S.M. ✦ Gin & Juice

XVII.

You shifted in the oversized armchair, the leather like butter underneath your fingers. It was supposed to be comfortable, supposed to lure you into a false sense of security while the psychologist across from you picked at your inner demons. The big comfy chair, the trinkets all over her bookshelves, the pale blue on the walls, everything in that office was designed to put the patient at ease. Or at least that's how the average person would have felt here.

Instead, you felt smothered, like the chair was going to open in the creases and swallow you whole. The cushions were too deep and you sank too far into the seat. The plastic action figures and plushes that littered her office fixed their eyes on you, like all the eyes from the outside world that you were afraid of. Like all the eyes you were trying your fucking hardest to cope with.

This was your fourth session and they just wouldn't stop looking at you. You knew it was by design. Dr. Michaels was a social anxiety specialist. She believed in coping strategies and positive self-talk and immersion therapy. To cope with people looking at you, there had to be people looking at you. She just happened to supplement with a lot of pairs of glued-on googly eyes. It made you have to work extra hard to focus on what she was saying.

I can do this. I can do this. I can do this.

"So..." Dr. Michaels tapped her pen against her yellow legal pad with your name written in black Sharpie across the top. She studied you for what seemed like the four-hundredth time with her soft green eyes, "tell me about Shawn."

"I've told you about Shawn," your knee bounced up and down while your eyes scanned the room for the quickest available exit. You'd told her about his football accomplishments, his family, how you met him, keeping your relationship a secret, the lying, the pressure, that night in your dorm room when it felt like an anvil was pressing your back into the floor...."He's why I'm here."

"I know you've told me the events...the actions...how you got from point A to point B," she brought her pen to her lip and rested the end on her bottom teeth, her head cocked to the side, "but you rarely talk about your feelings." You shifted, the leather rubbing together, making your discomfort at her impending examination audible. She put her notepad aside and leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees.

"How does Shawn make you feel?"

"He..." you sank further into the chair, pulling your knees up to your chest, "he makes me feel everything." Wrapping your arms around your legs, you pressed your face into your thighs, curling into the tightest ball you could muster, and closed your eyes to focus on the memories that came unbidden.

Waking up under his arm, pressed against his chest and surrounded by the smell of gin.

Giggling lies at him to make sure he forgot you.

Dragging him up the stairs to his bedroom with all those people watching.

Shouting his name just as his fist connected with Brian's jaw.

Feeling his breath against your face the first time he made a home inside your body.

Hearing his armor shatter, that hollow shell of human-shaped metal that you'd clung to until you'd broken it apart.

The mornings in his bed.

The nights in yours.

The hours in the library.

The precious minutes in the morning sunrise.

"Hope and happiness and passion and fear and anger and overwhelming sadness," you listed just a few of the things you'd felt in the few months that you'd known him, the fleeting feelings that came and went with the hours you'd spent together. "But, most of all, I feel love. I love him so much that it makes all the other feelings—the ones that trap me in this body—melt away." You opened your eyes and stared at your clasped hands, fingers picking at the dry cuticles. Looking up and shaking your head against the wave of emotion building in your throat, you locked eyes with her and took a deep, steadying breath.