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Raine looks down at him. “Oh! Let’s get this string off for you, buddy. That’s a choking hazard.” She picks up the toy, and I notice the string from the price tag is still attached to it. “Sorry,” she says,her eyes flicking to me as she winds her finger around the string. “I should’ve paid better attention.” She tugs at the string but can’t snap it off. “Can I borrow your scissors?”
The wordscissorsimmediately has me on edge. “I don’t have any up here,” I say. “But there are some in the pub.”
“Oh.” Raine frowns at the string and...shite, I’m looking at her mouth again.
She probably thinks I’m an arse for not offering to run down and get the scissors myself. I would. I would love to get them for her and bring them up here, but just thinking about holding a pair of scissors and bringing them into the flat, the very idea of being around her with them and passing them into her hands...
Before I lose my nerve, I blurt out, “I have disturbing thoughts about scissors.”
Raine pauses in another attempt to rip off the string and looks up at me.
“That’s why I don’t keep any up here,” I explain. “They make me... anxious.” An understatement if I’ve ever heard one. Scissors throw me into a full-on panic. Scissors put the most violent images into my head. Scissors make me question my very character.
The thought has me desperate to touch my fingers against something, but I don’t want to seem too jumpy. Fortunately, the counter is just behind me. I try to look calm and casual as I lean against it to press my fingertips along its edge and think,undo, undo, undo, undo.
Raine looks down at the toy and yanks the string again. “Because of your OCD?”
It takes me a moment to register the question, but Raine must interpret my surprise as annoyance because she looks at me with wide eyes and says, “Sorry! That was a super invasive question. I didn’t mean to—”
“It’s all right—”
“I shouldn’t assume. I didn’t mean to diagnose you or anything—”
“But you’re right.”
Her gaze meets mine, expression hesitant. “Still... it’s none of my business. It was rude of me to just blurt that out.”
“Do you... know a lot about OCD?” I ask.
“Probably more than most people. I’m sure it’s hard to believe, but I finished two and a half years of medical school before dropping out to play music. In an alternate universe, a different Raine is getting pimped during rotations.”
Itishard to believe. Not because I don’t think she’s capable, but because I can’t picture her in a pair of scrubs, that red hair tucked out of sight.“Pimped?”
She laughs at my expression. “Not pimped like, you know. Pimped stands forput in my place.It’s when the attendings quiz you during rotations.”
“Do they teach a lot about OCD in medical school?” I ask.
“Everyone gets a little training on it. Not enough, but some. I wanted to go into emergency psychiatry, though, so I know more than most people, I think.” She tugs at the string again, and when it doesn’t snap off, looks up at me. “Sorry you have the really shitty thoughts. Sounds rough.”
“It is.” I stare at her, unsure what else to say. I’ve never met someone outside of a therapist or doctor who actually understood OCD without my having to explain it. Hell, there aredoctorsI’ve had to explain it to.
“What about knives?” Raine asks.
“And razors, box cutters, even knitting needles,” I say.
She looks at me as if she has no idea what I’m talking about, but then she laughs and pulls the string on the toy baguette taut. “I meant for this!”
“Oh... here.” I pull my keys from my pocket and Raine tosses the toy baguette to me. I snap the string off with a key and pass the toy back to her.
“There we go,” she says when she sets the toy in front of Sebastian again. “So, bad thoughts about sharp pointy things. Anything else you want me to know about your OCD?”
I watch her wander over to the fridge. She examines the photos and cards from friends I’ve stuck there while I tap out a nervous rhythm on the counter. “It might make your job difficult at times,” I say. “There are a few triggers related to the pub, and some of the changes you’ll be making are ones I’ve tried to do myself, but the intrusive thoughts are... a lot. Ollie and Nina have tried to help, but they always let me put things back to the way they were before. I know that’s probably not what you signed up for, so if you’ve changed your mind about the job, I understand.”
Raine takes one of the Christmas cards from the fridge and turns it over. It’s from the tattoo shop I used to work at in Dublin. For the first two years after Da died and I came home to run the pub, I managed to head up to Dublin a few times a month to tattoo clients, but then my OCD got in the way, and it became too much. I haven’t worked at the shop in three years, but Shauna, my mentor, sends me a card every year, and every year, she writes the same Pablo Picasso quote on the back of it:The chief enemy of creativity is good sense.Raine reads it and smiles.
“So just to recap,” she says, “certain changes around the pub might trigger your OCD, and sometimes it’s not pretty.”
“Right.”
