hello! welcome to part 1/3 of the marriage counseling fic! treat her nicely please! i put my heart into this fic! this part is about days 1-7 (7.5k words) + a sneak peek of the next part!
this is pure angst. nothing else. FEEDBACK IS ALWAYS WELCOMED! IN FACT, IT IS ENCOURAGED.
or the one where writer!Harry and his wife Safiyya take a break from their marriage, as encouraged by their counselor, for thirty days.
**
Fuck, Harry thinks, looking at his wife's face. Fuck.
Her expression changes every second, going from confused to horrified to sad and it then repeats all over again. Her hands are pressed tightly to her side, nails digging into her palms, and one glance at them makes Harry want to cave in and reach over to grasps her hand in his.
However, he doesn't. He keeps his hands to himself and instead looks back helplessly at the counselor who happens to keep her eyes trained on his wife.
"No," Safiyya finally says quietly, shaking her head. "This isn't going to happen. This is just..." she breaks off with a humorless laugh. "Are you...I mean you're joking right? That's not going to solve anything. We're not..."
"It's a breather," the counselor reasons.
"We don't need a breather," she growls. "We can't run away from this problem."
"Nobody is running away from anything. We can start slow and begin with a month. Only 30 days," the counselor tries again, looking at Harry from the corner of her eye for a response.
"Only 30 days?" Safiyya echoes incredulously. "No. Absolutely not." Then, she sits back and crosses her arms over her torso and huffs, "Tell her it's not going to happen, Harry. Go on."
Harry's stuck. 30 sounds good to him. It's plenty of time for him to catch his breath. Plenty of time to catch a break. Well, that's what it is, isn't it? A break?
He understands why it would freak her out. Anything revolving a separation makes his own chest squeeze with panic, so much he can't even look at the word – something that's bothered both of them about the therapy classes as the word is literally on the pamphlet to use as advertisement – therefore it's not even an option to him to assume how she may feel about it. He reads her expressions and it gives her enough of an idea, but regardless, on the idea of the break, they're on two different pages. He's in the middle of the novel while she's still lingering around the dedication page.
The counselor shifts her eyes from his frame to hers. Safiyya glances over at Harry, beginning to pick on her cuticles.
"Tell her," she says. "Tell her it's a terrible idea."
The counselor sits back and crosses her legs. Fuck, he thinks again.
"I don't think it's a bad idea," he admits quietly. "I think it's a good idea to take a little break."
Her features freeze for a moment, brows pulled in and mouth ajar. "A little break? A whole month is not little. You're joking right? What is this going to fix?"
"I just feel like we've been fighting for so long. I want to try this."
"No."
Harry sighs, finally reaching over to grab her hand. "This is a good idea. Remember when your friends tried this–?"
"For two weeks!"
"– and it helped them out, didn't it?"
"Two weeks is nowhere near a month!"
