Me Plus You

Reeled In Like A Carp In The Chicago River..

Dawn was breaking and she was still awake. Slivers of muted light filtered through the blinds bathing the room with softness.
Kelly was asleep, lying on his stomach with one arm thrown over her.
Stella lay on her side looking at him, sleep evading her. She still couldn't quite believe that he had told her that he loved her. In the moment she had confessed the same to him. It was the truth, she was in love with him. But in the hours leading into dawn, the questions raised their hands.
Both Shay and Anna's loss had clearly shaped the man Kelly was today and she hadn't even known who Anna was until Sylvie had mentioned her yesterday. Would he have ever told Stella about her? His past was littered with so much romantic failure that when you counted up what he had told her about the women in his past, did Kelly fall in love serially? Were there more women that she didn't yet know about? Or did he lurch from one disastrous relationship to another? She knew she was being unfair. He couldn't help being cheated on or his girlfriend dying. But when she had met him he was sleeping his way through Chicago. A tearing part of her asked if it was in Kelly Severide's DNA to just keep moving on.

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"So how is your life right now?" Dr Charles's smile was so genuinely warm and interested that Stella could understand how people told him their deepest secrets.

"Good thanks. It's good...I'm back at work which is great. Waiting for the trial now." Stella shrugged but she didn't fool him with her nonchalance about the trial so he carried on smiling encouragingly.. "I... I'll be glad when it's over." She added.

"Of course. Any indication when that might be?

"No, unfortunately not....a couple more months maybe. Courts are backlogged they tell me." Stella sighed, scowling.

"Are you ready to face Starmer again? And going over the details?" Dr Charles joined his hands together in a steeple while studying her.

Starmer was someone she had buried as deep as she could so that his image was so distorted that she couldn't picture him. Not in the way that he was in that room anyway, so cold and full of hate. Even in her nightmares, he was a shadow, standing over her, his presence so suffocating that she couldn't breathe.

"Stella?" His gentle voice pulled her out of the darkness.
The pallor on her face was another giveaway of the ongoing effect of the kidnapping.

"I'm not sure, to be honest. I feel like I will be trapped inside that room again... That's how I feel about seeing him again." Stella confessed looking at him directly her eyes shiny with emotion.

He nodded sympathetically.
"That's a very honest way of describing it, Stella. Would seeing him go to prison free you from him?"

Stella thought about that for a moment. Would the dreams stop? Sometimes she did find herself looking over her shoulder in case he was there behind her. And she didn't think that she could live on her own again for a very long time.

"Maybe. I hope so. Hopefully, the nightmares would stop. Perhaps it is the fear that he will turn up again that worries me."

"And that's something you think you can't control?.... whether he turns up or not?"

Stella nodded. He was right about control. Stella had decided after she left Grant that the only way to stay on track with her life was for her to control everything in it.

"But if you think about it... Starmer is incarcerated so he can't get to you. Deep down you know that, right?"

Stella nodded. She needed to keep reminding herself of that. How could Starmer get to her now?

"I know that. I guess it's just that it happened at all. I had no idea that he was carrying all of that about me."

"There's no reason why you would have known, Stella. And also please remember something like this is extremely rare. It's not usual for a personal tragedy to be manifested into something as deeply obsessive as this. "