shit out of Lucas, and Alex got extremely mad.”

I hear how childish it sounds as soon as I say it. I hate that I did it. I hate that a part of me still remembers the brief relief of it breaking.

“And now I want to do the same to your clock,” I add, nodding towards the wall. “The ticking is pissing me off. It feels like it is scraping my brain.”

Joanna does not even glance at the clock. Her attention remains entirely on me, which is both unsettling and strangely warm.

“Hearing time pass can feel unbearable when you are overwhelmed,” she says.

The sentence lands harder than it should.

For a moment, neither of us speaks.

Then she asks, “Do you want to tell me about the fight with Alex?”

“Alex thinks I’m spiraling again,” I say, letting out a ragged huff.

I drop my gaze to the floor, fixating on the white rubber toes of my sneakers tapping an erratic, restless rhythm against the carpet. The noise isn’t loud enough to drown out the pulse in my ears, but it gives the manic energy under my skin somewhere to leak.

“Okay, yes,” I mumble. “I admit it. I’m spiraling.”

When Joanna’s voice reaches me, it’s quiet, steady, and dripping with that infuriatingly clinical empathy.

“What makes you feel that way? And since when?”

I lean back against the cushion, staring at the white ceiling, silently pleading with my brain to cooperate for fifty minutes and begging my impulses not to say fuck it, jump off the couch, and sprint out the door.

“I, um…” My palms drag hard across the denim of my thighs, the friction burning through the fabric. “Tristan. We…”

The name snags on my vocal cords. Joanna shifts forward in her armchair, tilting her upper body slightly toward me, closing the physical distance without crowding.

“Remember, you’re safe here, Maksim. There is no judgement in this room. I just want to listen.” Her tone is firm, the kind of anchor that usually pisses me off because I don’t want to be grounded. “The last time we spoke about Tristan, you said he had returned to the city and was actively avoiding you. Given your history, intense emotional reactions are entirely expected. Has anything changed between you two?”

“Yeah, well.” I offer a pathetic, one-shouldered shrug. “I went to his office two days ago to confront him about that pathetic parasite, Jake. That fucker and his family came over to mine for dinner, and he just sat there, smirking, wouldn’t shut the fuck up about how he and Tristan are getting back together.”

I swallow hard against the bile rising in my throat. The rage hits me in a sudden, violent swell, making the edges of my vision go hot.

When my eyes lock back onto Joanna, she gives me that familiar, subtle look, the one that doesn’t need words to tell me: Breathe, Maksim. Ground yourself. I hate that she can read the cadence of my panic attacks before I even feel them coming. I drag a breath into my lungs and force it out.

“I went to his office with a loaded gun,” I say flatly. “And for some reason, I couldn’t pull the trigger. Even though I wanted to blow his fucking head off. But then things escalated, and… suddenly I was on my knees, sucking the life out of his dick.”

Joanna’s eyebrows shoot up towards her hairline, disappearing for half a second before her professional mask snaps back into place.

“Okay,” she says smoothly. “There is quite a lot to unpack from that sequence of events.”

Understatement of the century. Give the woman a Nobel Prize for clinical composure.

“How exactly did the confrontation go?” she asks, resting her chin on her hand. “You know… before you ended up on your knees?”