30. Kai
Kai
“If you had to choose one moment when everything changed, which one would it be?”
I look at the man sitting across from me and wonder whether psychiatrists are universally irritating or whether I’ve simply spent enough years on the other side of this arrangement to resent every technique I recognize.
Dr. Samuel Bennett waits without rescuing me from the question.
His office is nothing like mine. No dark leather chairs, no obsessively arranged desk, no clean lines intended to make the room feel controlled without making it sterile.
Bennett apparently believes in bookshelves that bow beneath their own weight, an ancient rug that probably predates both of us and a ceramic mug on the table beside him with WORLD’S OKAYEST DAD printed across the side.
I have been coming here once a week for five weeks. I still hate the mug.
“What do you mean by changed?”
He gives me a look that tells me he knows exactly what I’m doing. “You know what I mean.”
Unfortunately, I do. I lean farther back and drag one thumb along the seam of my jeans.
I stopped wearing suits almost immediately after I stopped working because putting one on without having somewhere legitimate to go felt vaguely pathetic.
These days it is mostly jeans, T-shirts, hoodies and whatever survives the gym without smelling like something died in it.
The clinic has been closed to me since the day I reported myself.
Technically, I could have continued practicing while the Board investigated unless and until they ordered otherwise.
I just chose not to. There was no version of sitting across from another patient while an investigation into what I had done with Julia was moving through the Attorney General’s Office that felt remotely defensible.
Mara handles the office. The other physicians handle the patients who were willing to transfer internally, everyone else was referred out. I go nowhere near clinical care.
And every Tuesday at ten, I sit in this fucking chair and discover how annoying my own profession can be.
“If I have to choose one moment,” I say eventually, “it wasn’t the first letter.”
Bennett waits.
“It wasn’t the first time I touched her either.”
“What was it?” The nudge was what I expected from him.
Doesn’t make it any less fucking annoying, but expected nevertheless.
“The night I followed her home.”
His expression remains neutral, but I have spent too many years doing what he does to mistake neutrality for absence of thought.
“She left my office dissociated after a difficult session. I knew she was oriented, but she wasn’t fully present, and I was worried about her driving.
” I glance toward the rain making thin tracks down the window.
“That concern was real. Her trauma hit something familiar in me because of what I grew up seeing, and watching her walk out looking like that, brought back enough of it that following her felt almost automatic.”
“But you don’t believe that was the whole reason anymore.”
“No.” The answer comes without resistance now.
Five weeks ago I would have built a fucking dissertation around why it was more complicated. Now I’ve come to realize that it isn’t complicated at all. It’s as simple as it is pathetic.
“I found her attractive from the first appointment.”
Bennett nods slightly, inviting me to continue.
“I noticed her before I had any right to notice her that way. I knew I noticed her, and because I never acted on attraction to a patient before, I apparently decided noticing wasn’t important as long as I continued behaving professionally.
” I scrub one hand over my jaw. “Then she dissociated and I became genuinely worried, so my brain handed me something noble enough to hide behind.”
“You gave the concern permission.”
I glance at him.
“Yes.” The words sit heavily between us because they are accurate without being complicated.
I don’t need to excavate my childhood to understand them.
I don’t need another explanation involving my father, my mother, Henry or Pine Ridge.
I was attracted to Julia. I was worried about Julia.
Both things existed at the same time, and instead of recognizing that combination as a reason to put more distance between us, I treated the concern as proof that my interest was somehow different from what it actually was.
“And when she got home safely?” Bennett asks.
That is the part I have thought about enough that the answer arrives immediately. “I should have left.”
“But you didn’t.”
“No.” I stare at a loose thread near my knee. “She got home. I knew she was safe. Every reason I had used to justify following her had been satisfied, and I stayed anyway.”
“Why?”
I let out a breath. “Because I wanted to see her.”
There it is. Stripped of terminology and professional explanation. No fucking Ghost. Just the truth.
Bennett watches me for several seconds before speaking. “Do you think that’s the defining moment?”
“I think that’s the moment I stopped being able to pretend it was about protecting her.”
The session moves on after that, although not far.
He asks about the difference between guilt and accountability, which irritates me enough I tell him he sounds like a therapist and earns absolutely no sympathy for the observation.
We talk briefly about the Board investigation and whether the possibility of losing my license has changed the way I understand what happened.
I tell him that it’s not. I want to keep my license.
I want my work back but none of that is the reason I regret what I did.
If the Board called tomorrow and told me there would be no discipline whatsoever, Julia would still have looked at me exactly the way she did when she realized the man she trusted in my office was the same one who had been standing outside her windows.
No ruling can make that worse or better.
When the clock announces the end of our session, Bennett closes the notebook on his lap and tells me we’re done until next week.
I stand, reach for my jacket and pause when he says my name. “What?”
“Try not to spend the next seven days turning everything we discussed into another form of punishment.”
I stare at him. “You understand how irritating that sentence is coming from you.”
His mouth curves. “See you Tuesday, Kai.”
“Unfortunately.”
His laugh follows me into the hall. I almost smile. Almost.
Late night sessions at the gym have become my new thing. The gym used to be something I fit around work. Now I sometimes stay until the staff start wiping down machines around me with increasingly pointed enthusiasm.
Tonight, I have lifted enough weight to make my shoulders hurt and still haven’t exhausted myself enough to want to sleep.
I shower there only long enough to get the sweat off, change into a clean shirt and hoodie, then head into the underground garage where my bike waits beneath fluorescent light.
The sight of it still does something immediate to me.
Maybe because the bike predates almost every version of my life that became complicated.
There is no office attached to it — no Board, no reports and no patient files. And, if I am being remotely honest, there was a time before Julia when riding had nothing to do with following anybody.
I pull on my gloves, fasten the helmet and swing my leg over.
The Kawasaki comes alive beneath me with that familiar hard-edged growl that settles through the frame and into my body before the engine note climbs.
The inline-four has always sounded impatient at low revs, as though the machine knows exactly what it was built to do and considers city speed limits as a personal insult.
Tonight I keep it in the city anyway. I ease out of the garage and let Minneapolis swallow me.
The night air pushes cold around my neck where the helmet doesn’t meet the jacket completely, while storefronts smear into bands of white and amber along the edge of my vision.
Traffic has thinned enough that I can move without fighting it, shifting through gears while the engine rises and settles beneath me, the vibration clean and familiar between my knees.
I take Washington for a while, cut across toward the river and then turn again without thinking much about where I am going except for one thing.
I stay nowhere near Julia’s neighborhood.
Not by accident. I promised so I keep the city between us.
For weeks, that has been the part nobody sees.
There is no applause for not riding past a woman’s house after she told you to stay away from her, nor should there fucking be.
Respecting a boundary after violating so many others does not earn points.
There are intersections where one turn would eventually put me on roads I know too well, and every time I take the other one.
But every ride still contains the choice, only this time I make the right ones.
The engine snarls when I open the throttle across an empty stretch, acceleration pressing me back before I settle over the tank.
For several seconds there is nothing in my head except the machine, the road and the instinctive mathematics of speed, distance, braking and balance.
That is why I ride. Not because it solves anything.
Because for as long as I do, there isn’t enough room inside my head for anything that isn’t happening over hundred miles an hour or more.