18. Kai
Kai
Thursday arrives with the peculiar disadvantage of forcing me to sit across from Julia and pretend I don’t know what her face looks like when she believes nobody is watching.
I have spent four days discovering that there are thoughts no amount of professional discipline can successfully file away.
Sunday night follows me into the gym, into the shower where I jacked off at the memory of her face like a fucking adolescent.
It follow me into the office and through two days of patient notes that require significantly more rereading than usual because my attention has developed the irritating habit of wandering at exactly the wrong moment.
Monday made it worse. I stood in the trees while Julia found the second envelope, watched her disappear inside with it and remained there long enough to see her eventually approach the living-room windows.
She looked toward me. Not directly. There was too much darkness between us for that, but she stood facing the trees with the letter somewhere behind her and searched the place where I was hiding.
I had expected fear and there was some, but what I hadn’t expected was how long she stayed there.
She didn’t retreat from the glass this time.
She didn’t abandon the room or leave lights burning downstairs before disappearing into her bedroom.
She simply looked into the darkness as though the possibility that I remained somewhere inside it had become something she was trying to understand rather than escape.
I haven’t decided whether that should reassure or terrify me.
Probably neither, considering I have no right to be interpreting her reaction to a situation I created without her consent.
Yet here I am. The clock on my desk tells me she’ll arrive in fourteen minutes.
I close the clinical article I have been pretending to read and look at the notes from our previous session instead.
Sexual assault at eighteen. Possible drug-facilitated assault.
Repeated verbal refusal ignored. Dissociative response.
Persistent residual shame despite extensive previous therapeutic work.
The language remains accurate. It still feels sterile compared with the sound of Julia quietly telling me she remembered saying no.
That conversation altered something I had already understood intellectually.
Control has always mattered to me. Not simply in bed, although perhaps especially there.
I have never confused dominance with carelessness.
The entire point of being trusted with someone else’s surrender is knowing that trust can be withdrawn at any second and treating that possibility as sacred rather than inconvenient.
My father believed control meant making everyone around him afraid of what happened if they resisted.
Henry taught me that real control starts with yourself.
Julia’s attacker had neither. Ghost has been reminding me of the irony ever since.
I can think whatever noble thoughts I want about consent while sitting in this office.
At night, I still stand outside Julia’s house without permission and watch through windows she believes protect her from the world.
The contradiction is not subtle and neither is my refusal to stop.
A soft knock comes at the door before Mara opens it far enough to lean inside.
“Your two-thirty is here.”
My pulse changes. I resent that too.
“Thanks.”
Mara’s eyes linger on me for half a second longer than necessary. She has been doing that more often lately, usually whenever I leave with the motorcycle helmet or arrive after a night of sleeping considerably less than I should. Whatever she sees, she keeps to herself. Still.
I wait until the door closes before standing.
Julia enters a few minutes later, and I have rearranged my face into the expression of a man whose professional life is not currently being dismantled by the woman walking toward his chair.
She looks tired but not unhappy. Her auburn hair is loose today, falling over the shoulders of a dark sweater, and there is a faint flush across her cheeks from the cold outside.
She sets her bag near the chair, looks at me and smiles in the easy way she has begun doing more often.
“Hi.”
“Hi, Julia.” My response sounds normal. Miraculous.
She settles into the chair and immediately reaches for the water Mara left for her, twisting the cap while I sit opposite.
“How was the week?”
“Fine.”
I wait. Her eyes narrow. “You’re going to keep doing that every time I say fine, aren’t you?”
“Probably.”
She takes a drink, then lowers the bottle into her lap. “It was actually fine. Work was work, Tessa stayed over Saturday night, I cleaned my house like the Pope was coming over despite the fact that she has seen me live in conditions far worse, and Sunday was mostly quiet.”
Sunday. My body remembers far more of her quiet Sunday than she knows. I force my attention toward the relevant part of her answer.
“How was it having Tessa stay?”
“Good.” She smiles slightly. “She steals blankets and drinks wine I specifically tell her we don’t need, but otherwise she’s tolerable.”
There is affection beneath every complaint. I’ve seen it. I’ve watched Tessa occupy Julia’s kitchen like an invasive species while Julia pretended not to cringe as her friend brutalized pizza dough that had done nothing to deserve it.
The memory nearly makes me smile.
“She asked about therapy,” Julia continues.
My attention sharpens. “What did you tell her?”
“That you’re still annoying, obviously.”
The corner of my mouth moves despite myself. “Professionally devastating.”
“She’ll recover.” Julia’s fingers slide around the water bottle again before her expression changes. “I told her what we talked about last week.”
The humor disappears from me immediately. “The assault?”
She nods. “Tessa already knows everything. She’s known for years. I just told her I finally gave you the details.”
“And how did that conversation feel?”
“Better than I expected.”
She looks down for a moment, considering her answer rather than searching for an escape from it.
“I think you were right about one thing.” She hums.
“One?” I feel my eyebrow arch.
“Don’t get greedy.”
I wait, and this time she doesn’t make me ask.
“When you told me there was nothing to forgive, I realized I had been doing exactly that. Forgiving myself. For not screaming, not fighting, getting into his car, walking into the house. I knew none of those things made what happened my fault, but apparently there was still this little corner of my brain keeping score.” Her mouth pulls faintly at one side. “I think it finally shut up.”
The words land somewhere deeper than professional satisfaction should. “I’m glad.”
She looks at me, and for a second there is no sarcasm between us. “So am I.”
I let the silence remain for a moment because nothing useful needs to be inserted into it.
Then Julia shifts slightly in the chair. “There was something else Tessa and I talked about.”
The change in her tone is small but I notice it anyway.
“What?”
She gives me a look that immediately tells me whatever comes next makes her uncomfortable for reasons entirely different from the subject we covered last week.
“I’m trying to figure out how to ask this without making the next forty minutes unbelievably awkward.” That is not a sentence a psychiatrist wants to hear from a woman he secretly watched masturbate four nights earlier.
My entire body goes alert beneath the suit. Professionally, I remain still. Privately, Ghost lifts his fucking head.
“You can start wherever it makes sense to you.”
“That sounds dangerously reasonable.”
“It’s occasionally part of the job.”
Julia draws in a breath, then looks briefly toward the window before returning her attention to me. “I was wondering whether sexual preferences can be connected to trauma.”
There are moments when years of medical training become invaluable. This is one of them. They allow me to maintain a completely neutral expression while every inappropriate nerve ending in my body catches fire.
I place the pen against my notepad without writing anything.
“They can be,” I say carefully. “But that’s a very broad answer to a very broad question.”
“I figured.”
She shifts again, crossing her ankles instead of her legs now. “I’m not asking you to become a sex therapist.”
“I appreciate the distinction.”
A small laugh escapes her. “Obviously I’m not about to start discussing positions with you.”
Thank God.
Ghost strongly disagrees.
The thought comes with such speed that I have to redirect my gaze toward the notepad for a second.
Julia continues, thankfully unaware of the internal disaster occurring six feet away.
“I was talking to Tessa about what happened, and somehow the conversation moved into my sex life because she has no boundaries and apparently thinks getting laid is a medically necessary part of recovery.” There is enough dry affection in her voice that I can almost hear Tessa making the argument.
“And that made you wonder about your preferences?”
“Yeah.” Julia turns the bottle slowly between her palms. “Not because I think there’s anything wrong with them.
I like what I like. I’ve never felt particularly ashamed of that.
But after talking about what happened when I was eighteen, I started wondering whether I should be examining some of it differently. ”
“How so?”
She takes her time. “I don’t really like gentle sex.”
The sentence enters the room and finds every part of me that has spent the last week desperately attempting to behave. Ghost becomes very still.
“What does gentle mean to you in that context?”
“The whole... soft, slow, romantic thing.” She gestures vaguely with one hand, already looking mildly embarrassed. “I’m not saying I need somebody to treat me like we’re reenacting a Viking invasion every time I have sex. I just prefer more intensity. More control.”
Mine.