27. Julia #2
There is enough history behind that sentence that I almost ask what he means, but something in his expression tells me that would be moving farther than he intended to go so I let it pass.
“What else?”
“Mandatory Sunday dinner at Mara’s.”
I stare at him. “Mandatory?”
“According to Mara.”
I giggle at that. “That tracks.”
“Connor, her son, usually chooses the movie, which means I’ve seen the same superhero film enough times to qualify as a supporting character.”
I laugh, picturing it despite myself, Kai in one of those immaculate suits trapped on a couch beside a seven-year-old watching Spider-Man for the twenty-third time.
“You go every Sunday?”
“Most.”
“And she feeds you?”
“Usually more than necessary.”
“Okay, that one I believe.” I slap a hand against my knee to emphasize the statement.
His eyebrow rises. “What is that supposed to mean?”
“Mara has the energy of someone who would physically put food in your mouth if you tried to tell her coffee was breakfast.”
A quiet laugh escapes him. “That is disturbingly accurate.”
The conversation only lasts a few minutes before he turns the focus back toward me, but something about it stays with me after the session ends.
Not because he told me anything extraordinary — he goes to the gym, he rides motorcycles, he eats dinner with his friend and her kid every Sunday.
These are all normal things. Maybe that is why I like knowing them.
For the first time, Kai exists in my head somewhere other than this office.
I picture him on a motorcycle with the city lights moving past, then immediately wonder what he wears because the idea of him taking the highway in a three-piece suit is absurd enough to make me smile while I’m waiting for the elevator.
I don’t know why that image follows me home. It simply does.
Another week passes. Ghost comes twice. The first time there is no letter, only the quiet sound of my front door opening sometime after eleven because I left it unlocked before going upstairs.
I am already in bed reading when the mattress dips beside me, and the book survives approximately thirty seconds before his hand closes over the top edge and removes it from my grip.
The second time he doesn’t come inside at all.
A black envelope waits on the porch when I return from work, containing nothing particularly filthy for once, just a few lines telling me he watched me dance around the kitchen while making dinner and that if I ever sang into a wooden spoon again, he was going to need an explanation for why I owned an actual microphone-shaped wine stopper but still preferred kitchen utensils.
I spend an embarrassing amount of time staring at that sentence because it means he laughed.
I know he did. I can hear it now, or at least imagine it, the same quiet sound he made when I told him to shut up while tracing the tattoo across his back. The memory makes me smile.
Then Thursday arrives again. I leave work earlier than expected because a meeting gets moved, and rather than go home for forty minutes only to turn around again, I drive directly to Kai’s office. Mara looks up when I walk into reception and immediately checks the clock.
“You’re early.”
“I can leave and make a dramatic entrance at exactly three if that helps.”
She waves one hand dismissively. “He’s not with anyone. Go in. He was catching up on paperwork when I checked ten minutes ago.”
I glance toward the closed office door. “Are you sure?”
“If he complains, tell him I overruled him.”
“That feels dangerous.”
“He fears me.”
“Come in.”
I step through and close the door behind me. Then stop, at the same time as the air gets knocked out of my lungs.
He is standing beside the small cabinet near the window, jacket draped over the back of his chair while he dries one hand with a paper towel.
His tie is still on, though loosened slightly, and both sleeves of his dress shirt have been rolled past his forearms. My eyes catch on the ink before anything else.
Black. Geometric. A sharp sequence of lines and triangles wraps around his left forearm, disappearing beneath the rolled white cotton near his elbow and extending almost all the way toward his wrist.
Everything inside me goes silent. Kai looks up, and surprise crosses his face when he sees me standing there, followed almost immediately by something sharper when his gaze traces mine down to his exposed forearm.
It lasts no more than a second, the kind of reaction most people would probably miss entirely, but I have spent months sitting across from this man while he taught me to notice the things I do before I understand why I’m doing them.
He knows exactly what I’m looking at. The realization seems to reach both of us at the same time.
His expression settles before I can read anything more from it, smooth and composed in the practiced way I have watched him become whenever something in a session catches him off guard, but his movements are different now.
Deliberate. Too deliberate. He pulls the rolled sleeve down over his forearm.
The black geometric pattern disappears beneath white cotton one section at a time while he works the cuff back into place, fingers steady as he fastens the button.
My heart gives one violent beat beneath my ribs.
There must be thousands of tattoos like that.
Black geometric work is hardly rare, and I have only ever seen Ghost’s tattoos in poor light, while my body was flooded with enough adrenaline and lust to make remembering fine details questionable at best. Except I don’t remember the tattoo only with my eyes.
My fingertips know that fucking pattern, I traced those lines.
I followed one of the darker bands around his forearm while he stood in my bedroom wearing a balaclava, and I remember the way the muscle shifted beneath my hand when I touched him.
No.
Kai finishes fastening the cuff, then lowers the other sleeve even though I never looked at that arm long enough to see what was underneath it. That bothers me more.
“You’re early,” he says, and his tone is so convincingly ordinary that something cold moves beneath my skin.
I force my attention away from his wrists and back to his face.
Glasses sit exactly where they always do.
His hair is controlled, his tie still neat despite the jacket hanging over the chair behind him, and his eyes look lighter in daylight than they ever did through the opening of a mask.
Amber-brown — warm in this room, darker in my bedroom.
My stomach tightens.
“Mara said you weren’t with anyone and that I could come in,” I manage, though my voice sounds wrong to my own ears.
“That’s fine.” Kai glances briefly toward the clock before looking back at me, and I can almost see the decision he makes not to comment on the fact that I’m standing several feet inside his office staring at him like I’ve never seen him before. “I was just cleaning up before your appointment.”
He reaches for his jacket and slips it on, hiding the shape of his shoulders along with the rest of the evidence I suddenly cannot stop imagining beneath his clothes.
The familiar version of him returns one layer at the time — sleeves buttoned, jacket on, ink gone.
The transformation should reassure me. Instead, I feel sick.
I sit because my knees have started to feel unreliable and because standing here, staring at his hands is only going to make this worse.
Kai takes his usual chair across from me, but for the first time since I began therapy, the distance between us feels completely different.
There is a man sitting there whom I know intimately. There is another man sitting there whom I apparently don’t know at all, and I have no idea yet whether they are the same person.
Kai rests the notebook across one knee but doesn’t immediately write anything.
His attention stays on me longer than usual, careful without being obvious about it, and I recognize the look because I’ve seen it dozens of times before.
He is assessing. Only this time I don’t know whether he is assessing his patient or whether the man beneath the suit is wondering how much I saw.
“You seem unsettled,” he says eventually, his voice gentler now. “Did something happen before you came in?”
There is something almost absurd about the question. I want to laugh, but nothing about this feels funny enough for the sound to come.
“No. I’m fine.” The phrase should trigger him immediately. It always does.
His gaze changes slightly behind the glasses, but he doesn’t call me on it.
That lands like another stone in the growing pile inside my stomach.
Normally, I’m fine earns at least a look, sometimes a dry reminder that we agreed the phrase doesn’t count as an answer.
Today he lets it pass as though both of us are suddenly pretending not to notice things I settle farther into the chair and try to make my body behave like nothing has changed.
The session begins almost normally. Almost. Kai asks about work, and I tell him enough about the week to keep the conversation moving.
We touch briefly on Mom, then Nanna, and I manage to answer the questions without completely losing track of what I’m saying, but part of me remains fixed on the cuffs buttoned at his wrists.
Every time his hand moves, another image overlaps it.
A gloved hand wrapped around my waist. Bare fingers sliding over my skin.
The same long fingers curled around a pen now that had been inside me days ago. I look away before my face betrays me.
This is insane, a tattoo proves nothing. Men have tattoos. Men have hands. Men have amber eyes. Men ride motorcycles. By the time I’m done listing similarities, I feel like I’m going to be sick.
Night rides.