Chapter 54
Chapter Fifty-Four
I didn’t want to talk about my weekend with Dr. Eloise.
Yet somehow, without my saying so, she seemed to already know that this weekend had been a bad one for me.
Sometimes I swore my therapist knew way more about me than she let on.
She had motherly eyes, the same kind of eyes my mother would look at me with as a child when she knew I was doing something bad. It had a way of making me talk.
“I had another dream over the weekend,” I told her. “Well… more like a nightmare.”
“What happened?”
“I was standing at the edge of a really, really tall building. I was so close to the edge that the tips of my shoes hung off. If I even sneezed a little too hard, I would’ve fallen down the hundred stories to my death. But I was stuck at the edge.”
“Did you want to jump?” Dr. Eloise asked.
“No,” I replied. “It wasn’t that kind of dream. It was like the last nightmare that I told you about. I felt like I was watching all of this go on from outside my body. I didn’t feel anything. I didn’t think anything. I just watched. And Kain was there, too.”
“Was he crying in this one?”
“He wasn’t… But he was sad, and he was whispering something in my ear.
I don’t know what, but I think he was trying to get me to step away from the edge.
And then suddenly my dad appeared on the roof, too.
The clouds got darker and it started to storm.
The wind was blowing hard, strong enough to blow me off the edge of the building, but Kain’s hand came up and caught me, and his hand settled right where my scar is. ”
Dr. Eloise wrote something down, nodding for me to continue.
“My dad yelled at him to stop touching me. Kain said, ‘If I let her go, she’ll fall.’ My dad didn’t care, though.
Dad said something about it costing too much money for me to stand on the roof, and that Kain either had to let me fall, or follow his instructions.
It sounded like he was blackmailing him—using me. I don’t understand what it means.”
“There’s a lot to unpack here.” Dr. Eloise set her pen down on her notepad, leaning forward when she asked, “What did you feel when you woke up?”
“Scared.”
“Why scared?”
I shivered a little. “Because… Because nothing like that has ever happened to me in real life, but… but it didn’t feel like a dream,” I explained, chewing on my bottom lip anxiously. “It felt like a memory.”
“Have your father and Kain Montgomery every been in the same place at the same time before?”
“Only once,” I remembered. “When we first started dating, it happened one night… and it was all kind of downhill from there.”
“Was there anything that happened over the weekend that you feel would make these kinds of dreams occur?” There she went again asking me questions as if she was getting insider information from somewhere else. “It was your birthday on Saturday, correct? What did you do for your birthday?”
“I don’t really want to talk about it,” I mumbled.
“I can’t help you if you don’t talk to me Lauren.”
I felt embarrassed all of a sudden. My twenty-first birthday had been shamefully bad.
Starting with my fight with Rashad, then my fight with my father, and then lastly the fight with Kain.
I’d run to my bedroom after that last argument, casting the bag that Kain had dropped off, and cried for at least two hours.
It wasn’t until Morgan got home from celebrating with her friends that somebody thought to check on me.
I told my sister what I could, barely going into detail, focusing mostly on the actions of our father that day.
Morgan sat on my bed beside me and wrapped an arm around my shoulders.
‘Lauren, there’s something I have to tell you,’ she’d whispered.
‘I think you’ll stop letting the way Daddy treats you affect you so much if I tell you this. ’
‘What is it, Morgan?’ I had replied in a whisper.
‘The night you woke up…’ Morgan’s eyes began to water, which told me that whatever she was about to say had to be painful.
Morgan never cries. ‘Mom and Dad were already at the hospital the night you woke up, but it’s not because they were there to visit you…
’ My sister shifted uncomfortably in her seat beside me before she revealed, ‘They were there to cut off your life support.’
‘They made me swear I’d never tell you,’ Morgan had informed.
‘But can I be honest with you? After your ex embarrassed him earlier that day, he came home so angry. He just up and decided to cut off your life support that day, but it felt like… It felt like it was in retaliation to something. It was like Daddy suddenly wanted to take you off the breathing machine because Kain Montgomery had made a fool of him. It was like he was getting revenge.’
My sister went on to explain even more. ‘Mom protested. I don’t want you to think she didn’t fight for you, but Dad made it a money thing and brought up the fact that he’d just lost his job, and that we really couldn’t afford to keep you in the hospital anymore.
He was so ready to let you die, Lauren. When the machines were turned off, however, you started breathing on your own.
And that’s the only reason you’re still with us.
So, stop looking at Daddy like you expect him to grow a heart and start acting like he cares.
Daddy only cares about himself. You don’t need to cry over him. ’
Dr. Eloise reached for a few tissues on her desk, handing them to me as I finished up with telling her the story I was told.
“And that’s the dream you had after your sister told you all of that,” my therapist gathered.
“Well the dream makes sense, then. You have a sister who tells you that your father wanted to cut off your life support, the same night, you have a dream about your father wanting to cut your life support. In a symbolic way. In the dream, Kain was your life support.”
“No…” I whispered. “That’s not the part that scared me. In the dream, my father was blackmailing him and using me as leverage. And for some reason, it felt like this was something I had witnessed before.”
“When was the last time you saw Kain?” my doctor asked.
“Last year,” I lied.
She eyed me as if she automatically knew that was a lie, but she didn’t press harder.
I don’t know why, but I was ashamed of the truth.
I’d seen Kain less than forty-eight hours ago.
He’d stopped by to drop off a bag with the stuff I’d left at Seven.
When I took it, I had just assumed that was all that would be in there. This was not the case, however.
In the bag he’d dropped off, my purse was inside, of course, but there was one more thing inside as well.
A red and gold jewelry box with the word Cartier written across the top in beautiful script.
A birthday gift. The only one I’d received that day.
When I’d opened the box, a beautiful gold bangle was nestled between a velvety pocket.
He had a custom engravement written on the inside.
With love. Always. -K
I’d wanted to throw it away so bad, shoving the box back in the bag it’d come in, and walking to my trash bin. But my fingers would not allow me to drop the gift inside. I didn’t want it. I didn’t want anything from him.
But I couldn’t throw it away.
Again, I’d taken the bracelet out of its packaging, bringing it closer to my face and reading the inscription over a dozen more times.
With love.
With love…
Love…
I hated him. I hated him so much for having such a big piece of me.
I hated that I went to sleep thinking about him that night, and I hated that he was still on my mind when I awoke the following morning.
I hated that when he was close, I could feel myself drawing closer to him as if I couldn’t help myself.
God, I missed him.
And I hated myself for it.
Dr. Eloise did not seem pleased with me and my unwillingness to be honest with her, but as our uneventful session drew to a close, all she could do was eye me disapprovingly.
Just like my mother might. I met her stare head on, ready to ride out the last five minutes of our session in awkward silence.
It was she who ultimately gave in. She needed to remind me that I didn’t have a session next week.
“As you know, next Monday is Christmas Day, so—”
“So my appointment is moved to Tuesday at three, I remember.”
My therapist nodded, reaching into the distance that separated us to lay a hand on my shoulder. The touch was gently, meant to convey an air of compassion. Her parting words for me were, “At some point, you’re going to have to open up, sweetheart.”
“I’ll try harder next time.”
***
The sky was cloudy when I stepped outside. Distracted, I was digging in my purse for the keys to my car, getting ready to get on with my day. Talking to Dr. Eloise had reminded me that I had a week until Christmas and I’d yet to buy anyone in my family gifts.
Had it not been for the inscription he’d added, I might’ve been able to get away with giving the bracelet Kain had gifted me to Morgan. She would go nuts if she got a real Cartier Love Bracelet.
I checked the time on my phone, determining that I had about three hours until the mall closed.
There, I could get everyone some cost effective kiosk gift and then cross Christmas shopping off my to-do list. Checking the time on my phone also allowed me to see that I had two new text messages—both from Rashad.
I hadn’t spoken to him in more than two days, the last time we spoke being that night at Seven.
Rolling my eyes, I pulled up his contact profile and pressed down on the screen for a call. It rang twice before he picked up in a frenzy. He sounded surprised to be hearing from me.
“Lauren!” There was relief in his greeting. Perhaps he thought I was never going to call him, and he was relieved to have been wrong.
“Hey, Rashad, I’m—” I didn’t get my chance to apologize to him for the weekend-long silence.
The moment I said his name, a hand reached up from behind me and pulled the phone away from my ear.
After what I told Dr. Eloise about Rashad last week, I half expected her to be standing behind me, taking my phone away from me for what she believed was my own good.
I turned on my heel to confront the small, older woman. If I wasn’t in her office, she had no right to butt into my life. I was already in a bad mood.
Upon turning, it took me a fraction of a second to realize that the person behind me was neither small, or a woman.
My eyes traveled up an athletically built body, rising up along a dark wash pair of jeans, a long-sleeved white Henley shirt, and then ultimately a pair of eyes.
Staring back at me were a familiar set of golden brown eyes, and I felt my insides twist. Is he following me now? How did he know I was here?
Rashad shouted hellos from my phone, asking where I’d gone. “Lauren, are you there? Lauren, hello?”
Kain, just before he hung up the phone, put the receiver to his mouth, and aggressively let my boyfriend know, “She’s busy.”