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“Don’t be. I was only seven when it happened. Plane crash.”
She straightened up and appraised him. Then he saw it sink in and her eyes flew wide. “Shit, that’s heavy. What happened?”
Something about the forthrightness of her gaze made him feel like he could open up. “They were ophthalmologists. They’d gone on a medical vacation to Papua New Guinea to perform eye surgery in the remote villages when their aircraft crashed in the mountains.”
“Oh, Christ. That’s, just… shit.”
“Yep. You could say that.”
“Who brought you up, then?”
“My nan and pop. Nan died three years ago; Pop died just over two months ago.”
“Heck. Are you trying to make me feel sorry for you so I lose?”
Solo blinked. Somehow her irreverent comment loosened the tightness that blanketed his heart. He threw back his head and laughed. “Yes, that’s the master plan.”
She bent down. He couldn’t help his eyes sliding to her butt again, the almost heart-shaped gap at the juncture of her thighs. Such a perfect spot to nuzzle his hand.
Death and sex. Freud would have a field day.
“So why psychiatry? Why not ophthalmology?” Polly asked, after putting a ball into the net.
“Guess I wanted to stay alive.”
“That’s black. Seriously, why psychiatry?”
He took his turn. Struck at the balls. Missed spectacularly. “I feel faint at the sight of blood.”
She frowned. “Are you joking?”
“That’s the honest-to-god truth.”
Her nose wrinkled and a sudden memory of kissing the tip of it lurched through him.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “How would you have got through your medical training if you’re blood phobic?
“It had its moments. I had to see someone for desensitisation training and the guy happened to be a psychiatrist. He was an amazing man, Dr Brian Crayshaw, wise, compassionate, funny. I guess knowing I was a med student, he told me a fair bit about his work, about the human mind, suffering… despair… I started to delve into theDSM-5after that.”
Polly nodded, clearly aware of the psychiatrist’s diagnostic bible. “Right. A bit of light bed-time reading.”
“I got hooked. I realised how complex the mind is, all the things that can go wrong, and how psychiatry can help put that right, and I knew I’d found my vocation.”
Polly studied him, her eyes suddenly serious. “So, Dr Jakoby, tell me, do you believe Freud when he said we are all done and dusted by the time we are seven years old?”
“To some extent I do. Not lock stock and barrel, obviously.”
“How about his theory of hysteria? All those repressed nineteenth-century women who collapsed onto his couch. Supposedly fixed by a good shagging.”
He grinned. “NowthatI certainly agree with.”
Polly straightened and glided along the pool table towards him. His breathing was suddenly fast and shallow, every nerve on high alert. But this time she stopped just before she reached him and he didn’t know whether to sigh with relief or beg her to keep right on coming.
“I’ll tell you a secret.” Her head was within whisper distance,kissingdistance. “Freud knew fuck all about women.”
He fought off the desire to nuzzle into her neck. “What makes you say that?”
“He thought we envied men their penises.”
