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He kissed the full horizontal length of her scar again, and inhaling the line of her neck, he stepped back.
Amara blinked her eyes open, her heart thumping, his dark orbs blazing on hers.
It was over in seconds. It felt like lifetimes.
“I will kiss you and brand myself upon your heart, Amara,” he told her quietly. “Just make sure you’re ready for me to.”
He turned his back to her and Amara walked out on shaky legs, her neck tingling with the memory of his lips. She went down the stairs, out of the house, across the lawn, replaying the scene over and over in her head, a small laugh bubbling out of her throat by the time she entered her apartment, remembering the first time she’d seen Dante kissing a girl years ago.
Back then, she’d thought to herself he’d be her first kiss. He had been in a way.
And while her lips were still famished for his, the ugliness inside her didn’t feel so ugly anymore.
“If he had a girlfriend, how would you feel about that?” her therapist Dr. Das, a gorgeous woman in her late thirties, asked Amara, looking at her with solemn eyes behind round glasses.
How did she feel about that?
“Angry,” Amara told her in her new voice and looked around the room that had become a sanctuary of sorts for her over the last year. Dr. Das saw her clients – she didn’t like calling them patients – in the study of her brownstone house in South Tenebrae.
It was a room contrary to Amara’s expectations of what therapist offices looked like. The walls were white, the windows covered with bright green and yellow drapes, letting in an abundance of natural light, a huge Mandala wall-hanging in brown and black taking an entire wall opposite the door. The adjacent wall had stacks of shelves housing numerous books. There was no desk, just a comfortable couch, and armchair with a small table in between. It belonged more to a bohemian yoga instructor than an acclaimed psychologist.
“And why does it make you angry?” Dr. Das asked in her neutral voice that Amara somehow found soothing.
Because he’s mine.
Amara didn’t voice that, just stared at a spot on the wall.
“Okay,” Dr. Das moved on, understanding she wasn’t going to answer. “Do you feel any bouts of depression still? Not wanting to get out of the bed, any suicidal thoughts?”
“Very occasionally,” Amara admitted. She probably would have felt it more had she not had the people around her, holding her up all the way through. She didn’t know how women who didn’t have anyone believe them or support them did it. Just the thought of speaking her truth and having people reject it made her stomach knot.
“Panic attacks? Anxiety?”
Yeah, those were there. She nodded.
“What triggers them?”
Amara paused, thinking of every time over the last year that she’d felt the beginning of an incoming attack. “I don’t know,” she rasped out.
Clearing her throat, she spoke again softly, wishing her new voice could magically change. “Sometimes, I just smell raw tobacco somewhere and everything comes flashing back. I just freeze and no matter how much I try to bring myself back to the present, it doesn’t work until the flashes are done. And the entire thing exhausts me. Sometimes, it’s thinking about the future and not knowing anything. The unknown scares me. And sometimes, it’s knowing I want Dante but knowing I’ll probably never have him.”
Throat dry, she leaned forward and picked up the glass of water, gulping it down.
“And why can’t you have him?”
Amara shrugged. “We belong in different worlds. Girls like me don’t get happy endings with guys like him.”
“Yet, you asked him to kiss you last night,” Dr. Das pointed out. “You spoke to him for the first time since the abduction. You initiated, or rather invited, a physical intimacy. And now, you are able to identify some of your triggers. That’s tremendous progress, Amara.”
Amara stared at the older woman, realizing it was true. It was progress. She wasn’t stuck in the same hole she had been when she first came to therapy.
“And how do you feel after last night?”
She looked down at her printed dress, picking a
t it. “Good. I... I want more.”
“With a boy?” the other woman asked over her framed glasses.
