Brightside

22 | purple rain

"So, how does this work exactly?" Eddie would take a thousand punches to the head if it meant she never felt as uncomfortable as she did in that moment ever again. Each of her concussions were nicer to her brain than what it felt like at that particular moment. She'd been five minutes early to her own doom via Zoom call. Her doom call.

Her and the man on the other side of the screen had been sitting in silence for the better half of twenty minutes, spare a couple of cleared throats and a casual hello when he'd first signed on. Eddie simultaneously didn't know where to start and didn't want to ever start.

Some part of her hoped that soon enough, she'd be woken up by the sound of Axel snoring in bed beside her and the entire Giovanni Perez debacle would've never happened so there wasn't the pressing need for her to try and talk about every problem that has ever plagued her.

"Well, you talk about whatever you'd like to talk about. I'll listen. We see if we're a good fit for each other. And, eventually, we help you cope with problems."

"How do you know if we're a good fit?"

"We can do a couple sessions, see if you start to open up more," he said. It probably came with the career path he'd chosen, but Eddie couldn't deny he was easily the most patient man she'd ever met. "And I recognize that comes from trust, and that can be scary. But more often than not, we get there. And if we get there, it's pretty easy to tell whether we're a good match for each other or not."

"Have you ever been to a shrink, Roman?"

Roman Sahota looked kinder than Eddie expected the average therapist did. And she wasn't lying on a couch, hands on her abs, talking about her feelings so that was a bonus. Evidently, that was not how this worked. He even looked kind while he was writing in the notebook he said he'd have with him. That kind of pissed Eddie off.

He smiled at her. "I have. Still go."

"Can I ask you something?"

"Yes," Roman said. "But we do eventually have to talk about you if you'd really like to try this out."

"You know when you, like, fuck up a knee or something, you go see a physiotherapist, right?" Eddie asked.

"Yes."

"Well. I fucked up my shoulder early in my career. Didn't turn into much, but I needed to rehab it to make sure it didn't become a problem," Eddie said. "Eventually, he told me I didn't have to come back unless it happened again."

"You're wanting to know if that's what therapy's like?"

Eddie shrugged. Nodded. Leaned back into her seat on the couch like getting farther away from her laptop's camera would keep Roman from knowing her darkest secrets.

"I guess it depends on what we're talking about."

"That's cryptic."

"Let's talk about you. You're here, so you obviously want to feel better about something. Do you want to talk about that something?"

"Why don't you have that question on your intake form?" Eddie asked. "Don't you want to know what you're signing up for when I book an appointment?"

"It's personal," Roman said.

"You're a shrink. Isn't personal your whole thing?"

"Comes back to trusting the person you're talking to," Roman said. "Most therapists know we have to earn our clients' trust. I don't expect you to make a breakthrough on the first session."