She recovers quickly. But not quite quick enough.
“You like what you see?” I ask.
The room goes very still.
Dr. Ward sets the blood pressure cuff down on the desk with the precise movements of someone buying themselves a moment. She picks up her notebook. She picks up her pen. She does not look at me.
“I think we’ll end the session here,” she says, in the perfectly even tone of a professional who has made a professional decision.
“Do you need a minute?” I ask.
“That will be all, Saint.”
I pick up my t-shirt. I pull it on slowly, unhurried, the way I do everything. I pick up the hoodie. She is writing in her notebook, eyes down, jaw set and I allow myself the small satisfaction of having found the edge of her composure and stepped over it.
I walk to the door.
“Same time next week?” she asks, without looking up. Perfectly professional. A woman who has decided this interaction is over and is correct about that.
I open the door.
“You know where to find me,” I say.
I leave without closing it behind me.
Amy
Iam not looking for him.
I want to be clear about that.
I’m in the common room on the third floor of the east academic building because it has the best light for reading after four o’clock, and because Rose told me about it last week and she was right. I have two hundred pages of behavioral theory to get through before next Thursday, and the library is full. I’m here for the light and the quiet and the reading. Not for anything else.
Saint is at the far end of the room by the window when I walk in.
I see him before he sees me, which has never happened before. He always knows first, always has the quality of someone aware of every variable in the room before anyone else.
But tonight he is not watching the door.
He is watching the girl sitting across from him, which means his attention is elsewhere, which means I have approximately three seconds to decide whether to stay or go before he looks up, and the decision gets complicated.
I stay.
I sit at the table nearest the door, which is the correct choice for approximately six reasons and also faces the window.
The girl is beautiful. Dark hair, in layers. The kind of mouth that men talk about. She has her hand on the table between them, not touching him, but close, positioned in the way you position a hand when you’re about to do anything a man asks. She is laughing. Saint says something that makes her laugh harder.
I open my textbook.
I find myself re-reading the same sentence four times.
I look up because I can’t help myself. He is doing the same thing he always does, which is exist in the space with that absolute self-contained stillness while the world arranges itself around him.
The girl with the dark hair leans forward now, and her other hand has moved three inches closer to the edge of the table.
I keep telling myself I am absolutely reading about the neurological underpinnings of trauma response and not watching any of this.
The sentence I keep reading is: “The nervous system encodes threat through sensory association, creating involuntary physiological responses to stimuli that have been linked to prior danger.”