Warmth in Ice (Find You in the Dark #2.5)(14)
Author: A. Meredith Walters

She led me to a closed door and pointed to another row of chairs along the wall. “Dr. Cary will be out to get you soon,” she said shortly.

“Thanks Chloe,” I said, purposefully using her name. Hey, I could be charming when I wanted to be.

Clearly my charm was lost on Chloe. She didn’t bother to look at me again before heading back to reception. I sat down to wait some more.

After only a few minutes, the door beside me opened and a woman around Ruby’s age came out, dabbing her eyes with a tissue. She was followed by a woman in her late thirties who patted her on the shoulder.

“I’ll see you next week, Robin,” my therapist said. Robin nodded and headed down the hallway, her head bowed down.

Dr. Danielle Cary turned to me and smiled. “Hi Clay. Come on in,” she said smiling. I followed Dr. Cary into her office and sat down on the sofa. I had only been to see the new shrink a few times. Dr. Todd had referred me to her, so I had tried to reserve judgment.

The truth was, I hadn’t connected with her the way I had with Dr. Todd or Shaemus. Dr. Cary (no using her first name) seemed kind of uptight and overly clinical. She was nice enough; she just didn’t put in a lot of time with the whole “make you feel comfortable” thing.

It took me a lot to open up to people I liked, so Dr. Cary was having a rough time with me. I wasn’t trying to be oppositional. I had grown out of throwing therapy temper tantrums but that didn’t mean I was ready to throw up my entire life just because this chick was being paid to listen.

Excuse me if I felt she had to earn that trust. Dr. Todd had talked her up, saying I’d do well with her. The jury was still out.

So far our sessions had consisted of me answering a bunch of questions and looking at pictures, describing what I saw. Stereotypical counselor bullshit.

Tell me what you see in this picture…Tell me how you feel when I show you this photograph…

I had mastered the monosyllabic reply over the years and that particular skill was definitely being put to use now.

Dr. Cary sat down in a chair across from me and crossed her legs. Yes my eyes went there. Even though she clearly wore her panties too tight, I could acknowledge that she was a damn good-looking woman.

But that is where my appreciation ended. Because while Dr. Cary may be the focus of her other male client’s wank fantasies, she definitely wasn’t mine. There was only one woman who made my guy parts twitch and the good doctor wasn’t her.

“How has your week been, Clay? Classes going all right?” Dr. Cary asked, sliding her glasses from her hair to sit on the end of her nose. She put a notebook in her lap and clicked her pen a few times.

I settled into the couch trying to get comfortable. “Fine,” I answered. See, I killed it with the one-word responses.

Dr. Cary’s eyebrows pinched together and she wrote something on her notepad. “How are things at the house? Are you getting along with your roommates?” she asked me, switching gears.

“Yeah,” I said, chewing on a hangnail and looking bored. Dr. Cary seemed frustrated as she put down her pen to look at me.

“Look, Clay, you know how this works. Therapy isn’t new to you. So tell me what we can do to make this a beneficial relationship for you. This is a necessary part of your outpatient care. I have to provide monthly reports of your progress to your case manager. I won’t be able to give her anything positive if you’re not willing to talk to me. Dr. Todd says you are a responsive and interactive patient. I have yet to see that Clayton Reed in my office,” she said sternly.

I didn’t say anything, instead choosing to look out the window. Dr. Cary let out an audible sigh. “I’m sure you get tired of rehashing the same thing over and over again. I don’t want this to be painful for you. This is your therapy. You dictate how this is going to go. So how about, instead of me asking you questions, you tell me what you want to talk about and we go from there,” she suggested kindly and I turned my attention back to her.

She was right of course. These meetings were part of my outpatient plan. I didn’t have a choice. But I did have a choice in what I got out of it. I had come a long way in how I thought about therapy and talking about my feelings. I now recognized the necessity of it.

“Okay, well, I got a letter from my parents’ attorney this week. With a check. Basically, they told me to never contact them again,” I said, feeling kind of relieved to talk about it.

Dr. Cary frowned. “That had to have been hard. What did you do when you got this letter?” she asked, making more notes.

I let out a bitter laugh. “Do you mean did I cut or think about using?” I asked hatefully. Shit, would it always come back to this? The answer was yes. It would.

Dr. Cary dropped her pen and gave me a hard look. “Yes, that is exactly what I meant. That had to have been a strong trigger for you. I know in the past your parents have always brought about your most negative and self-destructive behaviors. So lets talk about that. Re-frame your coping mechanisms,” Dr. Cary suggested.

She was right…again. There was a reason she got paid the big bucks to listen to a bunch of crazies talk about their impulses and feelings.

“Yeah, I thought about cutting. That was my first instinct actually. But I didn’t do it,” I finally admitted.

Dr. Cary gave me a small smile. “Well, what did you do instead?” she asked.

I picked at a thread on my jeans. Talking about this shit never got any easier. The need to cut myself continued to sit like a shadow in the back of my mind. Always there, ready to make me feel better. It still whispered in my ear that just one slice would make all the noise in my head go away.

But with each passing day, I was getting stronger and the pull of that shadow was becoming easier to ignore. And I hoped like hell that one day soon I’d stop hearing it all together.

“I called Maggie,” I told my counselor.

Dr. Cary made a few more notes. “Maggie. That’s your girlfriend right?” she asked, pulling a folder off her desk and looking through it until she found what she was looking for. I recognized Dr. Todd’s handwriting on the paper in her lap.

“Yeah, she’s my girlfriend,” I answered, trying to get a look at the notes in her lap.

“I’ve read through your case file from the Grayson Center. There are lots of mentions of Maggie in Dr. Todd’s notes. From what I can gather, in the past, Maggie has also been a trigger for you. Is that not the case anymore?” she asked, still reading whatever was written in the file.