“What is it that you’re so afraid of?”
Watkins looked down his nose at me, and I fought not to roll my eyes at the cliché question. I’d been to one psychiatrist or another since I was a teenager, which meant I knew my way around Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. He could word the questions as innocently as he wanted, I knew exactly what he was getting at- that my perception of the event was causing the anxiety, not the event itself. And when something happened to reaffirm that, the negative cycle continued, supporting the feeling of being anxious in the first place.
“I’m not afraid of the group, if that’s what you’re trying to get at. I think my perception of them is pretty fuckin spot on.”
He lifted his eyebrows briefly at my cursing. It wasn’t something I indulged in often, except in my head. My manners were so engraved in me from birth that it was difficult to break.
Watkins leaned over his sedate metal desk and scribbled onto his yellow legal pad. The chair squeaked obnoxiously under his weight when he turned to face me again. His office was mind-numbingly boring—off-white walls, a sad looking plant in the corner, only his diplomas framed and displayed behind his desk—but I preferred that to the sleek offices of my former therapist who probably spent more time screwing his interior decorator than reviewing patient files.
While I thought about my answer, I couldn’t help but fidget when I thought of the way Lucy had described all of them, whether her observations were clouding my judgment. There was certainly something about her that was affecting me. Her looks, the classic beauty that she possessed was completely incongruous with the sharp, droll words that came out of her mouth. She looked like someone that I’d see at one of the black-tie events that I was forced to attend, albeit in completely different clothes than I’d seen her wear thus far.
“Are you going to tell me?” Watkins asked, leaning back in his chair and propping his folded hands over his stomach. A casual pose that almost looked genuine. Knowing him, it probably was genuine. He didn’t push, didn’t pry too much. A ‘good cop’ therapist.
I sighed and scratched along the edge of my jaw. “It’s not fear. I’m not afraid of the people in the group or worry that they’re going to do me harm.”
“That’s good.”
That time I did roll my eyes. Yay, maybe I’d get a gold star on my notes for today because my paranoia wasn’t flaring up in the presence of new people.
“I just don’t understand why you think it’s necessary. I have nothing in common with any of them,” I said in a curt voice, my distaste for the entire process coating every word that came out of my mouth. “From what I can gather, it’s a group of misfits who only share their therapist in common.”
Watkins laughed under his breath and peered over the rim of his glasses at me. “That’s a pretty big thing to have in common, don’t you think?”
“No. Because I’m not paying you an exorbitant hourly fee so that I can listen to a coed bemoan the fact that her professor won’t screw her senseless or listen to the pathological liar try to outdo herself every time she’s in front of me. I pay you to help me manage my anxiety so that it doesn’t completely interfere with my ability to live a normal life.”
“Which one is the pathological liar?”
I gave him a dry look, hating that I could picture her green eyes in an instant, sparkling up at me when we spoke.
Sparkling. At me. Though that could’ve been coke if she was a druggie, too. “Lucy. And like you’d correct me if I was wrong about her diagnosis.”
He lifted his chin briefly in concession. “True. Just interesting to see how you define your peers.”
“They are not my peers.” I leaned forward in the boring brown chair that I sat in every week for the last six months, and my fingers dug painfully into the metal arms. “I have nothing in common with them.”
Watkins lifted a finger and waved it at me. “Can I back up to something you said a little bit ago?”
“It’s not like I have a choice.”
“You said you pay me to help you make sure that you’re still living a normal life despite the anxiety that you deal with.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose. “I did say that.”
“You think you’re living a normal life?” His tone was light, but I knew him well enough now that he was about to hit me over the head with the psychologists’ equivalent of a sledgehammer.
We had a pretty impressive staring contest for about fifteen seconds before I held my arms out to the side. “Go ahead. Make some sort of sweeping, over-arching statement about me as a person.”
His eyes hardened a little, even though he smiled. It didn’t happen often, but when Watkins slipped into ‘bad cop’ therapist, it made me itchy. Then he cleared his throat and I fought the instinct to run from the office.
“You don’t work, Xavier. You live in a wealthy neighborhood in a brand-new house that you paid for with a trust fund that you did nothing to earn, except be born to the right people.”
“Or wrong people, depending on your definition,” I interrupted quietly. He laughed, because he knew about my mother’s hovering tendencies, debatably the root of where my anxiety came from in the first place.
“You don’t date. You don’t have friends.” He held my eyes, and I only made it a few more seconds before I had to look away and focus on a dent in the wall that needed to be patched up. Maybe the meathead punched his fist into the wall on his way out of one of his sessions. Shame licked across my skin in pulses, the pathetic sensation of having someone nail you with a truth that you hated to admit.
“Good thing I’m not here for depression, because you definitely would’ve made it worse.”
He wasn’t deterred in the slightest. “What about that is normal? Because you’re physically capable of leaving the house? Because you don’t have a panic attack when a woman talks to you in public?”
I slicked my tongue over my teeth and stared at him. “So now I need to be a popular guy in order to make you happy?”
“Of course not.” He shook his head. “But you’re a young man, whom by all intents and purposes, should have no problem making friends or going on dates.”
“Maybe I don’t want to go on dates,” I said snappishly.
“Are you afraid of sexual intimacy?”
I set my jaw and glared. “No. I’ve had sex before. With more than one woman.”
He wrote that down. Of course he did. “How long has it been?”
One year and forty-seven days, with a woman ten years my senior who knew my father and was recently divorced, very lonely and knew her way around a meaningless fling. We both scratched an itch, shamelessly using each other in a way that was mutually beneficial. She’d walked out of the hotel room smiling, and I took a hot shower afterward, scrubbing violently to rid myself of the scent of her perfume. But there was no way I was telling him any of that.
When I didn’t answer, he sighed and set his pen down. “Do you ever wish for companionship, even if it’s platonic?”
That was harder to answer for a different reason. Watkins was trying, I’d have to give him that. He seemed to genuinely care about me, care that I wasn’t locking myself up at home because it was easier.
So, I smoothed my hands down the tops of my thighs and took a deep breath. “Sometimes. But most people just irritate me. I don’t like talking about mundane things or wondering whether they’re only being polite to me because of who my parents are. So yes, sometimes I wish I had someone in my life that I could talk to without them getting paid to do it.”
“Fair enough.” He smiled, which made me smile. Sort of. My lips moved a little, at least. “So what should we do to go about fixing that?”
“I’ll probably just get a dog. Then I don’t have to talk about stupid shit.”
He ignored me and started tidying up the stacks of files that always littered his desk. “Your homework this week is to have a conversation with a woman you find attractive and ask her out on a date.”
My skin went hot at the thought. “No.”
“Yes. You don’t need to actually go on the date before our next session, but just have a conversation with someone that you aren’t paying to be there.”
I stood and narrowed my eyes at him. “I’m not doing that. Knowing my luck, I’d pick someone awful or flighty or incapable of intelligent conversation. Or worse, a gold digger who only wants me for my last name.”
Watkins shook his head and a wry smile curved his lips. “Xavier, someday you’ll learn that the whole world is not out to get you.”
Yeah. Okay. I jerked my chin and walked out of the office, his words still ringing through my brain.