He’s chatting with Josie.
The man of my dreams.
Actually, Dr. Simon Blackwood is the man who comes into my dreams. Not sure if it’s the same thing. Not sure if I should be dreaming about him at all.
The enemy. But honestly, he doesn’t feel like one.
He feels like someone I know but not really. Because I don’t know him.
All I know is that he doesn’t act like any other doctor I’ve met on the Outside. He hasn’t judged me or looked at me with condescension. Like he knows everything about my illness and the things I need, and I know nothing.
I also know that he’s fixing a house he doesn’t live in and he doesn’t like to be called a hero, but he saves people from needles and talks about putting my book back together.
Other things about him, I’ve only imagined.
Like his body. All powerful and male.
After that first time when I touched myself thinking that he was watching me, I’ve thought about him, dreamt about him daily. Every night, I feel like I have eyes on me and I’m putting on a show for him. But of course, no one’s there, at my little window.
I am the ballerina with no one to perform for but I do it anyway because my body won’t let me stop.
Sitting in the dining hall during lunch, I squirm in my chair, feeling full and achy. I cross my arms across my chest to hide my tightened nipples as I watch him chat with Josie. Not that he’s a chatting type, but apparently for her he is.
Suddenly, I’ve lost my appetite for the food in front of me.
I don’t feel like eating my chicken when Josie is close enough to count his eyelashes. Or the fact that he’s looking at her like she’s a wonder of the world when he hasn’t even looked at me once since we talked about needles last week.
Okay, so maybe not a wonder of the world, but something. Something that gives him pleasure. Something that makes his soft lips tip up at the edges.
I look away; I can’t watch. Maybe I should interrogate Josie in our session today and ask her about it. Or maybe I can ask him since I’m meeting with him too, at the end of the day.
“You’re not gonna believe what I have to tell you.” Renn plops down on the seat beside me, her tray laden with food.
Then she looks at me with pity.
“What?” I stab a fork in my chicken.
“Oh, Willow.” She presses a hand on her chest. “I love you, but this is gonna hurt.”
I sit up straight in my chair. “What? What are you talking about?”
She sighs dramatically. “I’ve got some dirt on him. I know you claimed him and so I went digging. People are not talking, which in itself is very weird. But I have my ways.”
“What? What ways?” I’m confused now, and fearful of what she has to tell us.
“Can you just tell us and get this over with?” Penny says in a bored voice.
Renn gives me another look of pity before launching into her story. “So, we already know that his dad founded this place, right? But get this…” She looks at us one by one and my heart starts to slam inside my ribcage, more than it was already slamming. “They have been trying to get him to work for them for years. Like, years. But he never accepted. Until now. You know why that is? It’s because our current Dr. Blackwood didn’t leave his job in Boston on his own. He left it because he was fired.”
“What?” This comes from Penny.
“Yes. He was fired. Can you believe it? Dr. Blackwood, the excellent doctor, was let go. No one knows for sure though. Official statement is that he quit. But there has been talk that he was forced to quit.”
Immediately, Penny denies it, but then comes up with all the reasons why he could’ve been fired. And in their usual way, she and Renn go back and forth.
Forged prescription. Self-medication. Affair.
My heartbeat spikes at the mention of an affair and I want to say shut up. Stop talking. I can’t hear it.
But all my words have died. I’m stunned. Reeling. Not in a million years would I have guessed Renn’s big news.
He was fired.
Dr. Simon Blackwood, the ice king, the hero, was fired.
Fired for God’s sake.
Instantly, I know it’s a mistake. It has to be. No one in their right mind would fire him. I’ve only known him for a week and we’ve had a handful of conversations, but I know that much.
I believe that much.
“All right. Stop,” Renn commands, before turning to me. “I’m sorry I got carried away. Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.” I shrug. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
“I know you like him –” She raises her hand when Penny protests. “Maybe it’s not true, you know.”
“I know it’s not true.”
“You do?”
“Yeah. I mean, I don’t believe it. Not everything you hear or even… read is reliable,” I say, paraphrasing the man himself.
He gave me the benefit of the doubt. I can definitely do the same for him.
“Well, then, I don’t believe it either,” Renn says.
Vi smiles at me, nodding. “Me neither.”
I smile back and for some reason, it makes me want to cry. This group of girls who have only known me for three weeks have somehow become the best friends I’ve ever had.
Renn gives me a side hug, which obviously gets noticed by Hunter, who’s standing nearby. She blows him a kiss when he tells us to break it up.
“God, you guys,” Penny grumbles half-heartedly. “Stop crushing on the staff. It’s not right.”
Even though we all laugh, my heart isn’t in it. I’m burning up with questions. Questions I don’t think I have a right to ask.
But I want to.
I wonder if this is what psychiatrists feel when they are analyzing their patients. I guess not. Why would they? It’s all clinical, in the name of medicine.
So I guess, he doesn’t feel the same burn when he asks me questions. Which is great because it’s not like I’m going to answer them anyway.
But why do I want him to feel the same burn that I’m feeling right now?
A second later, that burn takes up a physical form and I feel the heat of someone watching me. I turn around in my seat and my eyes clash with his. He’s leaving the dining area with Josie and his gaze is on me.
I sense a strange intensity in them. A strange… passion. An interest. A personal interest. It quickens my breath, makes me sweat under my clothes with the heat.
I’m not sure if I’m making it up or what. But the allure of it is enough for me to keep staring back. Until he looks away, breaking our connection.
My eyes go to the clock in the dining room.
Four hours to go before I meet him again.
Before I’m alone with him.
***
Four very long hours later, it’s time for my meeting with him.
Meeting? Session? I don’t know what to call it. Here at Heartstone, we majorly spend our time in therapy and only have sporadic meetings with the psychiatrist who oversees things. Which I guess is what Dr. Blackwood is, now that Dr. Martin isn’t here.
This is highly unusual but it doesn’t mean that I’m not looking forward to it. It almost doesn’t make sense, and yet it does.
All I’ve done for the past four hours is think about the rumors. I still don’t believe them, but my burn for answers isn’t gone.
Taking a deep breath, I knock on the door and count seconds until it’s opened.
Three seconds later, it opens with a click and there he is. Tall and powerful and polished. He is silent as he steps aside and lets me in.
It’s dark inside his room. Maybe because the storm has colored the sky black and he only has a small table lamp on. And when he closes the door behind me, the room seems even darker. Quieter, too. More intimate because the ruckus of the rain outside makes the silence on the inside more potent.
“Take a seat,” he orders.
I flinch at his voice. It comes from behind me and it sounds exactly like my dreams. Low and commanding. Rough. And just from those three inconsequential words, all of it comes back, that ache. Not that it went anywhere, but still.
I breathe slowly and do as he says.
When I’m settled in my chair, only then, he moves. I hear the sounds. The heels of his shoes carrying him across the room. The whisper of the wheels against the carpet that surrounds the desk when he rolls his leather chair out. The creak when he sits.
His breaths.
They echo in all the empty spaces inside me. His breaths are making me horny. Even hornier.
“Tell me about him,” he says, straightaway. “About your boyfriend.”
No small talk. No easing into it.
I look up as I clench my fingers together. Dr. Blackwood’s watching me intently. With focus. So much focus. Like I’m his entire world and he’s blind to everything else.
I revel in that look. I revel in the fact that in this moment, I might really be his entire world. He wants something from me, doesn’t he? Answers to his questions. Even though that should make me apprehensive, I’m not. I’m reveling.
“What about him?” I ask.
“Tell me how you guys met.”
I keep staring into his beautiful eyes. “In class. Literature.”
“What was the first thing he said to you?”
“‘Do you have an extra pen?’”
He keeps staring back. “Did you?”
“Yes. I gave it to him.”
“Then what?”
“We started talking. And then, after that he’d always sit beside me, and he’d always ask for a pen.”
“He never had a pen of his own.”
I detect something in his voice, something scoffing, and I latch on to that like a beggar, thinking that he might be jealous. Like I was jealous when he was talking to Josie. So jealous.
“He’d forget them on purpose.”
“He tell you that?”
“Yes. After we started dating. He said I was so beautiful that he couldn’t resist talking to me. And that was his only excuse in the beginning.”
I was expecting another round of fire. Another question. But there’s only silence.
In the quiet, we watch each other. His stubble usually gets thicker in the afternoon, wilder, untamed. My fingers itch with the need to touch it. See if it’s rough and scrape-y like I want it to be.
God, I hope it’s scrape-y. I want it to chafe against the soft parts of me.
While I’m rubbing my thighs under the desk, out of his sight, he’s probably looking at me for twitches and glitches, to catch me in a lie. But I’ll pretend that his deadpan stare is meant to be more than what it is.
“Did you like it when he told you that? Beautiful,” he asks, at last.
At this, I have to look away. I have to stop clenching my thighs.
Beautiful.
Did I like it when he called me that?
“Yes. I loved it. I loved that he called me beautiful. No one had ever called me that before,” I admit pathetically.
Truthfully.
I couldn’t lie. Not about this. Not to him.
Girls like me, they are never called beautiful. I’m too short, too pale, too pudgy.
Too weird.
I wonder if Dr. Blackwood has called anyone beautiful before. I wonder if I was a little prettier, would he call me beautiful?
“What else did he call you?” His face is impassive, but his voice sounds roughed up, like a scratchy cloth that rubs along the length of my arms. The side of my neck. The top of my thighs.
And I have no choice but to resume my clenching. This time, I feel moisture ooze out of my core. It’s getting wet and swollen. Humid.
“Snow princess,” I whisper my lie, and Dr. Blackwood’s eyes change.
I see a glimmer in them. A glint.
God, his eyes are so beautiful. So gray. So… rainy and stormy.
They flick back and forth over my face as he asks, “Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why’d he call you that?”
“Because of my hair.”
Silver hair, the only thing I’m proud of. The only thing I inherited from my family.
Dr. Blackwood looks at my hair, my overgrown bangs and my loose topknot, and my scalp tingles. The strands oddly feel alive.
“And your skin.”
“M-my skin?”
Said skin bursts out in goose bumps at his words. My lips part and I drag in a breath of his rainy smell that seems to have invaded every inch of this room.
He glances away from me, and I notice a random pulse on his jaw that comes and goes so fast I think I’ve imagined it.
“It’s pale. Your skin,” he says, straightening up in the chair and picking up his pen.
Even though he isn’t looking at me, I still feel like he is. Did he really just say that? Did he really notice my skin?
I mean, of course he would’ve, but still. To associate it with the name I’ve given myself in the dark of the night makes me think that he sees me. That he thinks about me too.
Jesus, I’m really losing it, aren’t I?
“He called me that the first time he kissed me,” I whisper, for no reason at all, except to bring his eyes back to me and away from the rainy window. For him to see me.
“When was that?” he asks.
“On our first date.”
“He kissed you on the first date.”
Again, that scoffing. Again, I tuck it inside my heart, thinking that he’s jealous. He doesn’t appreciate that my boyfriend kissed me on the first date. He doesn’t appreciate my boyfriend kissing me at all.
“Uh-huh.” I lick my lips. “We went to the movies.”
“And?”
“And well, he kissed me. We were walking back at night. It was raining. Drizzling, actually. My building was like, a block away but he grabbed me.”
“He grabbed you.”
His eyes are so intense, so heated that I look down at my lap. I didn’t want to.
I wanted to keep staring at him, taking in his reactions, however miniscule they might be. But now that I have his entire focus, I can’t do it.
It’s too much.
“Yeah. And then, he pulled me into this dark alley. He pushed me against the wall, heaved my legs up around his hips and…” I bite my lip, all the while knowing that he’s still watching me. “His hands felt so big. Like they could do anything. They were so warm when he put them on my waist and pressed up against me. I’ve never felt anything so hard and so… hot. He told me that he was dying to kiss me. He’d been dying to kiss me ever since he saw me.”
I can’t help it. I clench my thighs together and press my hand on my lower stomach. All hidden. All under the table. Away from his eyes.
“Then what?”
His voice causes a pulse to go through my stomach into my pussy. It’s wet and getting sloppy.
“And then he kissed me.” I press harder on my belly. “His lips were so soft. Softest thing I’d ever touched. And so different from his rough grip. Different from how hard he was. All over.”
I chance a glance at him and find him exactly as when my eyes left him. Stony, intense, watchful.
The ice king.
In fact, he looks colder than ever. Colder than the first time I met him. For a second, I think that maybe he knows the kisser in my head is not my boyfriend. It’s him.
Why do I always feel like he can see me, he can read the things inside me?
Then he asks, “How did you feel when he kissed someone else?”
My hand on my stomach stiffens and I drag in a breath.
God, not this again. I’m so totally over The Roof Incident.
Fuck.
“Lonely. Depressed. Heartbroken. Like I wanted to die,” I reply, sighing.
“Who was the girl again?”
“Zoe. She was in my history class.”
“Was she your friend?”
I scoff. “I never had friends. I was too weird for friends.”
His fingers around the pen tighten, but his voice is casual – the same – when he asks, “Weird. How so?”
I shrug. “I was the slowest kid in school. I got picked last for everything. I hated birthday parties. I hated parties, period. I hardly laughed. Most of the time I fell asleep in my classes, and then my teachers made someone lend me their notes and I had to stay home all evening to make up for whatever I had missed. So yeah, I wasn’t Miss Popular. I was Lazy Lolo. Weird Willow. Wacked Willow. Lunatic Lolo. I can go on if you like.”
The color of his knuckles has turned white and I can’t help but squirm at the forceful grip he has on his pen. I can’t help but think, how would it feel if he gripped me that forcefully?
If he really pushed me into a dark alley.
“Did you confront them?”
Again, there’s nothing wrong with his voice. It’s as cool as always. But I can’t figure out what’s going on with his body. It’s getting tighter and tighter.
What’s happening to him?
I hope he’s getting mad on my behalf. I’d really like him to.
I sweep my sweaty bangs off my forehead. “What, those kids?”
“Those kids? Your boyfriend and Zoe? Either?”
“Yeah. I kinda did. At least, the kids. When I was younger. A lot younger, and things they said hurt me. Sometimes I’d push them off the swing at the park when no one was looking. Hid their notebooks or their lunches at school. And sometimes when I was really angry, I’d punch them. Especially boys. In their junk.”
The glint in his eyes is admiration; I see it. It warms me.
I actually did do those things. I never admitted to doing them, though. I can’t remember if I was ever punished for them. I only know that I denied it to the teachers, to my mom, to everyone. To the point that I forgot I ever did them.
Until now.
Until he asked, and I told him. Just like that.
He’s breaking something free inside me. All the locked boxes. All the chained beasts. Simon Blackwood is setting them free and he hasn’t even made the effort.
Why is it so effortless? Giving him pieces of me.
I make a fist and show him, repeating his words from last time, “I’m dangerous.”
“You are, aren’t you? A little warrior,” he murmurs, his grip around his pen loosening. “Although that’s not how you make a fist.”
“It’s not?”
He shakes his head.
I open my palm, splaying my fingers. “Will you teach me?”
For a few moments, he doesn’t say anything, but then he stands up. The chair squeaks and his shoes click as he rounds the table and approaches me.
I stand too, my heart probably squeezed between the bones of my ribs, trying to fly out.
Stopping a couple of feet before me, he looks down. How is it that even without a single expression on his face, I feel like he’s telling me something? Only I don’t know what, exactly, but every part of me is listening.
It’s crazy. Not the useless kind but the kind that’s stealing my breaths.
“Give me your hand,” he commands.
“Why?” I ask, even as I obey him.
He takes my hand into his, and I notice all those tiny scratches on his fingers again. I want to ask him about the house, but he speaks over me. “I’m teaching you how to make a proper fist.”
My small palm is dwarfed by his big one as he curls my fingers. The last time our touch was over quickly. I couldn’t appreciate the heat and the texture of his skin completely.
I do, now. The warmth of his skin seeps into mine as he tucks my thumb down across my index and middle fingers.
“Keep it tight,” he instructs, tapping my thumb. “You don’t want it to get hurt.”
I smile slightly. “Okay.”
He’s been focused on my hand and the technique of making a proper fist but at my whisper, he glances at my face. There’s a dangerous clench in his jaw. I don’t know why I think it’s dangerous, but it is. Maybe it’s because that clench is paired with the look in his eyes. Kind of frosty. Kind of not.
When he lets go of my hand, I don’t like it. I don’t like the loss of touch, so I lightly punch him on his chest, before he can move away and go back to his chair where he’ll psychoanalyze the shit out of me.
And because I’ve lost all sense of self-preservation, I’ll let him.
He stops. Freezes, almost.
I peek up at him through my lashes. “Sorry. I wanted to see if it worked.”
“If that’s how you punch, I don’t think you really taught them their lesson,” he rumbles.
“How do you know so much about punching?”
His heart is beating beneath my fist and I want to press down harder, press up on the rhythm that gives him life.
Sighing, he answers, “I’ve been in fights before.”
“Yeah? With whom?”
He shrugs; it’s tight. “With kids. At school.”
I frown. “Were they assholes to you?”
His lips twitch. “Why? Are you going to use your stellar punching skills on them?”
“Maybe.”
My answer makes him chuckle and I feel it reverberating inside his chest. The chest that I’m touching, through the fabric of his shirt.
There’s no reason for me to touch it. But I can’t not touch it either. Especially when he’s not moving away or telling me to back off.
“Is your house fixed?” I whisper.
He swallows; I notice the slow bob of his Adam’s apple.
Apart from that grave way he was watching his dad’s photo, this is the first reaction I’ve seen from him or at least, the reaction that he’s shown me. That swallow. But before I can really marvel over that, he clips, “No.”
Something heavy sits on my chest. It’s not my illness. That’s where it comes from sometimes. My chest. This is different. This is for him, and for that pained reaction.
“Why are you fixing a house you don’t even live in?”
His eyelashes look thick, like a forest around his eyes, as he scans my face. “Because I have to.”
I accept his answer with a nod. I know his answer. I do a lot of things that I have to do, too.
Like lying.
I’ve lied all my life. For my mom. I’ve disappointed her a lot. The fact that I struggled with school, with making friends. The fact that I never took much interest in the things that she had an interest in. My cousin took to our store, fashion, cosmetics, jewelry, right from the beginning. My mom wanted that for me too, but I never gave her that.
When I was diagnosed, she was so heartbroken. I saw it in her eyes.
Lying and pretending were the only ways I could keep her safe. I could keep myself safe from her disappointment.
Until The Roof Incident.
I splay my palm on his chest. “You like fixing things, don’t you?”
Kinda like a hero.
He goes all stone-like. The breathing chest under my hand, just… stops. It stops moving. Stops being alive, even. I think he’s going to ask me to move my hand. He’s going to step back because he hates my touch.
But he simply says, “It’s my job.”
God, what is it? Why’s he so sad?
“Why did you move here? From Massachusetts?” I ask, thinking about the rumors.
Stupid fucking rumors that I don’t believe in.
People can be so cruel sometimes. Ask me. I know all about it.
A frown forms in between his brows. A suspicious, almost defensive frown. “Why?”
I shrug, appearing as casual as I can. I’m no threat to him. But I probably look like one because I’m asking the questions.
“I’m just wondering if you’ll go back once Dr. Martin is fine and back to work.”
The vein on the side of his neck has become taut. “I might.”
“Do you miss it? Boston, I mean.”
“Not really.”
“What about your friends? Colleagues?” Then I add, because I can’t stop myself, “Girlfriend?”
It sounded casual, right? I mean, there’s no way he can know I’m fishing for information. About his earlier job, his life before Heartstone.
I hope not.
Dr. Blackwood’s frown gets deeper. “Is this your way of fishing for information?”
Damn it.
I purse my lips, and admit, “Yes.”
“And what information would that be?”
His smell wafts through my nose as he shoves his hands inside his pockets. There are tons of things I can ask him. Tons of things I want to ask him. But I don’t think I can. I don’t have the right.
Though there’s this question that’s burning in the forefront of my mind. In my mind, I see him with Josie. Chatting, smiling.
And I’m jealous, despite the fact that I shouldn’t be.
The pads of my fingers dig into his chest, and as I realize his muscles are so toned, so sculpted that there’s absolutely no give, I ask, “Do you have someone special, Dr. Blackwood?”
Someone you kiss? Someone you grab and pull into a dark alley and press against walls?
I don’t say that but I’m definitely asking that.
It’s like he hears the unspoken questions because the heat of his body seems to have doubled. Like his blood is rushing in his veins with an uncanny speed.
With flaring nostrils and a hard jaw, he answers, “No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m busy.”
I want to smile. Actually, I’ve never wanted to smile this hard. Ever. His answer calms me but it also makes me restless to move closer to him. I want to trace my palm over the arch of his chest and see if I got it right in my dreams.
But I don’t do any of those things. I don’t want him to take away this small concession he’s given me.
Why is he even giving it to me? I’m not complaining. But still.
“Busy with patients?”
“Busy with my job. Yes,” he says, all professional-like.
That’s what he is. Professional and distant. Dedicated to his job and fixing people. If Mass General let him go, then they are idiots.
I’m an idiot, too, in this moment.
Instead of backing off, I want to do something. Something that might crack his cool façade. Maybe reaching up and messing up his no-nonsense hair.
What would he do? If I did that? If I grabbed his collar and pushed him against the wall?
And kissed him?
My eyes drop to his lips, his soft, soft lips. There’s a cleft in the middle of his lower lip. I want to taste that cleft, dig my tongue in it, wet it, suck on it, bite it.
“So you don’t have fun at all?”
“No. I’m not a fun guy.”
I watch his lips form the words, and every syllable that comes out of his mouth makes my need to shake him, kiss him, mess him up, stronger. Stronger and stronger.
The need is so consuming that I hardly notice when he puts his hand on my palm and takes it off his body. It’s final and smooth, his action. Effortless. As though my touch barely registered to him.
“But I think you have a point. It’s after hours and I should go… have fun rather than spending my time with a patient.” He steps back then. “I’ll see you next week. Same time.”