Chapter Thirteen
SAWYER
I woke in a cold sweat, my heart racing, hands balled into fists at my side. I couldn’t breathe; I couldn’t remember how to catch a breath. My eyes bulged, and I looked around my room wildly, expecting to see a man crouched with a gun, expecting to see my comrades dead on the floor. I was still in Afganistan in my mind, stuck in a foreign land with no help and no way to get out. I couldn’t escape. I was going to die.
But when I searched my surroundings, I saw a baseball poster. I saw a high school trophy for baseball sitting on an old wooden dresser. I saw a suitcase propped against a door. Never in my life had my room looked to me so foreign and so out of place as it did in that instant. I closed my eyes, but opened them again—I didn’t want to go back to sleep and face that again. These monsters I faced in consciousness were better than what awaited me in sleep.
I always forgot when I woke up. That was the worst part of it. When my eyes opened, I was back in Austin, and I couldn’t remember what had woken me up in the first place. I only knew that I was scared and I had to get my heart to slow down. The whole world didn’t feel right, though. Everything felt gross and obscene. How could I be looking at a baseball poster when somewhere, in some other world, there was a man bleeding out on the floor?
I laid in bed for a while until I felt better, and by then, the sun was coming up through the window. I needed to get back to my day. Something nagged in the back of my mind, and when I checked my phone, I saw that I had an appointment with Quinn. I smiled and got up, eager to prepare for that.
Even if we couldn’t date, even if she didn’t want to see me, I was excited to see her. She was one of the few people I could talk to that didn’t judge me, or seem to judge me. She let me talk and didn’t treat me like I was somehow special or different. I was neither deified nor ridiculed in her office. As a person, she was level-headed and beautiful and Christ, I wasn’t done being interested in her.
It probably had something to do with that I hadn’t been in the company of a woman in years. I would have found anyone attractive—at least, that’s what I told myself as I got ready, pulling my shoes on. Quinn didn’t deserve to be pressured into a relationship with someone who could barely tell attraction from a bad case of blue balls.
Which, of course, didn’t stop me from thinking about it while I drove to her office. I tried to keep a level head, but I was excited to see her, and I wanted to talk to her. That was perfectly normal, though wasn’t it? To be excited to see a therapist?
When I arrived, I did my best not to notice. She wore a skirt today, long legs supple and sturdy, prominent because of the heels she wore. I didn’t notice the firm curve of her bottom under the tight skirt, I didn’t think about how it might feel under my fingers. I didn’t imagine holding the slender waist or seeing the rest of the smooth breasts that threatened to peek out from under her top.
None of this. I could notice none of this. I met her calm blue eyes and did not watch her blonde hair; she’d worn it down, and it fell like every cliché I could think of to describe hair—like a waterfall, tumbling past her shoulders, like everything I’d ever wanted to knot my fingers in.
I exhaled, and she lifted her brow. “Sawyer, are you alright?”
Perfectly alright, if not on edge. I offered her a smile and nodded. “Yeah, I’m alright. Can I come in?” I was on time today, not early like I was before.
She offered me a cup of tea, which I turned down—I wasn’t a fan of tea and preferred coffee, but I hadn’t had coffee in some time. She sat down in her chair, and I noticed she wasn’t wearing her glasses today. Part of me wanted to believe that she’d dressed this way to get attention from me. It would at least make me feel better about noticing it. But I had no way of asking her, and she had no way of bringing it up, and so we began the session as though I weren’t moments away from absolutely losing my mind.
“Are you doing alright today?” She asked.
I nodded and thought about the night before. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m okay.”
“You seem like something’s bothering you.”
Something was bothering me, but it wasn’t something that I could tell her. I didn’t want to lie and say that I was fine—that would be an obvious lie. So instead, I decided to tell her something that wasn’t untrue. “I’ve been having some trouble sleeping,” I said.
“Oh? Nightmares?”
“Sort of.” I ran a hand through my hair. “I mean, I think they are. I wake up, and I’m all panicked. But I never remember what any of it was about. I just know that I’m freaking out, you know?”
Quinn clicked her pen. “Do you get a cold sweat, hard time breathing, pounding heart?”
“Yeah.”
“And you don’t remember what they are when you wake up?”
“Right. It’s weird. It takes me a few seconds to orient myself, and then I’m just… awake.” I shook my head. “And it’s hard for me to fall asleep after.”
She took a few notes. “That’s probably night terrors. People who get those often say that they don’t know what happened in the dream, but it’s kind of like an unconscious panic attack.”
“Huh.” I shrugged. “They’re a pain, in any case.”
“They usually happen due to some kind of disturbance,” she explained further. She tilted her head slightly. “They’re common in victims of PTSD, for example.”
I stared at her for a moment, and I frowned. I didn’t want to tell her that she was wrong, but at the same time, she couldn’t be right. “I don’t know if that’s really enough to determine that I have PTSD.”
“No, it’s not,” she agreed. “I haven’t been seeing you long enough to make any kind of diagnosis. But it is enough to tell me that there might be something that happened overseas after all. Or, hell, maybe something that happened before you went overseas.”
She was onto me, then. It seemed there wasn’t a secret I could keep from her. There weren’t any secrets that I wanted to keep from her, either, except the ones that might make her look at me with disgust. Because, in the back of my mind, I still wanted her to like me. It was stupid and absurd, but it was true.
“I…” I frowned and furrowed my brow. “I, um, I’m still bothered some by some of what happened. Some of the things I saw, anyway, some of the things I, um…” I shook my head, surprised at my own inability to talk about it.
Quinn didn’t say anything. She watched me without pity, without that awful look people got where they wanted, in some sense, to hear a horrible war story. I saw it often in civilians. They yearned for stories about bodies being blown apart. They ached for blood because they had no idea what it was really like.
There was none of that in the way she watched me. She was merely waiting, waiting to see if I’d finish my story, if I’d leave off. It was the most patient look I’d gotten since I came home, without demand or neediness.
I wanted her to look at me with neediness, but a different sort. The thoughts began to bubble to mind again, and I pushed them down, opting to continue talking instead of thinking about my name on her lips as…
“I don’t think I can talk about the specifics,” I said. I cleared my throat. “I, um, I don’t think I can talk about exactly… Can’t tell the stories.”
Quinn nodded, finally having her answer, and she jotted it down. How could she sit there and not sense the tension in the room? I must be imagining it. I was confusing this entire relationship with my horrible, horrible case of blue balls. It was shameful. I wanted to be ashamed but couldn’t manage it.
“That’s perfectly fine,” Quinn said. “Honestly, just that you admitted you had something happen is a big step. You’re acknowledging the problem.”
I hadn’t acknowledged my biggest and most current problem. But, Quinn didn’t need to know that right at this moment. I nodded, offering a terse smile.
“And of course, you know that this is all confidential,” Quinn reminded me.
“I know,” I said. Of course. Because she was my doctor, and I was her patient, and this was all perfectly fucking professional.
We spoke mainly about my childhood for the rest of the session, not really making any breakthroughs or discussing anything important. I didn’t want to disclose anything further but did want to talk about something to distract from my inability to get my mind off of her in the worst way possible.
When the session was through, I stood up. “Thank you,” I said, and started to dart out the door.
“Wait, Sawyer.”
When I turned around, she had her bottom lip in her teeth. If I could have taken her right there, I would have done it. I took a breath to steady myself.
“I was thinking…” Quinn shook her head. “Look, I was thinking that maybe you should see someone else.”
Shit. I’d done something. I’d given myself away. I knew for a fact I didn’t have a boner, and I hadn’t made any lewd comments, so I wasn’t sure what I’d done, but I’d done something to betray my intentions. “What?”
“Not that there’s any problem,” Quinn said. “I was just thinking you should see someone else because I… I’d like to get to know you better. Outside of here. I want to go to dinner with you.”
I stared at her, unsure of what exactly to say. All of a sudden I wasn’t sure that I’d ever known how to speak. “I don’t want to see someone else.”
“But I…”
A sense of dread filled my stomach. I wouldn’t be able to talk this easily to anyone else. No one else listened this well. I walked forward and, despite the muscles in my body that screamed at me not to do it, took her hand in mine.
“You might be the only one who can help me,” I said carefully.
She stared at me, eyes wide. I could see the red coming to the surface of her cheeks, and her mouth parted slightly. I’d gone too far, and yet not far enough. She didn’t move away. The silence hung in the air like an impenetrable cloud.
She leaned forward, and I claimed her mouth in a kiss.