by Ivy Jordan
My surprise, despite knowing full well I had an appointment with him today, led me to stop abruptly. A few books and papers fell out of my dolly, and I bit back a curse.
“Oh, sorry,” Sawyer said, and he got up to start helping. He picked up a few of the books.
“I can manage it,” I insisted, scrambling for a few papers.
“Are you sure? Oh, I don’t want to get these out of order or anything.” Sawyer looked at a few papers as though they were alien species, eyebrows furrowed.
“Don’t worry about it.” I stood up and found that he’d already stacked a bunch of papers and set his hand on the dolly.
I smiled at him. “Well, thank you.” I walked with him back to my office, holding the door for him and the dolly. He set it down near my desk and I went around to see what I needed to unpack.
I didn’t think I needed anything outside the initial paperwork. “Alright, Sawyer, I’m just going to need you to fill out a little bit of paperwork first.” I handed him the new patient sheet. Luckily I already had his insurance information and all that technical stuff through his mother, so there wasn’t any need for me to bother with all that. It usually ate up half a session, getting through paperwork.
While he filled out paperwork, I did my best not to blatantly check him out. He’d cleaned up a little, not that he’d looked back the day I saw him. He wasn’t wearing a baseball cap, and I could see his dark hair was cropped short to his head. He’d shaved, though, and the bareness of his face accentuated the straight nose and furrowed brow line. His jaw, I imagined, could cut something.
It was his eyes, by far, that startled me most. His skin was tanned from outdoorsmanship and his hair dark but his eyes were a bright, light blue, almost like ring lights set in his skull. They were startling, absolutely, but stunning nonetheless. I bit my lip and set my legal pad against my clipboard. I could keep this together. He was lovely, sure, but plenty of people that came into my office were lovely. I didn’t develop crushes on them. I clicked my pen and swirled it on the corner for a moment to make sure the ink was still flowing.
When I glanced back up, Sawyer had just finished the sheet.
“I’ll just file this,” I said.
“Thank you.”
I smiled and slid the paper behind my legal pad. “So, Sawyer, have you been to a therapist’s office before?”
“Once, overseas.”
“Alright, good. I’m just going to remind you about the confidentiality laws. I’m not allowed to tell anyone outside this room anything you tell me in this office unless I believe that you or someone you know is in imminent danger.”
“Imminent danger?”
“Losing their life,” I clarified. “And if you report neglect or abuse to me, I’m obligated to report that to local authorities too, if it’s happening to you or if you’re inflicting it on someone else.”
Sawyer nodded slowly. “That makes sense.”
“At your previous therapist’s office, did you have anything that you focused on?”
He shook his head. “No, we didn’t really talk much, actually. They were always full of people with problems, so they tended to just push Prozac and not ask questions. A lot of people come out of it addicted to that kind of stuff because of it. I couldn’t take medications, and didn’t want to, so I opted out altogether.”
“Well, I don’t like to prescribe medications,” I said. “Sometimes I have to, in patients with severe problems. Sometimes a patient needs something to help them sleep, or something like that. But I advocate for lifestyle changes before medication.”
“Like a lifestyle coach?”
“Sort of.” A lifestyle coach, but with an actual psychology license, and a license to prescribe most psychiatric drugs in the state of Texas. We were starting to talk about me too much; I veered the conversation back over. Sawyer didn’t seem like the sort of person to do too well with, ‘So, what brings you in?’ So I decided to try for more specific questions that he couldn’t worm himself out of.
“So, Sawyer, how long were you overseas?” I asked. I clicked my pen and offered him a small smile.
“About six years.” Sawyer leaned back a little. He didn’t lay down on the couch, but to be fair, few people did. It made people feel awkward to sprawl out on a stranger’s couch. “I left in May in… yeah, five years and eleven months.”
It still boggled my mind that he’d been gone that long. “Where did you start out training? Did you go directly overseas?”
“No, I went to boot camp in Texas,” Sawyer said. “There was an old camp in West Texas, and it’s been moved to Georgia, but that’s where I did boot camp. I didn’t go overseas until I’d broken into the SEALs.”
“And how many years ago was that?”
“Took about two years from entry,” he said.
He’d gotten into the program quickly, then. Most people took a decade or more of intensive training to become a Navy SEAL. Sawyer had melded into it without much of anything. “That’s impressive.”
“I’d done JROTC and trained a lot of my life,” he said, as a sort of downplay to his achievement.
I took a few notes on my pad. “So after you joined the SEALs, you went overseas. Where were you stationed over there?”
“Well, the main base of operations was in Afghanistan,” he said. “But the SEALs went pretty much everywhere, and we set up base wherever we went. But Afghanistan is where we were officially set up.”
“Were you with a team?”
“Yeah, me and some people.” Sawyer looked a little distracted for a second, and I knew I’d hit something of a lead.
“Were you close to them?”
“Not really.” Sawyer shook his head. He didn’t say anything after that; I got the feeling he was lying and staying quiet to avoid any kind of prying.
“Well, have you gotten in touch with any of them outside of the military? There are a lot of veterans programs in Austin that can help with stuff like that.” I thought of the brochures I had in my desk advertising for different coffee shop meetups and AA meetings aimed to attract veterans. It was a really great thing, it seemed, for veterans to be able to share experiences with people who really understood. Sawyer was a bit younger than most of them—well, a lot of younger than most of them. But he seemed smart enough not to care about that.
“I’ll see,” he said.
I waited for him to elaborate, and it seemed like he wasn’t going to. “So overseas, you and this team. What kind of work did you guys do?”
He sighed. “All due respect, Dr. Rodgers, I understand that you’re under the impression something terrible happened over there. That’s why my mom sent me in here, was because she thought something terrible happened over there. I can’t seem to get anyone to believe me when I tell them that nothing happened out of the ordinary, but I didn’t want her to worry.”
I couldn’t help but notice that he’d shut the conversation down right after I brought up the people in his team, and I made a quick note of that. “You’re only here to put your mother at ease, then?”
“Yes,” he said, seemingly relieved that I understood his plight. Or, at least, appeared to understand his plight; I was all too familiar with people coming in who deflected their reason for showing up onto someone else.
“Alright,” I said. I could try something else, maybe something unrelated to get him to start opening up about personal things that didn’t relate to the military. Sometimes the way people talked about their childhood could reflect on things that happened in their adult lives.
I doodled a small flower off to the side of my notes. “Tell me about where you grew up. Did you grow up in Austin?”
“Small town outside of it,” he said. “We moved into the city when I was coming out of high school.”
Similar to me, then. “Your parents?”
“Yeah?”
“You lived with your mother and father, I mean?”
“Oh. Yeah, I did. They didn’t divorce or anything.” Sawyer clear
ed his throat. I wondered why he clarified that they hadn’t divorced. It suggested that there was tension in the family that could have led to a divorce; perhaps the root of Sawyer’s problem wasn’t in the military at all, but in his life at home beforehand.
“Did they get along?” I asked.
“Yeah, well enough.” Sawyer rubbed the back of his neck. “My dad’s always been kind of quiet. Mom’s real bubbly and sweet. So I don’t know if it’s that they don’t get along or if they’re just used to each other. They’ve certainly been together a while.”
I nodded slowly and wondered if he saw the parallels between himself and his father. I made a little note of it. He certainly seemed, anyway, like the quiet type, and Kimberly was definitely bubbly.
“I think we’re out of time,” Sawyer said, glancing up at the clock above the door.
I looked at my watch. “So we are,” I said. Paperwork had, as it always did, eaten up a good chunk of our session. I knew I had more that I wanted to talk to him about, but he would come back in for another day, hopefully. “Can I count on you to come back Wednesday?”
“I suppose,” Sawyer said. “I don’t really want to waste your time. There’s nothing about me that I think requires much prodding.”
I smiled at his choice of words, as though I were picking through his brain and poking at what didn’t need to be bothered. “Why don’t you let me be the judge of that?”
He smiled at that. “Fair enough.” He got up to walk to the door, and before he left, he turned around. “Oh, Dr. Rodgers, I never got back to you about your invitation to dinner.”
My gut clenched a little to remember that I’d done that. It was before I’d known he’d be turning up in my office, but I still shouldn’t have been out and flirting so blatantly. “Ah, right. Well, Sawyer, I’m flattered you remember, but I really think we ought to keep everything professional.”
Sawyer nodded, and I couldn’t quite read the expression on his face. “That sounds fair,” he said. “Have a good afternoon.”
With that, he was gone. I couldn’t believe I’d turned him down so quickly. The words had rolled off my tongue. I’d had to turn down clients before, but never clients that I’d initially taken an interest in. Still, I knew I’d made the right choice. Sawyer was my patient, not my boyfriend, and it would be an enormous conflict of interest to start seeing him outside of my office in a romantic setting. It would be detrimental to his health, really.
I thought about the set in his brow and the way he smiled at me. I’d turned him down for dinner! I sat back in my office chair and buried my head in my hands. I’d really gotten into a mess now.
Chapter Nine
SAWYER
The morning after my therapy appointment, I woke up early to go to Pete’s. It was natural for me to rise early. In boot camp, we’d gotten up too early to fathom, and it carried over overseas. Now, without setting an alarm, I woke up at five or six in the morning, regardless of when I’d gone to bed the night before.
When I went out to the kitchen, I saw my father sitting there. Same chair at the table, different newspaper in his hand, same scowl on his face. I didn’t say anything to him, just poured myself a travel mug of coffee and made my way out. He didn’t say anything to me, either. I didn’t bother thinking about what it meant that he still wasn’t talking to me. I couldn’t make him care about me if he wasn’t going to care after my being gone for six years. If being in the SEALs didn’t make him care, nothing would. I couldn’t waste my time with it.
I drank my coffee on the way to Pete’s with the morning news playing on the radio. The world hadn’t blown up while I was gone, despite the government’s assurance that they’d see it happen if they had any say. While I was overseas, the message was always doomsday. It motivated soldiers to action if we thought the world was in jeopardy. Here, though, the woman on the speaker was talking about seasonal allergies like they were the only thing anyone had to worry about.
When I pulled into the driveway, I could see Pete sitting on the porch and smoking a cigarette. He put it out when I got there like I was a cop come to bust him for drugs, and when I walked up to him, I was already grinning.
“I don’t care if you smoke, Pete,” I reminded him.
“Shoot, I just don’t want you smokin’,” Pete returned. “Hell, I tried dip, but that stuff gets stuck up in your teeth and makes a nasty mess of everything.”
“Worse things than nicotine,” I reasoned, and he pulled a different cigarette out of his shirt pocket. “You got those things floating in your pockets?”
“I roll ‘em myself,” Pete said. “I grow my own tobacco out here.”
That was like Pete. I imagined he probably didn’t want to give any of his money to any of the big cigarette companies. He thrived on self-sustenance and even had a few cows out in his barn that he got dairy from. It was ridiculous, to some extent; I appreciated knowing that I could go to the store and buy the food I needed. But for Pete, the beauty of his way of life was that if the power went out and the government shut down, he’d be sitting on his hill, happy as a clam.
I’d gotten to his house a little early for work, so I sat down on a chair next to Pete.
“Did you go to the therapist yesterday?” he asked, annunciating ‘therapist’ like it was the hardest word he’d ever had to learn.
“Sure did,” I said. “You remember Quinn, from the party?”
“Jesus, yes.”
“Her last name is Rodgers. Dr. Rodgers, in fact.”
“Shit!”
“Yeah.” I shook my head at my profound, horrendous luck. “Can you believe it? She’s a psychologist. I didn’t know it was her until I went in to see her yesterday, and I was hardly going to run from her office.”
Pete shook his head and tapped his cigarette on the table. “Did she say anything to you about the party? Are you still gonna try to, you know?”
I rolled my eyes at his juvenile phrasing. Even if I were still trying to pursue Quinn, my days of being interested in women for only sex were long past. I wanted someone to get to know, someone to be friends with—sex didn’t mean anything without that, at least in my mind. “Don’t believe so. I brought up her offer to go to dinner, and she shot me down.”
“Shit. Was she mean about it?”
“Nah,” I said. “She’s just a doctor, and I’m her patient. It’s not professional to be seeing me outside of her office.” I considered all of the possible therapists in Austin and figured that it had to be some kind of shit luck that I’d ended up with the one person I’d been interested in seeing outside of work. “Besides, I think it’s against the law or something. She can get her license revoked if she sees clients. I think the law says something like that.”
“Maybe on TV,” Pete said. “But I don’t know if that’s true in real life. Maybe in a firm, or something?”
“Maybe. But I don’t want to risk it, and it sounds like she doesn’t, either,” I said.
“Shoot. You know, maybe you should try seeing someone else. That way you can keep talking to Quinn outside her office.”
I frowned. “I don’t know. I don’t really like therapists that well, and she’s easy to talk to.”
“Plenty of them are easy to talk to,” Pete argued.
I sighed. “I don’t know, Pete. I’m not really keen on seeing a therapist as it is. I like her well enough, and she’s easy enough to talk to. I’d rather just bite the bullet and talk to her. I think it’d be easier to find another girl I’m interested in than to find another therapist I can tolerate.”
“I guess that makes sense. But do you really think they make ‘em like that everywhere? No sir. Didn’t you see anyone while you were overseas?”
I had to laugh at that insinuation. “No. I mean, I probably could have. Hell, maybe even should have. There were a lot of whores in some of those bars, and we had the money, and a lot of people in my team were up for it. I just didn’t. At first because of Stacy, and then because… I don’t know. Felt wron
g.”
“Wouldn’t be too bad for you to meet someone,” Pete mused.
“Probably not. What about you? You been seeing anyone?”
Pete sighed. “Girls out here don’t get where I’m coming from. Too many of them come out of the city, and all they care about is money. They want a big house, expensive jewelry, stuff like that. I guess I understand why, but I want a friend out here. Someone who understands where I’m coming from.”
“Someone else to tear down corporate America?” I offered.
He shot me a glare, but he was smiling at the same time. “Yeah, something like that. A friend, really. Doesn’t help me all too much that I’m missin’ a tooth up front and don’t talk like some of those city lawyers.”
“Not everyone who works in the city is a lawyer.”
“They all talk like lawyers. Saying one thing and meaning another. Trying to trick you out of what you’ve got by weaving loopholes into well-meaning conversation.” Pete shook his head. “I get sick of it. Sometimes I think I might be happy out here by myself. Me and the cows and the chickens and the beets.”
“And the corn,” I offered. “And the wheat.”
“And the corn and the wheat,” he agreed. “And the vegetable garden, of course.”
I nodded.
“But I don’t think you’re quite like me in that regard,” Pete said.
“What do you mean?”
“You’re quieter than me. A little uptight sometimes. Don’t you get defensive; you are. It isn’t altogether a bad thing. You just need someone around to prod you outside yourself a little. If you spend your whole life alone, you’ll end up a hermit. Like one of them people in Asia that go and live in the mountains alone.”
He was talking about monks, and he was wrong, but I understood his point. I tended to seclude, but I didn’t know that I necessarily needed another person for that. “I don’t think having a wife would mean that. I wouldn’t want to bother a woman with that sort of thing, anyway.”