Medicine Man (Page 23)

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.”