Rose
"How have you been since our last visit, Rosalie?" Dr. Campbell sets a cup of coffee on the table in front of me before taking his usual chair.
"Thank you." I wrap both hands around the warmth. "I had a pretty rough episode a couple of nights ago. A good friend was able to get me through it, but it was probably one of the worst I've had in a while."
He nods and takes a sip from his mug, crossing one leg over the other and letting the silence do its usual work.
Today it's a black button-down, green trousers, brown loafers.
He's a nice-looking man, about my age, and I've always found him attractive in the way you find a locked museum exhibit attractive: appreciated entirely through glass.
That was on purpose.
I forced myself to choose a male therapist back when sitting alone in a room with any man made my skin crawl, and he's been a balm through some of my worst years.
A few months into our sessions, he'd asked me about it directly.
Most survivors in your position request a woman.
Why did you choose me? And because I've never seen the point of paying a man three hundred dollars an hour to lie to him, I told him the truth.
I'd picked his photo out of the practice directory specifically because he was attractive, and that felt like the harder thing, so it was probably the right one.
He'd nodded, the way he does, and told me my instinct was sound.
It gave me a place to practice holding attraction and safety in the same room, somewhere I kept all the power and nothing would ever come of it.
Rewiring, he'd called it. Teaching my nervous system that noticing a man didn't have to mean bracing for one.
It worked, mostly. It's part of how I eventually learned to take lovers on my own terms.
The fact is, I'd found my mentor singularly attractive.
He was older, accomplished, in a position of power and unhealthily good-looking, and yes, I looked up to him.
The monster aside, his accolades were praiseworthy.
I can still say that sentence, which tells you something about how deep the wiring goes.
But the only reason I was in that building with him so late at night was because I had a crush on him and sought out his attention.
I didn't want anything to happen. I never would have allowed anything to happen.
But being alone in his orbit made me feel chosen, and had I not been attracted to him, I never would've put myself somewhere so vulnerable.
I know that's textbook victim-blaming.
The worst case of it.
Hence the therapist.
"Did you hear my question, Rosalie?" Dr. Campbell prompts gently. "What triggered the episode?"
I lean back and tuck my legs beneath me. "I went to friends and family night at Noctra, and James was there. He's gotten so much taller since I last saw him. And he spoke to me. He was right there at my table, talking to me like a stranger."
"You are a stranger to him." There's no cruelty in it. He just sets the fact between us. "Are you regretting that decision?"
"No. Samson gave him a life I couldn't have. I don't regret it." I take a breath and let the next part out more slowly. "He looks like me."
The memory of that toothy grin pulls a smile out of me.
"It's like I saw him for the first time when he came up close. I'd spent years bracing for him to be like Wesley. To look like him, move like him, have some part of him I couldn't unsee. But he doesn't. He looks like me. Like Michael did when he was younger."
"And that's what caused the episode?"
"In part, yes. And..." I stare down into my coffee. "I started having that invisible feeling again."
He knows exactly what I mean.
"Thoughts of harming yourself?"
I lower my head and nod.
I know I shouldn't feel ashamed. My depression is a disease like any other, and I'd never let Michael carry shame over something like this. But some part of me genuinely believed I'd be cured by now.
Silly as that sounds.
"Go on," he says. "Finish your thought."
I let my head fall back against the cushion and close my eyes.
"There's an exhaustion setting in that I can't stop. It's like I'm standing on a rooftop watching these ominous clouds roll in from a distance, and I know they're coming straight for me, but there's nowhere I can go that they won't find."
I hear the soft clink of Dr. Campbell setting his mug down, followed by his pen moving across the notepad.
"Go on."
"I'm a stranger to James. I'm no one to him.
I spoke his name and he looked concerned, like I might be someone he needed to be careful of.
Michael is a grown man now, and half of what I do to help him feels like coddling a teenager who needs to grow up without big sister rushing in to fix every mistake.
I don't have a relationship. I walked in on David having sex with someone else right after I gave him a key to my place, and he used my own bed to do it. "
I leave out that it was a man.
I can only absorb so much humiliation per session.
"That same night, I went to my club and let another woman's sub go down on me while I held his leash."
He flinches.
Visibly.
I don't take it personally. I pay him to hear my life, not to be built for it.
"Have you considered burnout, Rosalie?"
He sets the notepad aside and leans forward, elbows on his knees, and I know this posture. This is the one he uses when he's about to say something he's been sitting on for a while.
"We started seeing each other when you returned to Los Angeles.
Before that, you spent years after the assault with no support and no treatment.
You raised Michael. You watched James grow up in another family's home, two doors down from your own childhood house.
You stayed in school. You worked. You built a career while helping Michael build his business.
" He pauses. "Rosalie, when have you stopped? "
I feel the tears start to well, and right behind them comes the anger.
Reliable. Punctual. Always happy to report for duty the second my body embarrasses me.
"Can't we just up my meds and send me on my way?" I sit straighter and angrily swipe at the one tear that manages to escape.
Dr. Campbell doesn't answer immediately. He just watches me, and I want to scream in his face, which I'm self-aware enough to know has absolutely nothing to do with him and currently angry enough not to care.
"What's causing your anger right now?" His voice stays gentle. He's seen the warning signs enough times to know better than to match my energy. "Is it that you started to cry?"
I cross my arms and stare at the wall. My breathing is heavier than I'd like, and knowing he can hear it only pisses me off more.
"I haven't had the luxury of stopping, Dr. Campbell." It comes out low. "My parents left me to raise Michael. I had to make sure he got the life they would've wanted for him. I owed them that much."
The sob starts climbing my throat, so naturally I talk faster, because I believe I can outrun basic human physiology if I increase my word count.
"It was my fault they were on that plane. They were coming to see me. I'd called them crying because it had been a brutal week. I was burning the candle at both ends, studying for the hardest exams of my life, and I missed home. I missed them. So they decided to surprise me."
The sob wins.
"My insipid, weak crying got them killed."
Dr. Campbell doesn't rush to argue with me. He reaches over, picks up the box of tissues and hands it across.
"Has it been getting harder to push the tears back?" he asks after a moment. "Have you noticed yourself unable to stop them lately?"
I pull out a tissue and wipe under my eyes, then my nose, dignity having left the session early.
"In all our years together, this is the second time you've cried in this room," he continues. "The first was our very first session."
I nod.
"Then I think this is the part we need to stop treating as something you can indefinitely control, Rosalie.
You've spent years telling me about your never happened drawer.
We've also spent years discussing the fact that avoidance works until it doesn't." His expression softens.
"I think you're reaching the point where it doesn't."
"No pressure, eh?" I laugh wetly into the tissue.
"I'm not telling you this to scare you. I'm telling you because I don't want you mistaking what happens next for failure.
" He sits back slightly. "You've survived by taking care of everyone and everything around you.
That worked. It got you through years when you didn't have another option.
But survival strategies can become very expensive when you keep paying for them long after the emergency. "
That one lands harder than I want it to.
"You need a break, Rosalie. Not a weekend. Not another outlet. Not another system for keeping yourself functional. You need space to actually process what happened to you instead of continuing to build around it."
I look down at the tissue mangled between my fingers.
"Sounds delightful."
"I suspect you'll hate it."
"Finally, something we agree on."
That gets the smallest smile out of him.
Then he rises, crosses to his desk and takes a card from the drawer.
"This is my sister, Jessica Knowles. She specializes in sexual trauma.
With your permission, I'd like to speak with her about bringing her into your treatment and forward the appropriate records.
Not because I'm handing you off. I think you need more specialized support for this piece than we've been using. "
I take the card and turn it over between my fingers.
Jessica Knowles.
"So you think I'm getting worse."
"I think what you've been holding back is getting harder to hold back."
I look at him.
"That's therapist for the dam is breaking, isn't it?"
His mouth twitches. "If that's the metaphor you prefer."
"I don't prefer any of them. They're all very ominous."
"Then forget the metaphor." His expression settles. "You're exhausted, you're having more difficulty containing your emotions, and you've had thoughts of harming yourself again. I don't want you facing that with the same level of support you had when those things were easier to contain."
Well.
That's considerably less mystical.
Also harder to make fun of.
Rude.
I look back down at Jessica's card.
The creepy tarot reading version was almost preferable. Beware of the water, Rosalie. I could've worked with that. Bought a life jacket. Avoided beaches. Maybe carried emergency floaties in my purse.
This version is worse because I know he's right.
I've been feeling it for months. Years, if I'm being honest with myself. Something is getting harder to hold together, and knowing that is one thing.
Knowing what the hell I'm supposed to do when I can't hold it anymore is something else entirely.