The Man I Love (The Fish Tales, #1)(96)

Diane nodded. “It’s the first thing to go.”

“And then we started feeling like it again, but every time it was good between us, we’d be shaking wrecks.”

“Anxiety?”

“Awful. Sheer panic. Shaking and nauseous and terrified. Of nothing.”

“Was this before? During?”

“Just after. Occasionally it was good, I mean really good during it and actually peaceful afterward. Occasionally. But then it was like we’d be sucker-punched—it would be twice as bad the next time, like we were being punished. We were flailing. We didn’t know what to do. At all.”

“Did you seek any help?”

He laughed. “Shit no.”

“Why not?”

“Because we were twenty-one and twenty-two years old for crying out loud. Who thinks to go into sex therapy then, no matter what the circumstances? Come on.” He tucked his fingers under his arms. He was nearly shivering and he pressed his feet hard on the floor to stay his knees.

She nodded, twisting the corners of her mouth. “All right, fair point. So you just muddled through it.”

“We did, but we muddled together. Both of us had the same problem. If it were her lying there anxious and I was fine, or the other way around, it would have sucked. But we’d both be nauseous and shaking. We were in it together.”

Diane drew a foot up under her leg. “I was just going to ask you if the loss of sex made the relationship feel diminished in any way. But it sounds as though you remained emotionally bonded. If anything, your bond grew stronger?”

“We were tighter. Definitely. We were rarely apart. We needed each other. We didn’t understand what was happening but we talked about it. We tried to laugh at it.”

“Yet something in your consciousness was linking sex to anxiety.”

Erik raked his hands through his hair, frustrated. “I don’t get it. If walking into the theater made me anxious, or rehearsing, or running a show, it would make sense to me.”

“But instead sex was the trigger. Why do you think?”

“You’re the shrink, you tell me.”

“Do you have any ideas?”

He resisted the urge to throw the pillow at her. “No, I got nothing. I have no idea why my greatest source of joy and comfort made me feel like I was going to die. By all means, enlighten me. The shooting had nothing to do with sex.”

“It didn’t?”

He threw the pillow, but at the side wall, not at Diane. “Oh good lord, don’t do this. What are you getting at?”

Diane’s eyes hadn’t even flicked toward the trajectory of the cushion—apparently worse things had been thrown in this office. Languidly she reached for her coffee cup and took a reflective sip. “Let’s back up a little. How soon prior to the shooting did you have sex with Daisy? Or been in any kind of sexual environment with her.”

“I told you I can’t remember anything before the shooting.”

Diane put her coffee cup down. “Try,” she said.

Erik exhaled. “Let me think.”

“Any kind of physical, loving, intimate way. What was the last time you remember before the shooting?”

The cold in his limbs intensified, grew prickling and sinister as he tried to think. “It was….” Every thought he began bumped into an invisible wall and splintered. “It was—” he began a half-dozen times, only to trail off as his mind faded out, and every time it faded out, his chest got tighter. “Diane, I’m sorry. I can’t think when,” he finally said. “It’s gone.”

“You’re getting agitated.”

“I know.” He wasn’t feeling good. Something was wrong.

“Do you feel frightened?”

“A little bit… Yeah.”

Her voice dropped, not in volume, but in pitch, lower, resonant, calm. “I think this is important,” she said.

He tried to get air in past the obstruction in his chest. He wanted to say I can’t breathe, but it came out, “I can’t remember.”

“Try to relax, Erik. Listen to my voice. We’re going to work through this together.”

He was shaking now. A cold, dark wind through him, trying to blow him back from going down this road. “What’s happening to me?”

Diane got up slowly, being careful not to startle him. “Your body is trying to keep you from remembering.” She took a blanket from one of the other easy chairs and held it out to him. “It’s going to be frightening but it is not going to kill you. I promise. Let it come back to you. I’m right here. I’m not going to let you face it alone.”

It seemed a supreme act of bravery to put himself into her hands, but he did, wrapping the blanket around him like armor. “All right.”

“Try to remember when, before the shooting, you were last sexual with Daisy.”

He closed his eyes. “I don’t even know where to start rewinding.”

“Start in the aisle. When you came out of the booth into the aisle. What was before?”

“I was under the console with the broken glass. And before… I was watching the shit go down. And before that I was running lights”

“Now back up from there. Before James came in. Before the dancing even started. What were you doing?”