Chapter 13
Ihadn’t planned on sitting on the couch.
It just happened. One second, I was walking in with the same steel resolve I always brought to these sessions—and the next I was sprawled across the cushions of her cloud-looking couch.
Usually, I took the chair across from her desk, not the one closest to her, but the one behind it.
I deliberately chose the hardest looking one.
But today, something about the way the sunlight caught the dust motes drifting through the window, or maybe the way my whole body hurt from last night’s insomnia-fueled spiral, made me collapse onto the couch.
The cushions folded around me, as if in an embrace.
I should’ve stood back up. Reclaimed my distance.
But I was too tired to pretend I wasn’t seeking a little comfort today.
Iris noticed, of course. She always did. But she didn’t say anything. Just gave me that annoying little half-smile of hers and jotted something into her notebook.
“Please don’t write ‘subject willingly took couch,’” I muttered.
She glanced up. “I was actually writing that your shirt is on inside out.”
I looked down. It was.
“I’m starting a new trend,” I said. “It’s called unhinged couture.”
Iris tucked her legs under herself on the chair opposite the couch. “I like it. Very Brooklyn.”
“Very ‘I’m a grown ass man who can’t even dress himself properly,’” I shot back.
We sat there for a moment, the silence more loaded than usual. I didn’t trust it. She was planning something. She was probably going to pull out finger paints and ask me to draw my inner child.
Instead, she said, “So. Do you believe in God?”
I let out a bark of laughter. “Wow, no warm-up? No gentle seduction into spiritual trauma? Just straight into the deep end.”
She tilted her head. “You’ve alluded to it in previous sessions. In a few different ways. So, I’m curious.”
“Right.” I crossed my arms across my chest. “Okay, I’ll play. Do I believe in God? Maybe. If I do I believe, there’s some bearded jackass up there watching us like it’s a reality show and placing bets on who breaks first.”
“That sounds like resentment, not belief.”
“No, no.” I leaned forward. “I believe in God the way you believe in a landlord who never fixes anything but still cashes the rent checks. He’s likely there, I just don’t think he deserves a fan club.
He either doesn’t give a shit or he’s asleep.
Or maybe he’s sitting back, popcorn in hand, skipping past the cries of the hurt and the sick to get to the juicy parts like who’s cheating on who, and the drama happening in our government. ”
She didn’t flinch. She never flinched. Did I sound bitter? Hell yea I did, but I had every right to. If there was a God, he owed me answers, not the other way around.
“What do you think when people say things like, ‘we don’t always understand God’s plan’?” she asked softly.
My jaw clenched. “That’s my favorite line. Right up there with ‘everything happens for a reason.’”
Iris waited. I sat up straighter. This couch was really comfortable.
I bet I could fall asleep and not have a nightmare on it.
“If there’s a God with a plan, and that plan involves children with cancer not getting better unless enough people pray hard enough—then he’s an asshole.
If that plan involves a kid begging for someone to stop touching them and no help ever comes—well, what kind of God is that?
One who says no? One who needs more convincing? ”
Her voice was almost a whisper. “Did someone hurt you, Danny?”
And there it was. I looked at the floor. My tongue was like sandpaper in my mouth. My chest felt like it was full of wet cement. Every cell in my body wanted to run—but I couldn’t even make my fingers twitch.
“I’m just saying,” I said, voice flat, “that if there’s a God keeping score, he’s got a fucked-up sense of morality.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
I looked over at her. She wasn’t writing. She wasn’t analyzing. She was just sitting there. Waiting. As usual. I gave her half a smirk. “What do you think?”
“I think you carry a lot of pain for someone who says they don’t care.”
“Pain’s a side effect of being alive. Which is why I’m trying to remedy that.”
She didn’t answer. She just got up with a swish of her silky-looking skirt and walked over to the bookshelf to pull something off the top shelf. A coloring book. Then she tossed it at me.
“Color,” she said.
I blinked. “Are you serious?”
“I’m very serious. Pick a page.”
“You’re going to therapize me with crayons?”
“I’m not a therapist, Danny. Pick a page.”
I flipped it open. The first one was a mandala. The second one was a beach scene. I landed on a page of broken clock faces and thought, oh, well that’s fucking poetic, and showed it to her.
“I’ll take this one.”
She handed me a box of colored pencils and sat back down.
I didn’t want to color. I didn’t want to feel anything.
But my hands moved anyway. Red. Brown. Gray.
Slow at first, like I was testing the weight of my surrender.
The pencil scratched softly against the paper.
Not making art, no I was bleeding out my emotions without making a mess.
Somewhere in the quiet, Iris spoke again. “Can I ask you something?”
I gave a theatrical sigh. “You always do.”
“Why do you think bad things happen to good people?”
I laughed. Not because it was funny—but because it was so damn typical. The kind of question people asked when they were still pretending life had rules. Cause and effect. Do good, get good kind of thing.
“You mean like karma? Divine punishment? God working in mysterious ways?”
She didn’t offer a rebuttal. I leaned back, colored pencil in hand. “It’s random. That’s the answer. The world’s just a roulette wheel. Spin it, and maybe you get a vacation in Hawaii. Or maybe you get molested by your foster dad and spend the rest of your life trying to breathe through it.”
Silence. Iris didn’t move other than her hands shifted as they folded in her lap a little tighter. I looked down at the page in my lap.
“And the worst part? People try to make sense of it. They say things like, ‘maybe there’s a bigger picture’ or ‘everything happens for a reason.’ But if this is the only shot we get—if this is our one life, why does it hurt so much?
Why do the good people get chewed up and spit out while assholes keep climbing the ladder?
Tell me what fucking good reason was there for a little boy to get raped and no matter how much he begged; it didn’t stop.
” Spittle landed on the page in front of me and for a horrifying second, the picture I’d been coloring blurred as tears sprang to my eyes, but I swallowed them back down before blinking, lest any moisture fall.
I heard Iris shifting in her seat and then, very gently, she asked again, “Did someone hurt you, Danny?”
I didn’t answer. Just went back to coloring. I pressed the pencil down too hard, breaking the tip. She silently handed me a new one; her finger ghosted against mine for just a second, sending a tingle blasting down my spine. I put the broken pencil down.
“I watched the car chicken video,” she finally said, changing the subject.
I stiffened.
“Is it your last one?”
I looked at her, annoyed. “Did Carter send you that?”
“No. I saw it on your channel.”
That stunned me more than it should have. I guess the video was finally posted, and he hadn’t told me. He had promised to post it last week and hadn’t. I guess now he finally did it. That bastard.
“It felt like a goodbye,” she added.
I leaned back on the couch. “It was.”
She nodded slowly. “So, you’re not planning on making more?”
I looked up at the ceiling. “I’m not planning to be here to be able to make more.”
She didn’t gasp. She didn’t argue. She just nodded.
“That’s what I thought,” she said.
We were quiet again. Then she smiled sadly and whispered, “Well, in case no one’s said it to you today… I’m glad you’re still here.”
I stood. “You really need better boundaries.”
She laughed softly. “You really need to realize that people care about you.”
I grunted. She looked up at me, like she saw something under all my mess. “Same time next week, Danny?”
“Only if you let me color a scene with a dragon.”
“Deal.”
As I walked out of the office, the coloring page clutched tightly in my hand, I wondered why the hell it felt like something had shifted.
I didn’t know what it was, but it made the air around me a little thicker with awareness.
Like I’d let my guard down somehow without realizing it.
Like I’d taken a step forward, toward something warm and stupid, and now I couldn’t reverse it.
And that terrified me more than dying ever did.