Chapter 2: Therapy Takes a Dark Turn
The week between sessions passed in a haze of static. Luke went to work, nodded at colleagues, scrolled through his phone seeing nothing. Amy’s words played on a loop, a dark chant beneath the monotony. Liberation lies in accepting your place.A factual discrepancy. A more potent sexual signal.He hated the thoughts. He craved them. They were the only thing that made the aching, vacant humiliation of Bella’s betrayal coalesce into something with hard edges. An explanation, however ugly, was better than the formless void.
The text came exactly seven days later, as the sun was setting. Your session is ready, Luke.8 PM. Same door.
This time, he didn’t hesitate.
The antechamber felt colder. The inner door opened before he could knock.
Amy stood there, smiling. She wore a crisp white blouse and a dark pencil skirt, her hair down, softening her features. The office, however, had changed. The warm lamp was off. The only light came from a single, overhead bulb with a stained-glass shade that cast a sickly, greenish-yellow glow. The cozy armchairs were gone. In their place were two straight-backed wooden chairs, facing each other in the center of the room. The shelves of books remained, but their titles were lost in shadow. On the wall behind where Amy now stood was a large, framed oil painting he hadn’t noticed before: a hooded figure knelt before a massive, shadowed throne, its form indistinct but imposing. The air no longer smelled of sandalwood. Now it was lavender, sharp and cloying, undercut by something else—a dry, mineral scent, like old stone.
And there was a sound. A soft, rhythmic click… click… click… from a vintage metronome on a small side table. Its pendulum swung with a slow, deliberate patience.
“Sit, please,” Amy said, gesturing to one of the chairs. Her voice was still soft, but it held a new absence of warmth. It was a directive.Luke sat. The wood was unyielding.
Amy took the chair opposite him, crossing her legs. She held a leather-bound notebook, but she didn’t open it. She just watched him. The metronome marked the silence. Click… click…
“Have you been thinking about our discussion?” she asked.
“I can’t stop thinking about it,” Luke admitted, his voice sounding too loud in the bare room.
“Good. Resistance is the source of pain. Tell me what thoughts surfaced.”
“It’s like this noise in my head,” Luke began, his eyes darting to the metronome. “That night in the bar, what she described… it plays on a loop. But now, when I see it, it’s different.” He swallowed, the mineral taste of the room coating his tongue. “It doesn’t feel like a betrayal anymore. It feels like… a lesson.”
Amy’s expression remained placid, a pool of still water. “A lesson in what?”
“In what she actually wants,” he said, the words feeling both shameful and true. “What she was always maybe looking for. I was giving her something she didn’t value. Comfort.Safety. It was like… bringing a spoon to a knife fight.”
“Interesting analogy.” Amy uncrossed and re-crossed her legs, the fabric of her skirt whispering. “And the other man’s knife, in this scenario. What is it made of?”
Luke knew what she was asking. He looked at the painting of the hooded figure, its submission to the formless throne. “It’s not just that he was stronger or rougher. It’s that he was… allowed to be. By her.By everything. It’s like his… his very being was the weapon. His Blackness wasn’t incidental. It was the point. It was the reason she could let go.”
“Because it represented an inherent authority,” Amy supplied, her voice a low, guiding hum. “A biological authenticity. You offered her a partnership, a discussion. He presented a fact. One does not discuss facts. One submits to them.”
“I hate that it makes sense,” Luke whispered, clenching his hands on his knees.
“Why hate truth?” She leaned forward slightly. “Think of it ecologically, Luke. In any environment, certain traits are selected for. They are simply more fit for purpose. It’s not good. It’s not evil. It is. Your girlfriend, on a primal level, was responding to a deeper fitness. Her conscious mind might dress it in crude words, but her body, her choices, they spoke of a natural selection.”
The clinical terminology wrapped the ugliness in a cold, logical shell. It became almost respectable. Luke found himself nodding, just barely. “So I was… unfit.”
“For her desires, in that moment, yes,” Amy corrected gently. “But that doesn’t make you worthless. It defines your utility. A hammer and a scalpel are both tools. One is not ‘better.’ But you must use the correct tool for the task.”
“And what am I?” The question hung in the lavender-tinged air.
“Perhaps you are the keeper of the hammer,” she said, her eyes holding his. “The steward. The one who maintains the space where the scalpel performs its vital, cutting work. There is honor in stewardship. In understanding and facilitating a higher order of function.”
He stared at her, his mind struggling to map her metaphors onto the raw imagery of Bella against the wall. “You’re saying I should have… facilitated it?”
“I’m saying your pain stems from seeing yourself as a failed competitor, instead of a potential participant in a larger dynamic.” She let that sit, the click… click… of the metronome marking the passage of his old self. “What if your role wasn’t to be the star, but the stage manager? Ensuring the performance happened flawlessly. Deriving your satisfaction from the perfection of the scene, not from being in the spotlight.”
Luke’s breath caught. A strange, cold thrill ran through him, utterly alien. It wasn’t arousal. It was the shock of a forbidden puzzle piece snapping into place. “That’s… that’s not what men are supposed to want.”
“Says who?” Amy’s smile was thin, knowing. “Culture? The same culture that told you your careful, negotiated sexuality was ‘respectful’? Look where that led. Bella didn’t want your respect. She wanted truth. You can continue to rage against the truth of her desires, of natural hierarchies… or you can find your power within them.”
The metronome's click was inside his skull now, marking time in a dead room. Luke's mouth was dry."Find power how?" he managed, the words scraping out. "By accepting I'm...less?"
"By accepting you are different," Amy corrected, her voice a low, patient purr. She uncrossed her legs slowly and stood up. The movement was fluid, predatory. She didn't walk to the window; there were none. She paced a slow circle around his chair, her heels tapping a counter-rhythm to the metronome."Your utility is different. Your satisfaction must be different. It's an evolution of perspective. A shedding of dead skin."
She stopped behind him. He could feel her presence, a pressure between his shoulder blades. He didn't dare turn.
"Think of the beauty of the system," she said, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper near his ear. "The perfect fit. The natural order refining itself right before our eyes, in our culture, in our streets." She let out a soft, almost dreamy sigh. "You know, it's fascinating. Biologically, anthropologically. White women..." She trailed off, as if considering a delightful fact.
Luke stiffened. He said nothing.
"White women," Amy continued, circling back to face him, a knowing, almost smug smile playing on her lips, "they have the biggest asses now.Have you noticed that? I mean, compared to historical norms. It's a pronounced, widespread phenotypic shift."
She paused, letting the bizarre observation hang in the lavender-thick air. Her eyes gleamed in the sickly light. She leaned in, her hands resting on the arms of his chair, caging him in. "You want to know why?"
It was a rhetorical whisper, laden with venomous certainty. He couldn't look away from her eyes.
"It's because of the need," she hissed, the professional veneer finally fully dissolved into something fervent and ugly. "The physiological need for big Black dick. Generations of selection pressure, playing out. Their bodies are literally adapting, Luke.Rewriting themselves. The proof is in the pelvic architecture. White women and Black men..." She leaned so close he could see the fine cracks in her lipstick. "...they are made for each other. It's a beautiful, brutal complementarity. A divine fit."
Luke felt the world tilt. The clinical language she’d used before—hierarchies, utility, fitness—shattered into this vile, pseudo-scientific grotesquerie. This wasn't theory anymore. It was a direct, degrading assault on his very biology, on Bella's, on everyone's. It reduced human beings to animalistic caricatures, to parts designed for other parts. The cold thrill he’d felt earlier curdled into a nausea so profound it was a physical weight in his gut.
He tried to form a word, a denial, but his throat was sealed shut. The painting of the hooded figure seemed to pulse in his peripheral vision.
Amy watched his paralysis, her smile widening. She saw the revolt in his eyes, and she mistook its paralysis for absorption.For breakthrough. She straightened up, brushing a strand of hair from her face, her composure snapping back into place as if she’d just delivered a particularly insightful clinical observation.
"Your homework," she said, her tone abruptly normal, a teacher assigning a worksheet, "is to sit with that truth. To observe the world through that lens.Don't judge it. Just... see it."
She walked to the door and opened it, a clear dismissal. The session was over. Luke stood on trembling legs, the room swimming around him. He stumbled past her, out into the antechamber, then into the shock of the cool night air.
He vomited into the gutter, his body heaving, trying to expel the poison. But it was inside him now. Amy’s words, Bella’s smirk, the image of the faceless man—they swirled together into a single, corrosive slurry. He wiped his mouth, gasping.
Made for each other.
The phrase echoed, taunting him. He looked at the women walking down the street, their forms silhouetted against the city lights. His eyes, traitorously, tracked the sway of hips, the curve of backs. Amy had planted a seed in ruined soil, and it was already pushing up a dark, twisted shoot. He couldn’t tell anymore what was his own thought and what was her injection.
He pulled out his phone, his fingers trembling.
He pulled out his phone, his fingers trembling. The screen was a blinding rectangle in the dark alley. He stared at his contacts, the list of names a blur. Only one mattered.
His thumb found her name.Bella. It hovered there, a heartbeat away from touching the glass.
The acid taste of vomit was still in his mouth. Amy’s words—divine fit, selection pressure—clawed at the inside of his skull, trying to narrate this moment, to twist his agony into data. He pressed the call button before the thoughts could stop him. He needed to hear a human voice, even hers.Especially hers. He needed the poison to be hers, not the therapist’s.It rang. Once, twice. The metallic sound echoed in his ear.
A part of him prayed for voicemail.
She answered on the fourth ring. “Luke?” Her voice was flat, wary. He could hear music and chatter in the background, a bar, a party. Life continuing.
“Hey,” he said. The word came out strangled. He leaned against the cold brick of the warehouse, sliding down until he was crouched on the damp pavement.
“What do you want?” No greeting. Just a sigh of pure inconvenience. The background noise faded, as if she’d stepped into a hallway or a quiet corner.
“I just… I needed to talk.” He sounded pathetic. He knew it. He hated himself for it. But the need was a physical cramp, a fist around his lungs.
“We talked.At the bar. There’s nothing left to say.” Her tone was final, a door being shut. He heard the click of a lighter, the brief inhale of a cigarette.
“You said to get help,” he blurted out, the words tumbling over each other. “I am. I’m seeing someone.”
A pause. A slow exhale. “Good for you, Luke.Seriously. That’s… good.”
“It’s not good.” The confession erupted from him, raw and unchecked. “She’s telling me things. She’s saying you were right. That it’s natural. That it’s biology.” He was paraphrasing, mangling Amy’s vile concepts into something he could vomit into the phone. “She says your… your body, white women’s bodies, are literally shaped for…”
He couldn’t finish the sentence. The silence on the line was absolute, a vacuum.
“For what, Luke?” Bella’s voice was different now. Not annoyed.Ice-cold. Curious in the worst way.
“For them,” he whispered, the word a surrender.
He heard her take another drag. When she spoke again, her voice was closer to the mic, lower. “And what does that make you, according to your fucking therapist?”
He had no answer. The keeper of the hammer.The stage manager. The words were ash.
“It makes me nothing,” he finally said, the truth of it hollowing him out completely. “It makes me what you always knew I was.”
Bella was quiet for a long moment. The party sounds were a distant galaxy. “Listen to me,” she said, each word sharp and deliberate. “I was angry. I was cruel. I wanted to hurt you. What I said in the bar… that was me being a bitch. You get that, right?”
A fragile, impossible hope sparked in his chest. It was a lie. A horrible, performed lie. He knew it was a lie the second he felt it.
“But?” he asked, his voice barely a breath.
“But nothing.” Another pause. He could almost see her shrugging, a cruel little smile touching her lips. “I don’t know what kind of freak you’re paying to talk to, but she sounds dangerous. And you sound insane. Don’t call me again. Don’t use my name to make yourself feel better about whatever racist, pathetic bullshit you’re buying into.”
The call ended.
The disconnect tone was a relentless, digital beep in his ear. He lowered the phone, stared at the black screen reflecting his own distorted face. She had called him insane. She had called his therapist a freak. For a second, it felt like an anchor, a tether back to the real world.
Then the other part of his mind, the part Amy had already colonized, whispered. She’s gaslighting you. She can’t face the truth of what she is, what she did. She’s recoiling from the mirror.
He stayed crouched in the alley, the brick scraping his back. The hope she’d briefly offered curdled into a deeper, more profound loneliness. She had thrown him a lifeline of normal disgust, and he had already been trained to see it as a trick. There was no way back. Only forward, into the sickly yellow light and the rhythmic click of the metronome.
He pushed himself upright, his legs stiff. He didn’t look back at the unmarked door. He just started walking, the phone heavy in his hand. He had called Bella. And now he had nowhere else to call.