“Oh come on,” Lucy begged from the passenger seat that evening.
“No way.”
“You are no fun.”
“That’s not what you said last night. More than once. I’m pretty sure I remember you calling me some sort of deity.”
Her eyebrow lifted haughtily as I pulled into the parking lot for group therapy. “My my, someone is developing a complex the more time we spend on that mattress.”
“And you’re the one who wants to walk into that gym with your hand on my ass.”
“Hell yeah, I do. I want Molly’s eyes to bug out of her puny little head.” Lucy grinned at her reflection in the mirror she’d pulled down from the visor in the passenger seat. “Little hooker wanted to bed you that first night.”
I laughed, surprised at how easily the sound came out of me now. I’d laughed more in the last three days than the previous three years combined. “You know, you call you her an awful lot of mean names. What happened to your feminism? Molly should be able to sleep with whoever she wants.”
Lucy made a snorting noise. “I’m not judging her for that. If she wants to sleep with the entire faculty at all of her schools, go for it, but you’re not her type. She should leave some for the rest of us.”
Satisfaction roared through me as I turned the car off. Claude offered to drive me, but since Lucy was still over, I figured it was more convenient for me to do it. Besides, I couldn’t guarantee that Claude didn’t report everything back to my mother. Lucy was still too much of a wild-card to display for Claude’s sharp eyes.
“Jealous?” I asked lightly. I wanted her to feel jealous of Molly’s attention toward me, especially since I’d never been interested.
“Me? Jealous?” She blew a raspberry with her lips. Lucy glanced through the windows to make sure no one was around us. When there was no one in the parking lot, she leaned forward and gripped my shirt with a small fist and dragged me over to her until our mouths were almost touching. “I have nothing to be jealous of, considering I was the one riding you this morning. And last night. And yesterday morning.”
My spine heated at the memories, and those flames spread through my body. “True.”
She flopped back in the seat and sighed. “But I suppose we can’t put on a show, huh?”
“Why not?”
Her head turned so she could look at me. “Watkins. He may not approve.”
“Ah. Do we need his approval?”
Lucy looked away and went quiet for a few seconds. “I’m sure you don’t. But it’s different for me.”
“How so?”
She closed her eyes and took a few deep breaths, which made me stop breathing. Lucy had given me so little of herself, besides the fun and the sexy, the brash woman who all but admitted to a hardware store employee that we were burying something six feet under my garage floor. When it came to pulling up the curtain of who she really was, Lucy was much slower to take action.
Quite desperately, I wanted to take control of it. Tear away that curtain and shed light on what was inside of her. What made her her. Because what I knew of her, of the effect she’d had on my life, I only wanted more.
“You’re in therapy because you choose to be, right?”
I nodded, but her eyes were still closed. “Yeah.”
Her eyelids lifted slowly and she had to blink a few times because the sun was shining brightly through the windshield. “I don’t have that choice. I have a parole officer checking up to collect my urine and Watkins taking note of every word out of my mouth so they can compare with each other. If I miss a group therapy meeting, it’ll raise a red flag for both of them. And showing up with the token rich guy in the group? Watkins will…” her voice trailed off and she swallowed. Almost like she hadn’t wanted to let all of that out.
“Watkins will what?”
Her chest rose and fell with her deep breaths, and my heart hammered in my chest with the realization that I very much wanted to know what she would say next, if she chose to be honest with me. Asking for honesty from Lucy was like tiptoeing through a minefield. One wrong step, and I could destroy everything we’d built in a fiery explosion. All that would be left is a burned-out husk.
“He just won’t believe it’s real.” Only briefly, Lucy looked over at me, but then she took her eyes from me again. I wished she wouldn’t. I wanted them on me all the time now, so that I could try and decipher what she saw when she looked at me, because it was different than how anyone had looked at me before. Like she saw someone good and strong. “He won’t trust it.”
“He won’t, huh?”
“Look, I should walk in first. Make it less obvious.”
Maybe her words were the kind I could take at face value, or maybe they were loaded with subtext that would disappoint me once I deciphered them. But she wasn’t wrong. All of this was different for her than it was for me. There could be lasting negative consequences for Lucy if we had a misstep. So I let her slip out of the door and counted to thirty before I walked in.
When I opened the gym door, she was already in her usual chair. Watkins smiled at me, and Ryan the rageaholic gave me a look that I roughly equated to him imagining me dead. Molly twirled her hair and winked when I sat down next to her.
My chair was on the opposite side of the circle from Lucy, so I had no reason not to stare at her. Her eyes were trained on the shiny floor, her hands knit together in her lap.
“Does anyone want to start out?” Watkins asked, his ever-present notepad clutched in one hand. His attention briefly touched on me, but he didn’t linger. Lucy raised her hand. “Yes, Miss Connors.”
“I guess I’m wondering if you can explain something to me.”
Watkins gestured for her to continue.
Her arms crossed defensively across her chest. “What’s the point of this group?”
His eyebrows popped up briefly. “What do you mean?”
I held my breath, and even dead zombie guy gave Lucy a curious look. She shrugged. “I just mean … we sit here. No one wants to share anything real. What do we get out of this? Other than checking off a box on our time served.”
Lucy didn’t sound combative, only curious. I wondered how much of our conversation in the car had triggered this. Watkins opinion of our relationship, how it would affect her probation, the believability of a relationship between us.
“You’d like the group to be more real, Lucy?”
His words had the effect of a bucket of ice water being thrown on her. Her posture loosened, and her eyes touched on everyone around the circle. She seemed genuinely surprised that everyone was paying attention to her. “Well … I’m just wondering if you’ve got a reason why we have to sit here like this.”
“I do,” Watkins said easily. “Do you really want to know?”
“I’d like to know,” Molly piped up, shifting in her seat so that her shoulder brushed mine. Lucy’s eyes narrowed dangerously, and I smiled and moved away. Just to be safe, I shifted my seat a couple inches in the opposite direction.
“I don’t,” Ryan muttered.
Watkins set his pen down on the pad of paper and gave everyone around the circle a glance. “Talking in a group setting like this has multiple benefits. It’s helpful in a therapeutic setting for the support that you can receive from your peers who might also struggle with the same thing you do.”
He’d said the same thing to me, and at the time, I hated that he’d called them my peers. But despite whatever social strata we hailed from, what our diagnoses was, we were peers.
“A group can also act as mirror, showing you sides of yourself that you may not have recognized before. It gives a different perspective on how to effectively deal with whatever issues you’ve come to get help with. Sometimes people have blind spots, often unknowingly, in working on their recovery. When you have an unbiased group of people that help you view yourself differently, they can get rid of those blind spots that might be blocking your recovery.”
“No one can help me recover from being dead,” Zombie guy whispered next to me and I pinched the bridge of my nose when Lucy choked on a laugh. Watkins had to dip his head to hide a smile and Molly covered her mouth with one hand. Ryan just stared at the wall.
Watkins straightened, recovering better than I thought possible in such a short amount of time.
“Well, yes. We can continue working on that, Brett.”
When I caught Lucy’s eyes, they were bright with amusement and her lips held the slightest hint of a smile. Is that what Lucy had done to me? Unblocked blind spots that I hadn’t realized were there?
She’d done something, even if it didn’t have a fancy name from a therapist. And watching her for the rest of the session, the question I certainly couldn’t answer was what my life might look like if she wasn’t in it anymore.
Probably because I didn’t want to.