5. Kai #2
She isn’t drawn toward me. She’s waiting to see what I’ll do.
Touch her.
My hand tightens at my side. I step back first. Julia straightens slowly, pressing the bottle against her chest.
“Sorry.” The apology is barely audible.
“You don’t need to apologize.”
“I almost head-butted you.”
“I’ve survived worse.”
“That sounds like a challenge.”
“It wasn’t intended as one.”
Her smile returns, but the lingering color along her throat looks like the aftermath of nerves rather than flirtation. I open the door for her, and she reaches the hallway before turning toward me again.
“Thank you.”
“For what?”
Her fingers curl around the strap of her purse. “Not speaking to me like I’m fragile.”
The answer reaches somewhere it shouldn’t. “You aren’t.”
Julia holds my gaze for a second longer but there’s nothing romantic in it. She’s studying me again, deciding whether she believes what I’ve said and whether returning next week will feel like a mistake. Then she nods and walks toward reception.
I remain beside the open door while Mara quietly confirms her next appointment.
Julia responds to something she says, though I can’t hear the words, and then pushes a loose strand of hair behind her ear as she turns toward the exit.
Just before she reaches the door, she glances back.
Our eyes meet across the waiting room, and a spark appears in hers, quick and bright, not desire but wary curiosity.
For the first time since she entered the office, she looks less like she’s preparing to run and more like she’s considering the possibility that staying might be safe.
Little ember.
She looks away first. The door closes behind her, and the office becomes unnaturally quiet.
Mara glances toward me, but I return to my office before she can ask why I’m still standing there. I’m sure that question won’t evade me, though.
Julia’s chair remains slightly angled from where she rose. The room feels different without her inside it, emptied of an energy I hadn’t noticed until it disappeared, and I find myself staring at the space she occupied instead of preparing for the patient scheduled after her.
I sit behind my desk and open her file, then begin the progress note with the same clinical language I use for every intake.
I document that she arrived on time, remained alert and oriented throughout the session, and presented with an anxious but appropriate affect while reporting a recent panic attack triggered by music associated with her deceased father.
The words are accurate, yet they barely resemble the woman who sat across from me.
I add the bite injury, her denial of suicidal intent, the history of parental conflict and abandonment, the anniversary response, and her tendency to rely on humor, minimization, and overfunctioning.
I note that she demonstrates insight, intelligence, and a willingness to engage despite visible discomfort, but my fingers pause above the keyboard when another word appears in my mind with absolutely no place in a medical record.
Beautiful.
I catch myself before typing more than the first few letters and delete them immediately.
“Jesus Christ,” I mutter, leaning back in the chair while the cursor continues blinking at the end of the sentence.
There’s no clinical justification for the word, no acceptable reason it entered my mind while documenting her treatment, and no reason I should still be thinking about the exact shade of green in her eyes when I have another patient arriving in less than twenty minutes.
I replace the thought with something that actually belongs in the file, noting that the patient appears motivated to continue treatment and responded appropriately to initial interventions.
The sentence is professional and true, even though it leaves out the part where the thought of her returning next week produces a satisfaction that feels far too personal.
Once the progress note is finished, I save it and close the file, but the quiet in the office continues pressing against me.
There are calls waiting to be returned and enough unfinished work to occupy every second until my next appointment, yet my attention drifts toward the closed door as I picture Julia walking through the building, crossing the lobby, and heading toward the parking garage with those sleeves pulled over her hands.
She’s probably still downstairs. The thought is followed by another before I can stop it.
I should make sure she gets home safely.
There’s no reason to call her. She isn’t in crisis, she left the office regulated, and contacting a new patient simply to ask whether she reached home would be unnecessary and difficult to defend.
She came here for treatment, not protection, and whatever instinct that keeps trying to blur that distinction has no place in my decisions.
She doesn’t need me. And for some fucking reason, that thought irritates me more than everything else.
I remove my glasses and rub the pressure building between my brows, reminding myself that this is attraction and nothing more, an inconvenient response to a beautiful woman with a sharp mouth, a guarded smile, and eyes that reveal every emotion she tries to conceal.
I’ve felt attraction before, ignored it before, and watched it disappear without consequence because that’s what adults with self-control do.
This will pass too, because there isn’t another acceptable outcome.
I put my glasses back on and reach for the next patient’s file, though my hand stops before I open it. Somewhere beneath the professional language, the rational explanations, and every boundary I’ve spent years respecting, one thought remains stubbornly untouched by logic.
I wonder which road my little ember takes home.
My. Of all the parts within that thought that should concern me, somehow that single word is the one that keeps me still.
Little ember was already a liberty I had no business taking, a nickname she never asked for and will probably never know exists, but somewhere during the last hour it settled into my mind so naturally that I stopped questioning it.
Apparently, just a nickname wasn’t enough.
At some point between watching her hide a bite mark beneath her sleeve and listening to her laugh when she should have been falling apart, my mind quietly added possession to something I had no right to claim in the first place.
My little ember.
Fuck.
I stare down at the unopened file beneath my hand, suddenly incapable of processing the name printed across the top while that one word continues circling through my head.
I should correct it, even privately. Especially privately.
There are thoughts a person dismisses because they mean nothing, and then there are thoughts that deserve attention precisely because they arrive too easily.
The door opens before I manage to decide which category this one belongs to.
I hear Mara’s voice from the hallway as she lets my next patient inside, followed by the familiar shuffle of footsteps crossing the threshold.
Under normal circumstances, I would already be standing, greeting them by name and giving them the same undivided attention I expect from myself every time someone enters this office.
Instead, I remain seated behind my desk, staring at a patient’s file without reading a single fucking word on the page.
Because somewhere between Julia Hayes walking into my office and walking back out again, little ember became my little ember.
And I have absolutely no idea when the fuck I decided she belonged to me.