Open Heart {Under Revision}

Chapter 18- Marks Under Skin

Six and a half Years ago...

"Charlotte, would you like to tell me what your initial thoughts were...before what you did?"

My new therapist, a bronze-skinned woman asked me. Her name had vaporized from my head and her only identifying characteristics accounted were tall and slender body with black hair styled into a bob-cut with light brown eyes, hawkish nose and overall average features. But her squint was just like any other shrink. Searching to make the life living hell.

To her question, I held her eyes and replied, "I had no thoughts."

"I find that hard to believe."

I gesticulated at my mother's ignorant bungalow where I was currently dragged in, "My mother pays you to not believe me?"

"It's not about what I'm being paid for." She retorted, crossing her leg over another on the chair she was perched in and leered into me in my bedroom, "I'm here to make sure you know what you did was...not right for anyone."

"There's only my mother and me. It wouldn't have mattered."

Her lips drew into a small smile, "I think there are more people involved here than you both."

After the red tide I brought in my mother's Atlanta place, she thought hopping me another state would help. So she dumped me alone in a small town of Raleigh where she had a crumbling farmhouse which she received as her inheritance after my maternal grandparents died. The place was so quiet that it reminded me of Manchester but only very much warmer and more desolated.

"Why did you become a therapist?" I asked her after a moment.

She blinked, "Excuse me?"

"Why did you become a therapist?"

"I—I had my reasons." The place between her eyes puckered.

"There you go." I smiled, staring at her from my bed and ignoring the gauzy cocoon on my left leg, "I had my reasons which is none of anyone's business."

"You are a bright child—"

I was trying my best to shoo her away. I rolled my eyes and leaned into the window frame, "Heard that before."

"—and your path doesn't end here." She continued, her patience daring not to run thin. "You have to talk about it eventually and I understand you do not chose your mother to be your confidant which is why, I, a stranger will not understand what you felt but I will listen without barriers."

"Are you going to screw my mind like my first therapist? She pretty much liked making me a nutcase." I grinned, "She succeeded."

"She failed." And then in her eyes, something darkened as she spoke without breaking a breath, "The reason I became a therapist is simple. I was screwed up in my mind like you said because my father killed my mother and my little brother in front of me and made me watch."

I almost fell from the bed at her sudden disclosure, "...uh...what?!"

"Then he bashed himself to death on an iron nail and I watched it too." She quieted for a second before continuing, "I chose to live with it and share my story. Look me in my eye and tell." Then her expression grew softer, "Do you think I won't understand?"

I felt sick.

"Nobody does." I had to look away from that gaze. I knew that gaze. I knew the pull of that gaze which once compelled me to believe the impossible. Look how, many years later the impact violently rocked my world.