Chapter 5
CHAPTER FIVE
“And how do you feel about the way you’ve treated Nikolett?”
“You can say it. I’m an asshole.”
“You’re not an asshole. You are someone whose unanswered need and unresolved trauma have hindered your relationships with people you care about.”
Eric lay back, the sparse grass and rocky soil biting into his back.
Dr. Mata sat beside him in performance tech running gear. It contrasted unflatteringly with Eric’s own sweat-stained track suit.
In the week Elijah—Dr. Mata—had been here, the other man had slowly allowed himself to be more casual, both in dress and their interactions.
Probably that was strategic, because Eric got antsy if he spent too long sitting in one place, especially if he had to sit in one place and talk about his feelings.
He wouldn’t say he and Elijah were friends, because all their interactions were very much therapist and patient, but now, sometimes their sessions took place on a cliffside after a run.
“I would say that your behavior has at times been asshole-ish,” Elijah conceded. “But that doesn’t wholly and completely define you as an asshole.”
Eric snorted. “Splitting hairs.”
“People are complex beings. We are more than our worst decisions.”
“How I’ve treated Nikki—Nikolett—is bad, but it’s not my worst decision.”
“An interesting statement, but I think you’re trying to deflect. You want me to ask what your worst decision is so I don’t repeat the question.”
“Which is?”
“How do you feel about your relationship with Nikolett?”
“We have no relationship.”
“You do. You have relationships with everyone in your life, even the mailman. But relationships, like love, are a spectrum.”
Eric’s back teeth ached as he clenched his jaw.
He closed his eyes, fighting down the frustration and anger caused by Elijah’s annoyingly reasonable tone.
He couldn’t throw Juliette’s pet mental health specialist off a cliff because he found the man’s questions irritating. It would only prove Juliette right.
“She is an admiral within the Masters’ Admiralty, correct?”
“Yes.” Eric’s teeth had mostly unclenched.
“And as the fleet admiral, you will have to interact with her. For this reason alone, it’s inaccurate to say you have no relationship. You have to have some sort of relationship with her, even if it’s formal and professional.”
“Okay, fair point.”
“Is that what you want? To create and maintain the emotional distance required for a formal, professional relationship?”
“I don’t need to. She already did that.”
“She created deliberate emotional distance, or she retreated because she was hurt?”
Eric sat up. “Does it matter? One way or another, the space is there.”
“It does matter.” Elijah leaned back on his hands and stuck out his feet, stacking his ankles. “Why does an army retreat?”
Eric took a moment, seeing where this was going, but answered anyway.
“To avoid unacceptable loss of life.”
“Certainly an argument could be made that any loss of life is unacceptable, but yes. Retreat is used to avoid loss. What loss means depends on what one is retreating from. You say it’s strategic, and it can be, but at the end of the day, retreat is about avoiding loss.
” Elijah looked at him. “What was Nikolett avoiding losing?”
“Her sanity,” Eric said with a snort.
But Elijah just waited. He’d learned to wait out Eric’s knee-jerk flippant responses. Another highly annoying trait.
The tide was coming in, the sound of the waves louder than it had been when they started their run. Every so often sea spray hit his face, peppering Eric with sharp, salty drops.
“Her heart. She was afraid I’d break her heart.” Eric bent his knees, resting his forearms on them, back hunched. “No, I’m pretty sure I already broke it. Maybe she was avoiding me shredding it past the point of repair.”
“You did this deliberately?”
“Break her heart? No. Be a complete asshole by running hot and cold and then trying to force her to marry someone else so I wouldn’t be tempted to sleep with her again? Yes. That I did deliberately.”
“Why?”
Eric slanted a look at him. “I told you why. And it sounds nuts. I know that.”
“This isn’t a trap. There are no ‘gotchas’ in therapy. It’s just a question.”
“Every woman I’ve ever loved has died because I didn’t protect them.”
“And how does that relate to Nikolett?”
“I already told you this.”
“It bears repeating.
“I love her. I love Nikolett. Actually, I don’t just love her, I’m desperately in love with her in a way I never was with either of my wives.”
It felt right to say it. As if his world had been built on sand, and confessing his love out here in the bright light of day hardened that sand into firm stone.
“You love her but you don’t want a relationship with her.”
“I can’t have one with her. Both logistically—she’s a territory admiral—and survival-wise. And by that, I mean her survival.”
Elijah hummed contemplatively then shook his head. “Based on your logic, it’s too late.”
Eric whipped around to face Elijah, who merely shrugged.
“You love her. Her life is forfeit.”
“What the fuck, man…”
“You cannot un-ring a bell, and you cannot un-love. You love her, ergo her life is forfeit already.”
Eric shoved to his feet, heart pounding. “Say it again and I’ll throw you off this cliff.” Fuck it, he’d just deal with Juliette being pissed.
Elijah didn’t move from his relaxed position sitting on the ground. “Is Nikolett still alive?”
“Barely. Someone’s trying to fucking kill her.”
“And what has stopped that?”
“Really good security and she’s smart.”
“So it isn’t you, personally, who gets credit for her survival.”
“No, but I sent the Spartan Guard to check her—”
“No, the fleet admiral sent the guard. You made a point of that the other day. You, personally, have done nothing to protect her, and yet she’s still alive.”
“Because I stayed away! She’s alive because I love her but no one knows that.”
Several meters behind him, Regina, also in workout gear and scanning the area around them for threats as she did cool-down stretches, snorted. She was standing far enough back that she wouldn’t have been able to hear what they said when speaking normally, but Eric had started yelling.
“What the fuck does that mean?” he demanded of Regina.
“Eric, what are you feeling right now?”
He whipped back to Elijah. “I feel like I’m having a heart attack. And also that I should throw you off this cliff.”
Slowly, Elijah stood. “Your brain is telling your body that there’s active danger, but there isn’t.” Elijah pulled a small pen light from his pocket. “Follow the light with your eyes and tell me again what you think is going to happen to Nikolett.”
Eric’s muscles trembled with the need to do something.
To fight. To become a mindless beast of violence just so he could stop thinking for a while.
The trembling was so intense, it felt like a full body shiver, but he looked at Elijah, tracking the tip of the pen light as the doctor moved it side to side.
“She’ll die. Not just die but die horribly. Die in pain. And what if…what if she has hope?” The trembling made it impossible to stand. Eric sank to his knees. Elijah dropped with him, still moving the penlight back and forth horizontally, forcing Eric’s eyes to move bilaterally.
“Hope?” Elijah asked softly.
“What if she’s being tortured, or she’s alone left for dead, and she has hope?”
“What is she hoping for?”
“Survival.” Eric bit out the word, his blood rushing in his ears muting the sound of his own voice.
Elijah cocked his head in question. “Hoping for survival is a very normal human action.”
The doctor was going to make him say it out loud. To expose the seed at the core of his nightmares.
“What if she’s being beaten, hurt…” Eric swallowed hard, fighting the instinctive urge to close his eyes.
His instinct was an asshole because when he closed his eyes, he could too easily picture her broken and dying.
With his eyes open, part of his focus on tracking the light, the mental images his words conjured weren’t as harsh.
“…and she hopes, believes, that I’ll rescue her.
” For the first time in his many sessions with Elijah, Eric had to swallow not against fear or rage but tears.
He wasn’t even sure why he was about to cry.
“And I don’t. I fail her and she dies alone and in pain and the last thing she’s thinking is ‘why didn’t he come? ’”
It felt wrong that the sky above him was blue, dotted with long wispy clouds rather than boiling with rain and lightning. He felt like he was choking, drowning, yet somewhere a fucking bird was chirping.
“Is that what you fear most? Not just that the women you love die, but they die hoping you will save them?”
“Yes.” Eric scrubbed his face with his palms. His lashes were wet. “Fuck.”
“Breathe with me.”
Almost against his will, Eric matched his breathing to Elijah’s as he took pointed loud inhales and exhales. The storm inside Eric calmed enough he no longer felt like he was drowning.
They sat quietly for a while, Elijah occasionally saying something therapisty, but Eric only half listened because a thought had wormed its way into his head and he couldn’t shake it.
His asshole brain had conjured an image of him standing over Nikolett’s lifeless, broken body. But this time, that image wasn’t like amber trapping him in an endless, horrible moment of grief and guilt.
This time, Nikolett’s eyes popped open, she sat up zombie-style, and…started to lecture him.
If she was dead, unless he was the one to kill her, it wasn’t his fault. Not everything was about him.
No, she didn’t need him to avenge her murder. She had backup plans in place in case of her death. Her people would solve her murder, no help needed from him, and he should go brood dramatically somewhere else.
Zombie Josephine would have tried to comfort him. Zombie Trina and Dahlia would have worried about him.
Only Zombie Nikolett would be irritated with his grief and tell him to go away.