27. Julia #3
My stomach drops. The conversation from last week returns with awful clarity.
Gym most mornings. Work. Motorcycle. Night rides when he needs to clear his head.
I remember sitting in this exact chair and liking the fact that I knew something about him outside the office.
Now every ordinary detail feels like something I should have noticed.
No.
Kai adjusts the notebook slightly on his knee, and my attention catches on his fingers again.
“Where did you go?” he asks quietly.
I look up. His brows have drawn together faintly, genuine concern softening the expression that had become almost impossible for me to read since I walked through the door.
“What?”
“You’ve been answering me, but you haven’t really been here for the last few minutes.” His voice remains calm, though there is something more cautious beneath it now. “What are you thinking about?”
My pulse jumps. There is only one way to find out. I inhale slowly, then let the breath out through my nose.
“I started seeing someone.” Kai’s pen stops against the page.
It isn’t dramatic enough that I would have noticed months ago. Now I see everything. The pause lasts less than a heartbeat before he continues as though nothing happened, lifting his gaze to mine while the rest of his posture remains perfectly composed.
“Okay.” His tone stays neutral, but there is a subtle shift in the way his fingers hold the pen, the grip tightening before he seems to notice and relaxes it again. “Tell me about that.”
The words almost make me smile.
Tell me about that.
Of course.
Not who is he? Not when did this happen? Kai Blackwood is going to therapist the hell out of this until I give him nowhere left to hide.
“I don’t know whether seeing him is the right way to describe it,” I say, trying to keep my own tone casual even though my heart is beating so hard it feels like he should be able to see it through my blouse. “We don’t date. We don’t go out anywhere together. It’s mostly sexual.”
There. Something passes behind his eyes. It disappears so quickly that I could convince myself I imagined it, except the muscle near his jaw tightens once before smoothing again.
“How do you feel about the arrangement?” he asks.
I almost laugh from nerves. “You mean how do I feel about being fucked by him?”
His gaze remains steady. “I mean how do you feel about whatever exists between the two of you.”
The careful correction sounds exactly like him. That somehow makes everything worse.
“It’s complicated,” I say, watching him closely enough now that I notice the slight tightening of his fingers around the pen before he leans back in his chair.
“What makes it complicated?”
For a second, I consider how much to give him and in what order, but I didn’t exactly come into this room with a plan.
“He isn’t somebody I met in any normal sense.
” I keep my voice deliberately even, though my heartbeat has become painfully loud beneath my ribs.
“He started watching me before I knew he existed. At my house. Then he started leaving letters, telling me things he’d noticed through the windows, things he couldn’t possibly know unless he really had been there.
At first it scared me, then the letters changed, became more sexual, and somewhere along the way I stopped being afraid of finding them. I started looking forward to them.”
Kai doesn’t interrupt. That is almost worse than if he did. His face remains composed behind his glasses, but the pen has stopped moving entirely and something in the set of his shoulders has gone unnaturally still.
“He started giving me ways to answer him,” I continue.
“Not by writing back. A lamp left on, standing at the window, little things that let me decide whether I wanted him there. Eventually he asked me to let him inside, and I did. Since then, I’ve let him come back more than once, and yes, before you ask, it became sexual. ”
The muscle near Kai’s jaw tightens — there — so small that I might never have noticed it before today. Now it lands like another stone in my stomach.
His voice remains controlled when he finally speaks. “When you let him inside, was that something you genuinely wanted, or did you feel that refusing him might have consequences?”
The question makes my throat tighten because I have heard its meaning from another man over and over again, written in black ink and whispered through a mask.
Choice. Always a choice. But now I realize that it never was, though, was it?
“I wanted him there.” I manage to say.
Something in Kai’s posture eases, almost imperceptibly. I hate that I notice.
“I still don’t know who he is,” I add before he can ask anything else.
“He hides his face, changes his voice when he speaks and comes to me either wearing a balaclava or a motorcycle helmet. I don’t know his real name, where he lives or what he does for a living, and yet I keep letting him into my house because I like being with him. ”
Kai sets the pen on top of the notebook with an almost exaggerated care that makes my stomach turn.
“I know how fucking stupid it sounds,” I add.
His brows draw together immediately. “I wouldn’t call it stupid.”
“I would.” I let out a brittle laugh and look away, folding my hands together in my lap. “What kind of woman willingly lets the man who has been stalking her through her windows into her bed because his letters turn her on?”
“Julia.” There is a warning beneath my name.
I keep my eyes down because I know exactly what happens when I start talking about myself this way in this room.
“What does that say about me? That I’m getting healthier? That months of therapy have apparently brought me to the enlightened conclusion that sleeping with my stalker is personal growth?”
“Don’t do that.” His voice has changed. Not much, but the professional distance has begun wearing thin around the edges.
I finally look at him. “Do what?”
“Use one decision to invalidate everything you’ve done because it doesn’t fit whatever version of normal you think you’re supposed to want.
” His gaze stays fixed on mine, frustration beginning to sharpen his expression.
“There are legitimate safety concerns in what you’re describing, and I’m not going to minimize those, but that is different from deciding the fact that you wanted something unconventional means there is something fundamentally wrong with you. ”
The conviction sounds exactly like Kai. The protectiveness underneath it sounds dangerously close to someone else. But the pretence pisses me off so I press harder.
“I let a man I couldn’t identify into my house, slept with him and then let him keep coming back. Maybe there actually is something wrong with me.”
“There isn’t.” The answer comes too quickly.
We both notice. Kai’s jaw shifts, but he doesn’t take it back. I lean into the opening.
“Maybe I’ve just gotten better at making bad choices sound empowering. Maybe I’m not more confident or healthier. Maybe I’m just fucked up in a more articulate way now.”
His expression hardens. “You know that isn’t true.”
“Do I?” My voice begins shaking, partly because I want it to and partly because this has stopped feeling like a game.
“Maybe normal women don’t get wet because somebody watches them through their windows.
Maybe they don’t leave doors unlocked for men whose names they don’t know and then fall asleep in their arms afterward. ”
Pain flickers over Kai’s face. It is gone almost immediately, but I see it before it does. My chest tightens.
He leans forward, the notebook forgotten against his knee.
“What you want sexually does not become pathological simply because it frightens you when you examine it outside the moment. You’re allowed to want intensity.
You’re allowed to give someone control because giving it is different from having it taken from you.
What matters is that the choice remains yours and that when you withdraw it, the other person stops. ”
Every word lands harder than the one before it. Ghost stops. Every time. Kai knows exactly how important that is to me. Of course he does. I can barely breathe now, but I need one thing I cannot explain away.
“What if I can’t trust my own choices anymore?” I ask quietly. “Maybe after everything that happened to me, I shouldn’t. Maybe I need somebody else to decide what’s good for me because clearly I’m very talented at choosing men who aren’t.”
“Julia, that’s not—”
“Maybe I need somebody to save me from myself.”
Something in him snaps. Not loudly and not enough that anyone who didn’t know him would call it losing control, but I watch the psychiatrist disappear from his face for one devastating second and the man underneath take his place.
“You do not need to be saved, Julia.” His voice has dropped, emotion roughening the edges before he can smooth them away. “You need to be seen. You need somebody who can see every part of you without deciding the difficult ones make you broken or too much, and—” He stops.
The room goes completely still. My heart does too. I hear the sentence again in darkness, spoken in a deliberately altered voice through the narrow space between us.
You don’t need to be saved. You need to be seen.
My gaze drops toward the white cuff hiding his forearm. The tattoo no longer matters. Neither does the motorcycle or the eyes. Or the build I suddenly know perfectly well exists beneath the expensive suit. I know. And when I lift my gaze again, Kai knows that I know.
The anger that pulled the words out of him disappears from his face, leaving something that looks almost like fear behind his glasses.
“No,” I whisper.
He doesn’t answer. That silence tells me more than anything else could. I get to my feet because sitting across from him suddenly feels impossible, but when he moves instinctively as though he might stand too, I take one step backward.
“Don’t come near me.”