“Can’t or won’t?” I fire back, pushing myself up to standing too. He’s half-dressed now, so I do the same, snatching at my clothes, flung all over the room last night in our haste.
“Either,” Lark replies angrily.
“Fine.” I finish yanking on my jeans and grab my top from a lamp it somehow wound up slung over. “If you can’t open up, then neither will I.” With that, I tug the shirt over my head.
When I emerge on the other side, Lark’s standing in the middle of the room, still only half-dressed, his own shirt dangling from one fist. “Cassidy…” He runs one hand through his hair, and I try not to get distracted at the way his muscles ripple when he does. “Can you just… give me time? To get there, at least? I’m not ready yet, but I hope soon that maybe—”
He breaks off. Probably because I’m already shaking my head and taking slow steps backward toward the door. “Lark, I just… I can’t. Okay? I’m working on myself too right now.” Because he’s right, I do have that wall up. Even if I get the feeling he’s not the guy I can let the wall down around—because I’m pretty sure he would wreck me if I did… I know I need to eventually.
“I need to concentrate on me just now,” I say. “I’m sorry.”
I expect him to call out. To chase me again, the way he’s been doing this whole time. But when I turn around and start toward his apartment door, he lets me go for once. Still, I can’t help stealing one last backward glance when I reach the elevator, just before the doors close behind me.
Lark’s still standing right where I left him in the middle of his bedroom, shirt in one hand. Motionless, as if he’s just been stunned out of motion.
My heart wrenches. But then the elevator doors shut, blocking him from view, and I sink back out of the clouds, down to the street level again.
15
Cassidy
I lie on my back and count the lightbulbs that stretch along the ceiling of this office. I already know there are twenty inset lights, each one dim, but together they provide enough glow to write by. At least, so I assume, based on the scribbling sound coming from the chair adjacent to my couch.
“Tell me more about Norman,” my therapist says, her voice low and unassuming.
My throat tightens anyway. “Do I have to?” I murmur, still squinting at those lights.
“You don’t have to do anything, Cassidy,” she replies, although not before I hear her scribbling another quick note. “But if your goal, as you just told me, is to learn how to open up to possible relationships in the future, and you believe that this is what’s blocking you, then I think it would be helpful to practice talking about it with someone neutral, don’t you?”
I sigh. Mostly because what she’s saying makes a lot of sense. Unfortunately. “It… we dated for two years. He was the one who pursued me, hard. I wasn’t sure, but…” I shake my head. “He had this way of convincing me to do things. Things I didn’t always want to.”
“Are we talking sexually?” my therapist replies, her voice still careful and even.
“Sometimes.” I shift against the couch. The lights, which earlier seemed so dim, now seem way too bright. “Not as much that though.” I lever myself upright to look at her. “Just, everything was all about what he wanted. All the time. He wanted me to dress up, so I dressed up. He wanted to go to a show, so we went to the show. He wanted to go out to dinner, so we went… He never asked what I wanted. And the few times I tried to ask, he’d flip out at me.” I bite my lower lip, remembering. “He used to tell me that…”
When my voice falters, my therapist leans forward, crossing her arms on her lap. “It’s all right, Cassidy,” she says. I don’t realize I’m crying until she passes me a tissue.
After she does, I just sit there holding it for a minute, confused. Like I’ve come unmoored for a minute. “He told me that since he made all our money, it was his decision.” I breathe in slowly through my nose, and out through my mouth, the way I’ve been practicing over the last couple of weeks, coming here. “And if I argued or anything, he’d accuse me of trying to use him for his money, being a gold-digger. But I wasn’t, I swear I didn’t even care, sometimes I used to wish we’d lose all the money just so he’d act normal.”
“You understand that that is manipulative behavior, don’t you, Cassidy?” my therapist murmurs.
I bob my head. “But I just felt…” I tug at the tissue so hard it comes apart between my fingers. So I ball it into my fist instead. “I felt like I’d never find anyone better, so.” I clear my throat, scowling. “He knew it, too. He played on my fears. He used to tell me I was ugly, annoying, shrill. He said no other guy would put up with my bullshit, and I believed him.”