Confidential(46)

“How old do you think you are?”

“Not very. She got clean by the time I was in kindergarten. Then she was the world’s best mother. But before that, it was a really different story.”

“One you’re finally ready to tell.” His expression turned admiring. “You are just so strong, Lucy. You amaze me.”

With the way he was looking at me, I actually felt it. I mean, I felt sort of amazing. “It’s because of you.”

“No.”

“Yes.” Something came over me, and I approached him, kneeling, my chin tipped upward to meet his eyes. I wouldn’t be the first to look away. I couldn’t. I was too strong for that. I wanted this. I wanted him. “Michael.”

He didn’t move a muscle. Was there fear in his eyes? “This can’t happen.”

“I’m not a little girl.”

“I’m your therapist. I know it might not feel like it, but that’s a position of power. Being with you the way I think you’re suggesting is an abuse of that power.”

I shook my head, which was still upturned, coy. I hadn’t inhabited this role in so long.

Adam. This was how I used to play it with Adam. Me below and him above. You know so much about the world, and I know nothing. Oh, you big man, I’m just a little girl.

I got up and walked around the office, trying to shake it off. I’d been the victim. Because I couldn’t have been otherwise. I was just a little girl. A teenager is a child. My body had been developed, but my brain hadn’t. Now it was. Adam had made me a victim; I’d made myself a survivor. Wanting Michael was not the same as wanting Adam. Not at all.

“What’s going on?” He was talking in his Dr. Baylor voice, authoritative and soothing at once.

“It’s hard to breathe,” I said, “but I can’t stop moving.”

“Is it the recovered memories? About your mother and that man’s house?”

“No.” I started to wring my hands, which had gone numb. “I don’t know.”

“I’m going to ask you to do something.” Now his voice was slow and deliberate, almost hypnotic, but I was still pacing. I wanted to run, only I wanted to stay close to him. He was the only thing that could save me. Yet he’d rejected me, hadn’t he? He’d told me it couldn’t happen.

He hadn’t said he didn’t want it to happen. He said it couldn’t. But he was wrong. We were two mature adults, and we could decide to take our relationship in a different direction. We could make the rules together. I wasn’t a child.

“Sit down, please,” he said, and I found a way to do it, perching on the couch, though my legs stayed in motion, bobbing up and down.

“I can’t stop them,” I said. “Can you help me?” I meant, would he come and touch me? If he held me again, like last time . . .

“I want you to try to press your feet against the floor as hard as you can. Then just feel them there, flat.”

“I can’t. They’re still going.”

“Just try.” He was so gentle. So perfect.

I wanted to please him, so I did it. I tried. I pressed down from my heels to my toes, and he was still talking, telling me to feel only my feet, that all my energy and my awareness should go to my feet, and I was listening to him, like I was in a trance. When I opened my eyes, my legs had stilled. I felt something akin to calm.

“You did it!” I told him.

“I’m thinking maybe we’re moving too fast, kind of like your feet were. Your body is trying to tell us important information. Between twice-a-week sessions and the writing, it’s too much.”

“No, it’s not!”

“You were decompensating right in front of me. Now, some of that’s to be expected when we’re doing trauma work, but it can be a sign we need to slow down.”

He’d just talked me down off the ledge, and now he was trying to put me right back up there. “What are you saying, exactly?”

“We could go back to once a week and pull back on the intensity—”

I couldn’t wait seven whole days to see him. “If this is about the money, I can start paying. I’ll pay for both sessions.”

“It’s not about money.”

“Is it about earlier, when I went and sat by you? That made you uncomfortable and now you want to get some distance?”

“No, it’s about what’s best for you. I don’t want to foster an unhealthy dependency, and I’m afraid that’s what’s happening. I need to get some more consultation on this.”

I stared at him. “Consultation? As in, you’ve been talking about me to other people?”

“To one other person. Her name is Dr. Devers. She’s a highly skilled trauma therapist. It’s for your protection, a safeguard for the treatment process.”

I didn’t understand how talking to another woman about me constituted protection. What about confidentiality?

“It’s in the Consent to Treatment you signed when we first started. It says that sometimes, I might need to seek consultation from colleagues. Make sure I’m providing responsible treatment. I never use your name.”

“And what does she say about me, this colleague of yours?” Had he told her about the other day and how he wrapped his body around mine in a decidedly unprofessional manner?