Chapter 1: The Interview
The light in the office hums, a sterile white fluorescence that pours from the ceiling and makes everything look both too sharp and strangely flat.Dr. Wick sits in a chair that seems molded from the same material as the walls—a sort of unforgiving beige polymer. Her pen hovers over a yellow legal pad, its tip not quite touching the paper.
Susanna watches it, her own fingers picking at a loose thread on the knee of her jeans.The fabric is worn soft. She focuses on that texture, the safe mundanity of it, to anchor herself against the question hanging in the air.“You were describing her hands,” Dr.Wick says, finally. Her voice is calm, a smooth lake.Susanna feels like a stone disturbing its surface.
“Yeah.” Susanna’s voice sounds small in the sterile void.She clears her throat.“Her hands. They’re… long fingers.Piano fingers, she calls them. She never learned to play.” She glances at the single barred window, a narrow slit offering a thin rectangle of washed-out sky. “They can be so gentle.Tracing my spine, like she’s memorizing the vertebrae. Brushing hair off my forehead when I can’t sleep. It feels like being precious.”
She swallows.The hum of the light seems to grow louder.
“And when they’re not?” Dr.Wick asks.The pen lowers, makes contact.A faint scratching sound joins the hum.
Outside, in the hallway, a heel clicks against linoleum.Once, twice. A paced, impatient sound.Susanna’s shoulders tense almost imperceptibly.She knows the rhythm of that walk. Lisa is out there, waiting. Every word in here is a currency, to be spent or saved, to be used later.
“When they’re not,” Susanna repeats, her eyes drifting back to the thread on her knee.“They’re… efficient.Quick. Once, she shattered a glass against the kitchen wall.Just gripped it and squeezed.No drama. It was just a thing that needed breaking.” She looks up, meets Dr.Wick’s patient gaze. “Afterward, she picked the shards out of her palm, one by one, with tweezers.Never flinched.I watched the blood well up in these perfect little cuts. She smiled at me.Said, ‘See?It’s just physics. Pressure and release.’”
The clicking heels in the hall stop.Silence, then, heavier than the sound.
“Why did she break the glass?” Dr.Wick’s pen pauses.
Susanna lets out a short, soft breath that isn’t quite a laugh.“I don’t remember. I probably said the wrong thing.Looked at her the wrong way.Breathed too loud. It doesn’t matter.The reason is always the same, underneath. I was… existing outside of her.”
The door to the office is thick, heavy. But they can both hear the muffled vibration of a phone, then the rapid, furious tapping of a text being composed. Susanna’s own phone, buried in her bag on the floor, remains dark and silent.For now.
“You said you feel torn,” Dr.Wick says, steering her back.
“Torn isn’t the right word.It’s like… being centrifuged. All the parts of me get spun so fast I can’t tell what’s core and what’s just debris flying off. She’s the only one who can stop the machine. And the only one who starts it.” Susanna pulls the thread free and watches it curl on her fingertip.“I crave the stopping.The peace after. It feels like love.The chaos… that feels like love, too. It’s all the same battery.”
“And what do you crave for yourself? Not for the relationship, but for Susanna.”
The question is a trapdoor.Susanna feels a dizzying drop in her stomach. For Susanna. She thinks of her notebook at home, half-filled with sentences that start and then scratch themselves into oblivion. She thinks of silence that isn’t charged, of sleeping through the night, of waking up and just being bored.
“I want to finish a sentence,” she says, the truth surprising her with its simplicity.
From the hallway, a low, melodic whistle filters through the door. A tune Lisa whistles when she’s bored, or when she’s reminding Susanna that time is passing.That her time is being consumed in this room.Dr. Wick glances at the clock. “We have a few more minutes.”
“It’s fine,” Susanna says, already pulling herself back from the edge of the conversation. The moment of honesty passes, replaced by a familiar, tactical fatigue.She couldn’t explain it to Dr. Wick, this gravitational pull.Lisa wasn’t just chaos. She was the raw, unfiltered current of life, terrifying and addictive.Being with her was like standing in a hurricane. You might get destroyed, but you’ve never felt more awake. The sterile safety of this office, of a stable life, felt like suffocation by comparison.“She’s waiting for you,” Dr.Wick states.
“She is.”
“Are you afraid to see her?”
Susanna considers. The memory of Lisa’s hands surfaces, the gentle ones. The way they’d frame her face and Lisa would look at her with such fierce, absolute focus that Susanna would feel like the only person in the universe. It was a drug.“No,” Susanna lies. “I’m afraid of when she won’t be waiting.”
The session ends on the hum of the lights.Dr. Wick’s final words are a gentle suggestion about boundaries, a pamphlet on support groups. The words dissolve before they reach Susanna’s ears, washed away by the louder reality of the hallway.
She opens the heavy door.
The linoleum is a bright, scuffed pathway to where Lisa leans against the far wall, one ankle crossed over the other. Her wild blonde hair is a cascade of chaos against the institutional beige. Her icy blue eyes fix on Susanna, scanning her face, her posture, for data.“Well?” Lisa pushes off the wall, closing the distance in three smooth strides. She smells like cold air and the faint, sweet scent of the lilac shampoo she uses. “Did you and the good doctor solve all my mysteries?”
“No mysteries,” Susanna says, slinging her bag over her shoulder.
Lisa’s hand shoots out, not to hit, but to grasp Susanna’s wrist.Her fingers are warm, their grip firm enough to feel the bones. It’s not gentle, but it’s not cruel either.It’s a claim.
“You look tired,” Lisa says, her thumb stroking the inside of Susanna’s wrist, a complete contradiction to the hold.“All this talking.It drains you. I can see it.” Her voice drops, intimate.“You give your words away in there.You come out empty. I have to fill you back up.”
Susanna feels it, the awful truth of it. The session had drained her.Lisa’s presence, even now, was a charge. A dangerous, familiar voltage.“What do you want to do?” Susanna asks, her voice barely a whisper.
Lisa smiles.It’s a bright, sharp thing. “Let’s get out of this tomb. I need air that hasn’t been recycled through a hundred neurotic lungs.” She leans in, her lips brushing Susanna’s ear.“I bought you a present. It’s in the car.”
She lets go of Susanna’s wrist, but the imprint of her fingers remains, a phantom bracelet. Lisa turns and walks down the hall, her heels clicking a confident tattoo on the linoleum.She doesn’t look back.She knows Susanna will follow.
Susanna stands for a moment in the empty hallway, the smell of floor cleaner and Lisa’s fading lilac scent mixing in the air.She thinks of the present in the car. It could be a book she’d mentioned wanting months ago, proof of a love that listens. Or it could be something else, something designed to unsettle, to remind her of the world they share that no one else understands.
She takes a breath of the chemically clean air, and then she walks, her soft-soled shoes making no sound at all as she follows the echoing clicks down the corridor and out into the bruising purple light of the late afternoon.