She gave us a little head bow and turned to make her way to the back corner, where a small kitchen folded around an empty island. I wrinkled my nose at the idea of sour citrus, leaning close to Mel to make sure no one heard us.
“I’m already sure this guy’s a creep. You can’t have that last name and not be a creep.”
Mel’s lip quirked but he was scanning the room intently. After another minute of looking around, he made his way toward the couches set in a square off to our right.
“Consultation?” I whispered, tugging on his arm to slow him down.
“Yeah,” he whispered back. “Be convincing. We want them to want us here so we can get all up in their business.”
“Speaking of, why didn’t you just seduce one of the receptionists and steal her keys or something?”
Mel was quiet and I wasn’t sure for a moment if he was ignoring my question or if he just didn’t have a good answer. Finally, he glanced at me so quick it was like he didn’t want to, and swallowed.
“It wasn’t really…it wouldn’t have worked.”
Without giving me a chance to ask why, he took a seat next to an older couple, giving them both a quick smile. I followed him over, dropped down next to Mel, and looked around. There was one other pair sitting on the couch to our right and they were chatting quietly, their emotions mild. I wasn’t sure why they were there; they seemed to be getting along just fine. No subtle resentment, frustration, disappointment, or even a trace of silent loathing. It was nothing like how I imagined it would be to step outside myself and read me with Mel.
“Are you here for the retreat?” Mel asked the older couple. The wife smiled at him, her body language indicating she was all too happy to make conversation with the attractive, muscular young man. The husband gave Mel a look of mild disapproval but there wasn’t any hostility behind it.
“Oh no, just for therapy. We’ve been here once a week for a few months. We’ve been married longer than you’ve been alive and you can’t go wrong with a tune-up now and then,” the woman said, delight lighting her up. She was just so happy to have someone interested, she pushed on, spilling more information than Mel had asked for, while he smiled politely at her. “I thought we’d better see what we could do to make our lives more content. We’ve tried changing our diet and taking supplements, different sorts of activities, and now we’re trying this.”
“And how’s it working for you?”
“Very well, I think.” She reminded me of everyone’s favorite grandma, content and soft, nice to have around. It was like sitting two people away from the personification of a fuzzy blanket.
“That’s fantastic,” Mel said, and it seemed genuine. “I hope the wife and I have as much success as you two.”
The man leaned forward, pointedly ignoring Mel so he could catch my eye and wag his brows suggestively.
“Let me save you a lot of money, darling, and tell you what the doctor told us: Have more sex.”
“Cornelius!” His wife’s cheeks went red, embarrassment spewing out of her like a broken fire hydrant. He gave a nod before turning to give Mel a challenging grin. Mel just nodded and looked to me.
“You hear that, sweetie? More sex.”
“Bite me,” I said without thinking.
“Well that wasn’t prescribed,” Cornelius said. “But I’m sure your husband here wouldn’t mind.”
Mrs. Cornelius slapped his arm three times in rapid succession and I gave in, laughing along with the feelings rumbling out of him. Satisfied, Cornelius leaned back in his seat, laying a hand over his wife’s pleated khakis. She wiggled a bit like the embarrassment of the intimate touch was almost too much to bear, but she didn’t stop him.
Soon after, a woman in her mid-fifties came out to stand in the gap between the two couches.
“Cornelius, Mira, are you ready?”
“We are,” Mira said. Cornelius turned to give me one last lascivious grin before heaving himself up and following the women toward a hall to the left. When they were out of sight, Mel shifted to throw his arm over the back of the couch, pulling me close to him.
“Well there you go, all our problems solved. We’re just not having enough sex.”
“You’re having plenty of sex. Just not with me. Which I’m grateful for,” I added before he could offer.
“Maybe that’s our problem. You don’t want to take advantage of all of this,” he said, gesturing to his body, and then specifically to his crotch.
“I don’t consider not wanting to have sex with you a problem,” I sniffed, turning away. I only then realized that the couple to our right had stopped talking and were watching us. I blinked, tried to give a convincing smile. “He’s kidding, of course. I have…s—” I didn’t want to say it. I’d had to suggest it just a few weeks before and it had felt like swallowing a jar of worms. “—sex with him all the time. That’s not my problem—our problem.”
Realizing we had an audience, Mel pressed his arm around me even tighter, smashing me against his firm body and making my shoulder hurt.
“It’s true. She can barely keep her hands off me. Especially in the mornings. It’s like taming a lion trying to get out of bed each day.” He winked at them, mimed cracking a whip and, then moved on to imitating some other action that I didn’t recognize but could be sure wasn’t work safe. They nodded silently, trying to hide the fact that they were both stifling nervous laughter or maybe the urge to get up and run away.
Luckily for all of us, the doctor showed then, calling our names. Mel let me go and I was able to push to my feet and step away from him. Immediately I regretted moving closer to the doctor. I did not like standing near this man.
Doctor Coontz was just as greasy as his name implied, though not terribly so physically. He had a smattering of stray wiry hairs on the sides, with what little he had left on top slicked back severely. His eyes were a little too wide, slightly buggy and too grey to be considered blue. I’d met men with attractive grey eyes, but these were from a different manufacturer. They looked like newspaper that’d been left in the rain, rather than the sky before a storm.
I felt myself squinting as I looked over his thin body and wondered why my nose could almost-but-not-quite detect a smell somewhere between good cheese and old socks. My lizard brain started hissing and spitting and I immediately wanted to turn to Mel, forfeit the cupcakes, and leave.
My fake husband got to his feet, stepped around the coffee table with its dozens of magazines, and held out a hand. The doctor shook his hand, and then turned to me, his hand still out. I pretending to be fascinated by the cow clock on the wall and hoped he took my rudeness for distraction. He faltered a bit, dropping his arm before gesturing to a hallway off to our right.
“If you two are ready, just follow me.”
“Lead the way,” Mel said, glancing down at me. He seemed to notice my discomfort and put a hand to my shoulder, pushing slightly. “Let’s go, Pumpkin.”
The doctor turned toward the hall and I couldn’t help but critique him as he walked. Even the pattern of his steps bothered me; his feet dragged on the wooden floors and his steps were too small. When I didn’t start moving immediately, Mel shoved harder, leaning down to whisper in my ear.
“Get it together, Arthur.”
“Shh,” I hissed at him, moving to follow the doctor. The hallway was long, curving past several closed doors and a few open ones that revealed small rooms that all matched each other in décor: three comfortable chairs, one coffee table, and an end table. The art was all fields and forests, with the occasional lake thrown in for good measure. It felt kind of like a dentist’s office, but without the scary warnings about gum disease and cavities.
“Right through here, have a seat.” The doctor stopped at a room toward the back of the hallway, letting us enter first. I darted forward, squeezed between Mel and the doorjamb to keep Coontz from trying to shake my hand again. I took the seat that looked slightly further away from what I guessed would be the doctor’s seat and bus
ied myself with pouring some lemonade from the carafe on the end table. Mel gave me a look that clearly disapproved of my nutty behavior as he moved toward me, but his expression was plain before he faced the doctor.
Instead of offering Mel any of the lemonade, I took a gulp of mine and looked around the room. I forced myself to be fascinated by the boring photographs on the walls so that I wouldn’t have to make eye contact.
Doctor Coontz sat in the chair across from us, crossing his chicken legs in what I deemed an overly feminine fashion and looked at us both in turn. I likely wouldn’t have noticed the action in any other man, but I just really couldn’t get over how uncomfortable he made me feel. It was weird and I didn’t know how to handle it. I couldn’t leave, I couldn’t really ask him why he creeped me out, and I couldn’t tell Mel, so I had to just sit there and feel like my skin was crawling.
He’d grabbed a notepad and a pen from somewhere along the way and he perched the pad on his knee. I didn’t speak and neither did Mel. Finally, the doctor gave a small chuckle, shook his head, his gaze falling on me and staying. I snuck a peak at him before turning my attention to Mel, as if I expected him to do all the talking.
“First time jitters, I see. Let’s just talk about you two for a second. How long have you been married?”
I ignored the question and pretended he wasn’t still watching me, looking to the lemonade as if I was trying to read a label, which of course it didn’t have. Coontz’s emotions seemed pretty normal, not overly inappropriate or outrageous. He was just a human man with unfortunate genetics, but good god did he make my stomach do flailing flip-flops.
Mel cleared his throat harshly and I jerked my head up to look at him. When I offered nothing helpful, Mel gave a slight roll of his eyes and turned to Coontz.
“We’ve been together three years, married one.”
“How did you meet?”
“In a bar,” Mel said. He gave a shrug of his shoulder. I was wondering if he’d thought of any of this beforehand or if he was just about to wing it. He’d distracted me from deciding on a fake history to back up our fake marriage, so now we were left in the position of possibly contradicting each other. Frustration welled, distracting me from my unease and I spoke up, desperate to contribute something, even if I was risking sounding snide or dishonest.
“Who could resist that face, right?” I said, setting down my lemonade. Mel glanced over, tension pulling his brows together ever so slightly. “He was quite a cad before me, bedding everything that moved. He’s even slept with my best friend.”
“Really?” the doctor asked, making a note on the pad. “So you had met before?”
“No, not really,” I said before he could make up something I wouldn’t be able to follow. “I’d seen him in passing, but it was nothing.”
“It was love at first sight for me,” Mel said, his tone a challenge. I threw him a glare. “I saw her across that crowded bar, sipping on her pink, fruity drink and thought, ‘my God. That woman is incredible.’ So, I went right up and asked her out. I wanted to propose that instant, but I didn’t want to scare her off.”
“Oh god,” I groaned, before catching myself. “Um. I—he always tells it that way, but that’s not… He’s embellishing. It’d be pretty weird if he actually wanted to marry me before even knowing my name, right?”
Mel’s lip quirked before he looked back to Coontz. “And now here we are.”
“Yes, here you are,” Coontz said, scribbling something else onto the pad. He wasn’t particularly amused or unhappy with our responses. He was curious, but it was mild. I probably would have been picking up on the friction between the two of us, even if I wasn’t an empath. Maybe he wasn’t on the level and I could just explain that to Mel, he could call the cops, and we could be on our way. Good god, did I want to be on my way.
“So, why are you here?”
“We fight all the time,” I said, knowing the easy answer to that question, and happy I wouldn’t have to lie. “I can barely stand to be in the same room as him.”
“What do you fight about?”
“Everything. He never listens to me. If I ask him to do something he just laughs. It’s all his fault. Our marriage is falling apart and it’s all his fault.”
“Hey, you’re part of this marriage, too,” Mel argued, turning in the chair so he could almost face me completely. “You never do what I want, either.”
“Now, now,” Coontz said, leaning forward. “Let’s take a second before we start to argue.” I realized too late what he was about to do as he laid a hand on my knee. It felt like spiders were wriggling along my skin. Crossing my legs just to get my knee out from under his hand, I glared his way, giving him a look that clearly explained that touching had been going too far. He stayed folded forward, watching me mildly, his psyche completely guilt-free. I really didn’t like this guy, but I had to consider that maybe the worst of his offenses was being a sociopath. Perhaps he’d done nothing wrong except choose a profession he had no business being a part of.
“Let’s have a discussion instead of a fight. Can we do that?” Coontz asked, finally sitting up straight again. Mel crossed his arms over his chest, flicked his gaze to me, and then nodded.
“Sure,” I said, keeping my crossed legs squeezed against the armrest of the chair, hoping it kept me out of touching range. I wanted to talk to some of the other couples under his care, I thought, hoping we could find a few before we left. Maybe we’d be allowed to tour the grounds and I could grill other women about whether or not Coontz made them want to crawl inside their own belly buttons and disappear.
Him being a creep wasn’t exactly illegal, though, and we were there looking for cultish wrongdoing, not just some dude with bad hair making women uncomfortable. That was something you could find at any nightclub, not something worth prosecuting.
“Good, that’s good. Now, why did you come here?”
“To work on our marriage,” Mel answered, as if unsure if he was answering two plus two with four.
“And why do you want to do that?” Coontz asked. I watched Mel, at a loss. I’d been through a real crumbling marriage and hadn’t known how to handle it then, either. What the hell was I supposed to say when asked why I wanted to work on a fake marriage to a slutty werewolf?
When neither one of us spoke, Coontz sat back and gestured like a teacher offering the answer to a student who should already know it.
“Because you love each other, or just because you feel you have to? Are you trying to save your marriage, or just save face?”
“Our marriage, of course,” Mel said. He let his arms drop onto the rests and sighed dramatically. “We still love each other. I can tell, even when we’re having issues that she still loves me, and I know I love her. Please say you’ll help us out. Please say you’ll have us for the retreat.”
Coontz looked between us and I felt something new move around his psyche. I couldn’t quite place what it was, but it reminded me of curiosity. It was dangerous, though, something altogether different than anything else in his head—or anyone else’s head, really.
No, I realized, that wasn’t exactly true. I’d felt something similar in Stan and in Mel when they’d been under the influence of a succubus. Maybe whatever was going on at Tough Love wasn’t just some strange cult, after all. Maybe we had bigger problems on our hands.
Swallowing nervously, I found my mouth was dry as a bone, and I let out a small cough When I grabbed for the lemonade and took a few sloppy gulps, Coontz turned back to Mel, regarded him silently for a moment.
“Let me ask you a few more questions,” he said finally, as if he was still making up his mind.” When Mel nodded, the doctor looked back to me. “Do you have any children?”
“No,” I said. He gave a nod, made a mark on his paper.
“Are you planning on having any?”
I turned to Mel, my brows up. Yet another question I couldn’t answer. In real therapy there isn’t a right or wrong answer. Some couples want kids, some
don’t and I wasn’t about to judge, unless it was a problem between them or unless it was a decision based on biology or trauma.
We were trying to get in good with this guy, though. We had to make him want us around so we could poke and prod to see if Tough Love was luring couples in and forcing them to worship at the feet of some long-haired loser with an acoustic guitar. Mel had been the one to do research on this place. Did we want kids? Would that make us more or less attractive to a possible cult? This had been exactly what I’d been afraid of happening. Mel caught my confusion and turned to the doctor.
“We’ve talked about it but we’re still using birth control, so it’s not something we’re planning in the near future.”
“All right. What about your families? Are they big families? Do you have a history of multiple births?”
“I do,” Mel said, though I could hear a note of suspicion in his voice. I just shook my head.
“And your families? Lots of brothers and sisters, or just a few?”
“I have a big family,” Mel answered. “Gwen, too.”
“Yeah,” I added lamely.
“Excellent.” Coontz’s emotions were keying up, excitement crackling through him alongside that strange extra grinding thread I couldn’t place. “May I ask what you two do for a living?” Again, Mel took the initiative and answered for us both.
“Gwen owns her own consulting business and I’m a personal trainer.”
“Good, good.” Coontz looked over what he’d written as if considering, adding up facts and data. He made a show of it, but his emotions didn’t fit. He’d gone giddy as soon as we’d talked about children, and I didn’t like it. Finally, he looked up at us.
“I would be happy to help you both. There are a variety of exercises we go through and some might seem very invasive but I assure you they are only administered for the health of your marriage. Now, because this is only a consultation, we won’t start quite yet. I have a few other appointments today, but I’d like to see you back here first thing in the morning.”
“That’s perfect, thank you so much, doctor.” Mel stood up, reaching out a hand. Coontz stared a little too long at me before standing up as well. Taking Mel’s hand, he let him pump it once.
Cold Feet (Empathy in the PPNW Book 3) Page 5