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I sense a strange intensity in them. A strange… passion. An interest. A personal interest. It quickens my breath, makes me sweat under my clothes with the heat.
I’m not sure if I’m making it up or what. But the allure of it is enough for me to keep staring back. Until he looks away, breaking our connection.
My eyes go to the clock in the dining room.
Four hours to go before I meet him again.
Before I’m alone with him.
***
Four very long hours later, it’s time for my meeting with him.
Meeting? Session? I don’t know what to call it. Here at Heartstone, we majorly spend our time in therapy and only have sporadic meetings with the psychiatrist who oversees things. Which I guess is what Dr. Blackwood is, now that Dr. Martin isn’t here.
This is highly unusual but it doesn’t mean that I’m not looking forward to it. It almost doesn’t make sense, and yet it does.
All I’ve done for the past four hours is think about the rumors. I still don’t believe them, but my burn for answers isn’t gone.
Taking a deep breath, I knock on the door and count seconds until it’s opened.
Three seconds later, it opens with a click and there he is. Tall and powerful and polished. He is silent as he steps aside and lets me in.
It’s dark inside his room. Maybe because the storm has colored the sky black and he only has a small table lamp on. And when he closes the door behind me, the room seems even darker. Quieter, too. More intimate because the ruckus of the rain outside makes the silence on the inside more potent.
“Take a seat,” he orders.
I flinch at his voice. It comes from behind me and it sounds exactly like my dreams. Low and commanding. Rough. And just from those three inconsequential words, all of it comes back, that ache. Not that it went anywhere, but still.
I breathe slowly and do as he says.
When I’m settled in my chair, only then, he moves. I hear the sounds. The heels of his shoes carrying him across the room. The whisper of the wheels against the carpet that surrounds the desk when he rolls his leather chair out. The creak when he sits.
His breaths.
They echo in all the empty spaces inside me. His breaths are making me horny. Even hornier.
“Tell me about him,” he says, straightaway. “About your boyfriend.”
No small talk. No easing into it.
I look up as I clench my fingers together. Dr. Blackwood’s watching me intently. With focus. So much focus. Like I’m his entire world and he’s blind to everything else.
I revel in that look. I revel in the fact that in this moment, I might really be his entire world. He wants something from me, doesn’t he? Answers to his questions. Even though that should make me apprehensive, I’m not. I’m reveling.
“What about him?” I ask.
“Tell me how you guys met.”
I keep staring into his beautiful eyes. “In class. Literature.”
“What was the first thing he said to you?”
“‘Do you have an extra pen?’”
He keeps staring back. “Did you?”
“Yes. I gave it to him.”
“Then what?”
“We started talking. And then, after that he’d always sit beside me, and he’d always ask for a pen.”
“He never had a pen of his own.”
I detect something in his voice, something scoffing, and I latch on to that like a beggar, thinking that he might be jealous. Like I was jealous when he was talking to Josie. So jealous.
“He’d forget them on purpose.”
“He tell you that?”
“Yes. After we started dating. He said I was so beautiful that he couldn’t resist talking to me. And that was his only excuse in the beginning.”
I was expecting another round of fire. Another question. But there’s only silence.
In the quiet, we watch each other. His stubble usually gets thicker in the afternoon, wilder, untamed. My fingers itch with the need to touch it. See if it’s rough and scrape-y like I want it to be.
God, I hope it’s scrape-y. I want it to chafe against the soft parts of me.
While I’m rubbing my thighs under the desk, out of his sight, he’s probably looking at me for twitches and glitches, to catch me in a lie. But I’ll pretend that his deadpan stare is meant to be more than what it is.
“Did you like it when he told you that? Beautiful,” he asks, at last.
At this, I have to look away. I have to stop clenching my thighs.
Beautiful.
Did I like it when he called me that?
“Yes. I loved it. I loved that he called me beautiful. No one had ever called me that before,” I admit pathetically.
Truthfully.
I couldn’t lie. Not about this. Not to him.
Girls like me, they are never called beautiful. I’m too short, too pale, too pudgy.
Too weird.
I wonder if Dr. Blackwood has called anyone beautiful before. I wonder if I was a little prettier, would he call me beautiful?
