Total pages in book: 111
Estimated words: 111038 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 555(@200wpm)___ 444(@250wpm)___ 370(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 111038 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 555(@200wpm)___ 444(@250wpm)___ 370(@300wpm)
He was silent.
“You got me?!”
“I want to fuck you so bad right now.”
I closed my eyes and fell forward, my head hitting the bed. “Agh.”
“Can we video chat? Right now?”
I wanted to, but then it’d be even worse. More torture. I couldn’t. I couldn’t do that to myself. Or him.
I choked out, “One month. You got me?”
He groaned. “One month.”
“Do the work.”
“I’ll do the work.”
Oh, heart. Melting.
My knees shook.
A whole month? My heart was being squeezed out of me, but no. We could do this.
“Aspen?”
My hand squeezed my phone so tight. “Yeah?”
“I love you.”
Yes. A whole month. That was it. “I love you too.”
49
Aspen
July had been long.
August was longer. I think because there was more at stake, and because college lay ahead of me at the end of the month. Until then, there was more family time. Nate was around a lot, but August still seemed endless.
No calls from Blaise. No texts.
He was serious, and I was serious.
I was also going insane.
I missed him.
I wanted him.
I cried for him.
I bargained in my head so I could contact him.
But no.
In the end, I didn’t reach out, and he didn’t either.
If he wasn’t doing the work, I was going to kill him.
That was my new mantra, and it was getting me through the month—that and listening to Nate call my parents every night and ream them out for things he’d been holding in since his high school years. Guess he needed a couple weeks to process, but them forgetting my graduation had been like the dam breaking with him.
He got mad, and then he got furious, and then he’d started sharing. I loved it.
Our parents wished he’d stop sharing.
I didn’t.
50
Blaise
“I’m going to admit that when you first called and requested daily appointments, I thought you were insane.”
I sat in my therapist’s office, across from her, and she was laughing.
“I’ve never had a client request daily appointments for an entire month. It was a miracle I could even shift my schedule around to accommodate you. And then to have you actually show up for all the appointments?” She shook her head. “Usually the problem is clients who don’t show up.” She stopped laughing. Her hands folded in her lap, over her pencil skirt. I’d been envisioning Aspen in that same outfit. She didn’t dress like my therapist, but the skirt? Hell yeah. Put some glasses on her, maybe give her a ruler, and she could bark orders at me any day of the week.
My therapist sat up straighter.
Her name was Naomi. She was recently married and had moved from Washington down to Cain. I knew all this because her husband was the one who spoke to her for me. After Aspen’s command—fucking hot command—I did my research.
Naomi Ferrer was new to the area and setting up her private practice. She had the acumen, because I saw her degrees online, and I’d guessed she’d have the most open calendar for what I wanted.
I’d called and made my request. She’d turned me down flat.
Then I found out her husband was one of the professors at Cain, and he was a soccer enthusiast. That’s when I approached my coaches. I’d been hesitant, because shit like this wasn’t usually discussed on the soccer field, but my coaches had supported me. My head coach said they’d rather have a guy getting his head cleared than a hothead who could be a danger on the field. That made sense. One of them spoke to Dr. Ferrer’s husband, and he got her to change her mind. She was even amenable to my soccer schedule, which came in handy because we’d had three matches before classes started next week.
“I’m impressed with you, Blaise,” she told me.
I nodded. “It’s a good thing you didn’t know me a few months ago.”
“You’ve made progress. I was initially worried about the emotional duress I’d be putting you under daily, and the ethics of that, but you handled it. And you did it well, and again, I’m impressed. For an incoming freshman, you’re setting up a phenomenal foundation to build upon. But…”
There was always a but, I was finding.
“You still have not confronted your mother about why she wasn’t honest with you all those years. That’s a problem.”
We’d been through everything else.
Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy—EMDR. That’d been enjoyable (insert heavy, heavy sarcasm). But the post-traumatic stress crap I dealt with was better. Someone could touch my arm when I was in the middle of a flashback—and I’d had a few more over the month—and I could check myself.
I now recognized the state when I was in it, and I was also hopeful that eventually, the flashbacks would stop happening. For now, though, I could navigate my way out of them using the tools Dr. Ferrer had taught me.
That was all I wanted. It meant I wasn’t such a danger, but my head was still messed up. Sometimes I felt like the more therapy I got, the more crap we dug up, and the worse I got. That had lasted until this week when, surprisingly, some of that shit had started to lessen.