Chapter 47
Chapter Forty-Seven
“I had another dream about him last night,” I confessed from the brown leather chaise situated in the center of my therapist’s office.
Dr. Eloise raised a single eyebrow, a sympathetic look morphing into her aged face. “Who?”
I hated how she always made a point to make me say his name.
“Kain.”
The word always sounded uncomfortable coming out of me in this office.
For almost a year and a half now, since my shooting, I’d been seeing Dr. Eloise every Monday at four o’clock in the afternoon, pouring out the emotions I kept suppressed every other day.
The fact that my parents were even forking over the money for me to see a therapist was the biggest plot twist. Before I was shot, my parents were never really huge proponents for things like therapy and mental health management.
This was why they’d always scoffed at my desire to be a child psychiatrist.
I could’ve sworn that my father once held this age old, African-American belief that things like therapists were for fragile white people.
“What did you dream about?” Dr. Eloise questioned.
I drew in a shaky breath, closing my eyes as I laid back, trying to grasp at the fleeting memory of the dream. “I was sitting across from him in a pitch black room. Just two chairs and a spotlight overhead. We were sitting face-to-face and he was…crying.”
“Was the reason clear?”
“Yes,” I answered initially. “Well, not at first… He was very sad, though.”
“And how did you feel?” Dr. Eloise questioned.
I opened one eye and snuck a look at her scratching fast notes into her notepad.
“I felt nothing,” I admitted. “But… I mean, like… super nothing. I was sitting across from him, and all I could do was watch him suffer. I couldn’t even feel my sense of self. It felt like I was watching us both from outside of my own body.”
“And you just watched him cry,” Dr. Eloise gathered as if this was nothing out of the ordinary.
“No.” My eyes snapped open and I sat up to look at her. “You don’t understand—Kain doesn’t cry. Like, ever.”
Dr. Eloise only nodded at this information, scribbling something down. “So, did he say why he was sad?”
“He was sad because I lost the baby,” I replied.
She stopped scribbling, her eyes rising from her notepad with a sympathetic softness.
I took handfuls of my hair as I tried to make sense of the dream from where I sat.
“He told me he wasn’t mad at me for not telling him, and then admitted to wanting a family.
It broke his heart that I’d lost the baby.
He was totally unraveling over it. It was so… I don’t know.”
“It was so what?” she pressed.
“Real…”
“Real like the others?”
I nodded. This wasn’t the first dream about Kain that I’d had that played out in this way.
“But is it possible to dream about something I’ve never seen before? I’ve never seen Kain cry before, Dr. Eloise.”
“It’s possible,” she replied. “So what do you think the dream means?”
I wracked my brain for an answer, ultimately giving up because I didn’t have any idea.
“I think I’m just jealous that he’s dating Eden Xavier,” I admitted.
“I see.” I always felt like Dr. Eloise knew things about me that I hadn’t told her when she’d hit me with those short responses. “Three months ago, you told me you were over him.”
“I’m supposed to be, right?”
“That’s your call, Lauren.”
“Well I am supposed to be.” I crossed my arms, hating how deep down, I didn’t believe in what I was saying. “His father tried to kill me, and he got on the stand and defended him. To make things worse, he ruined my father’s law career in the process.”
“Are you reminding me, Lauren? Or are you reminding yoursel—”
“I don’t know!”
“Lauren,” Dr. Eloise spoke in soothing tones, trying to calm me down. I drew in a long breath, and made a show of exhaling slowly, trying to give off at least the appearance of checking myself.
“I’m sorry for shouting at you.” She accepted my apology with a nod. “It’s just… Okay, so he took her to my favorite restaurant. That’s where we had our first date and everything.” I caught my voice cracking.
“And how does that make you feel?” my therapist pressed for details.
“Angry.”
“Why?”
“Because…”
“I need a better answer from you, Lauren,” she encouraged.
“Angry—just angry. I don’t know why. Just angry.” I raked my fingers through my hair, frustrated. “She looks nothing like me, by the way. All the others he was seen with—they looked like me.”
“And that made you feel good,” she guessed.
“It made me feel like he still thought about me, yes.”
“And that’s important to you.”
I nodded, a little ashamed that this was my truth. Dr. Eloise offered me a faint smile, pleased that she was getting real answers out of me. “So this dream,” she came back to my original point. “You never got the chance to discuss the miscarriage with him in real life, correct?”
“I never even told him I was pregnant.”
“Do you feel like you’re denying yourself a chance at healing by never having this conversation?”
I squinted. “Doctor, you don’t get it. He. Defended. The. Man. Who. Tried. To. Kill. Me. It’s not like I can just show up at his doorstep, and be like, ‘Let’s have a conversation, Kainie.’ I can’t even see a picture of him without getting so… mad.”
“Let’s unpack that. What are you most angry about?”
“He lied to me.”
“About?”
“He said he loved me. He got me to open up to him in every way, and then he just… Ugh! It pisses me off every time I think about it.”
“And yet you still have feelings for him,” she guessed. I was annoyed now. Just because something is true, doesn’t mean it needs to be said.
“I read online that as a woman, I will always feel something for the person who took my innocence.”
Dr. Eloise raised a vaguely skeptical brow. “Me and about a dozen of my friends must be exceptions to this rule, then.”
“I’m sure when I’m your age, I won’t feel anything for Kain either.” She made a face before chuckling to herself. “No offense,” I added.
“If you want to wait forty years to get over an ex, that’s your prerogative, Ms. Caplan.”
I shivered at the thought. “I don’t want to talk about Kain anymore,” I announced.
“That’s fine. What else would you like to discuss?”
For a moment, I only sat there. Finally, I cleared my throat, drawing in an easing breath before I said the words, “Rashad forced himself on me last Thursday.”
***
My parents always smiled so damn hard whenever Rashad came over for dinner. If not for Rashad, I might’ve never known what it looked like when my parents approved of my boyfriend.
Dr. Eloise, with her encouragements to cut Rashad loose, didn’t realize how important that was for me.
After months of feeling like my parents secretly hated me, bringing Rashad around made them act different.
Their smiles were for him, but sometimes I could fool myself into feeling like while they smiled for him, they were silently happy with me for having brought him home.
Rashad, my Beauvais-approved boyfriend, complete with a legally-earned trust fund, good Creole genes, and a lifelong membership to the same fraternity my father was in.
My parents were no doubt already planning our wedding.
We sat at the dinner table, eating as Dad and Rashad talked politics.
Lately, my boyfriend had taken to calling my father Governor Caplan.
Ugh, he was so annoying… Dad pretended to be embarrassed by the title, but I noted how he didn’t actually discourage Rashad at all—especially since he readily answered to it.
“Governor Caplan.”
“Yeah, son.”
I didn’t know which pet name made me cringe the most—Governor Caplan or son. I tuned out their conversation until I heard myself being talked about.
“Our girl is turning twenty-one in just a few weeks,” Dad reminded. I hated that my father felt the need to remind my boyfriend that my birthday was coming up. My birthday was December sixteenth, which was fifteen days away on a Saturday. Rashad had more than enough time to remember it on his own.
As a joke, Rashad turned his head toward Morgan and wished her a happy early birthday.
My parents seemed to find this just hilarious.
I cracked a smile, not wanting to be a mood kill, but I was not amused.
Morgan snuck a knowing glance at me, and from the look on her face, I knew she didn’t think Rashad’s joke was all that amusing either.
“Any big plans?” my father asked Rashad.
If anyone had asked me, I would’ve said it felt like my father was trying to silently communicate that if Rashad wanted my hand in marriage, all he’d need to do was ask. My father may have said the words, ‘Any big plans?’, but I heard the words, ‘You have my blessing if you want her.’
“I was going to surprise her on the night of, but since everyone is curious,” Rashad started, ready to ruin my birthday surprise to appease my father.
He took out his phone and pulled up something on the screen before handing it to me.
The bright backlight of his cell burned into my irises, a single name displayed in big, bold, and green font.
Eden Xavier
“I got us floor seat tickets to her first ever concert and the after party,” Rashad informed as I read the ticket details off the screen, her name in a bright, flashing green beside an e-receipt for two VIP tickets that evidently set Rashad back almost eight hundred dollars to buy.
I wondered if I would look ungrateful if I asked him if it was too late to get his money back. Whatever I was feeling in the base of my stomach must’ve showed itself prominently on my face because the excitement in Rashad’s eyes faded.
“You don’t like it,” he guessed, his tone halfway between disappointed and… angry?