I clench my teeth at her noisy jewelry. “People call me A but sure, yeah. Whatever.”
“I can call you A. No worries.”
She smiles. Again.
I don’t know how to respond to it. Am I supposed to smile back? Am I supposed to ask her what she wants to be called? What, exactly.
Also, how does a Harvard graduate not know what the basic professional attire is? Why is she wearing a hobo-like skirt? How is that going to inspire confidence in her clients that she can fix their problems?
But again, I’m not going to get riled up. Because I never get riled up.
Besides, it’s not like I’ve been to a therapist before. So I don’t know what these people do.
“So,” she begins when I simply keep looking at her. “This is the first time that you’ve had an anger problem, at least to this degree. Is that correct?”
I jerk out a nod. “This is the first time I’ve had an anger problem to any degree.”
She raises her eyebrows. “Are you saying that you’ve never been angry?”
“Yes.”
“But that’s impossible.”
“It’s not. I don’t lose my temper. It’s detrimental to the game.”
“Ah, soccer.” She nods. “So you’re very dedicated to soccer.”
Something about that makes me tighten up my body. “Yes. Soccer is everything.”
She hums and I don’t like that. I don’t know what that hum means. I’m about to say something to her when she asks me another question. “So what happened to make you this angry?”
“Excuse me?”
She shrugs. “You say that you never get angry because it’s detrimental to the game. But something must have happened to make you so angry that you punched someone. So what happened?”
What happened.
She’s joking, right?
Doesn’t she know what happened? It’s fucking plastered all over, what happened.
It’s fucking plastered all over the team that I broke up with my girlfriend and lost my shit. And I lost it to such an extent that I got suspended because the douchebag I beat up was threatening to press charges against me. They even told me to get out of the city, work on my issues and come back when I have a doctor’s note saying that I’m fit to play again.
The PR team had to step in and make up a lie about an injury.
All because I broke the first rule of soccer.
“I was under the impression,” I begin, shifting on the pink couch – I cannot fucking get over the color – my body tighter than ever, “that you were hired by the team.”
“I was.”
“So shouldn’t you already know what happened?”
She smiles again and I swear to God, I’m going to destroy her coffee table and that bookcase that she has by the wall, just to get myself to calm down and finish my very first therapy session.
My fingers are already tingling with the effort of keeping still and not curling into fists.
“I do know. But I want to hear it in your own words. So I’d love it if you’d humor me.”
Right.
Okay.
Humor the goddamn doctor so she’ll give me a note and I can go back to where I belong: with my team.
I clamp my jaw and count to three. Then, I count to five.
My gut is still churning but it’s okay. I can do this.
I’ve done harder things on the soccer field. I can talk to a therapist and tell her in my own words what happened.
“I broke up with my girlfriend,” I begin with clenched teeth. “And that made me angry. It made me so angry that I did what I never do: I broke a rule. And now I’m here sitting in front of you, talking about it.”
She hums again and it’s starting to grate on my nerves. “So about the breakup. Tell me about it. How did that happen?”
At this, everything in my body seizes up.
Every single thing.
My muscles strain and I have to clench my teeth as I feel something crawling over my skin. Something like a bug. A hundred bugs. A whole fucking army of them.
They crawl and slither even, getting me hot around the neck, getting my legs jittery and I lose the battle with my fingers and curl them into fists, digging the knuckles into my thighs.
Somehow, I manage to say, “How do you think breakups happen? We had a fight. We broke up.”
Finally, she’s lost her smile and there’s a frown on her forehead. And I’m not sure if I like that better than her constant stretch of lips.
“Well, there must have been a reason, right? Breakups don’t just happen.”
That’s the thing.
It happened. It fucking happened. And I didn’t see it coming.
I didn’t see the knife in her hand.
Not until she stabbed me with it.
I’m sorry, A. I didn’t mean for it to happen…
That’s what she said. After.
After she took eight years of our love and threw it away.
That she didn’t mean for it to happen.