Stroke It

by Ivy Jordan

  By the time Monday morning rolled around, the only conclusion I’d reached was that the situation was tricky and I was going to have to talk to him about it. Recalling what he’d said to me in my office during our encounter, I opted for slacks instead of my pencil skirt, and a loose blouse that did little to show off any figure I might have. Glancing at myself in the mirror, I looked like I was trying not to look remotely sexual. I pulled my hair back into a ponytail and pushed my glasses on—the glasses I didn’t know whether he liked or not, but most men I’d been with preferred them off.

  It was ridiculous to take all these measures to make sure I didn’t look attractive, and I couldn’t help but berate myself for overthinking the situation on my way to the office. When I walked into the waiting area and saw Sawyer, though, I was glad that I’d worn what I had. He’d chosen to wear a short-sleeve shirt, and I could see his tattoos more clearly.

  I wasn’t sure exactly where one tattoo ended and another began, but they were beautifully done. Some roses, some eagles, traditional and typical tattoos but done tastefully and all I could remember was how those arms had felt wrapped around my waist, how his fingers had felt digging into my hip bones…

  I shook my head and smiled at him. “Good morning,” I said. “You’re here a little—you’re always here early.”

  “I try to be,” Sawyer answered. He returned the smile.

  I sucked in a breath. “I, um, I hope that we’re both clear on the terms of your coming to these sessions,” I spoke as we walked back to my office. He got the door for me, eyebrow raised in an unspoken question.

  “What we did, last time, on Friday. It doesn’t change anything,” I said. “I’m still your psychiatrist. We’re not… these sessions aren’t for sex. We can’t stop doing work just because of what happened.”

  Sawyer laughed. I’d expected him to be disappointed or even angry, but instead, he laughed as he sat down on the couch. “I agree with you one hundred percent,” he said to me, smiling. I didn’t see anything facetious in his smile, and his words were without sarcasm.

  “Alright,” I said. “So we’re good to have a regular session?”

  “Of course,” he said. He motioned towards me and then to my office. “You have the floor, Dr. Rodgers.”

  “Well, you have the floor,” I pointed out. “You’re not paying so that I can talk to you, after all.”

  “That’s true,” he said.

  I smiled. “You seem to be in a better mood today. Did you do something fun over the weekend?”

  He raised his eyebrows at me again.

  “On Saturday and Sunday,” I clarified, excluding our sexual encounter from the realm of conversation.

  “I went out on Saturday and had some drinks with Pete. Well, a drink with Pete,” he said.

  “Yeah? How did that go?”

  “It was alright,” he said. “I mean… A couple of my old friends showed up. One of them had drugs, and Pete got defensive.”

  That was quite a lot to take in. People didn’t usually showcase that they were carrying drugs when they went out to bars—but then, I didn’t know where Sawyer had gone or what they were around. I thought about what Babs said, about Sawyer hanging around Stacy, and couldn’t help but get a little curious. Thankfully, it was literally my job to ask further questions.

  “Why did Pete get defensive?” I asked.

  Sawyer shifted in his seat, a little uncomfortable. At this point, I couldn’t see really what he had to lose telling me anything. He must have come to that realization on his own, because he looked up and started talking again.

  “When I got out of college, I was kind of stuck. I mean, I had a degree in business, and I probably could have gotten a job, but I hated everything that was offered to me. I couldn’t stand cubicles or desks or offices or cities. I just wanted to be left alone for the most part. I started going out and drinking as a sort of distraction,” he said. “At some point, I met Stacy. She’d gone to my old high school, and we’d never talked, but we just sort of hit it off. She was way more into drugs than I was. I smoked some pot in college, you know, everyone does, but I’d always been afraid of drugs.”

  I had similar experiences. I’d always think of the science behind LSD and what it could do to a brain and just like that, I’d ruined whatever party I was at.

  “But Stacy was convincing,” he said. “And I was bored and stupid. It got out of control, and my dad found out, there was a whole mess made over it.” He ran a hand through his short hair. “Anyway, once I realized that I was messing up my life, I joined the military to get away from it. I figured it could give me a fresh start, or at least teach me some discipline.”

  “Do you feel like the military helped?” I felt like I’d had my worst fears confirmed, but it didn’t bother me as much as I’d thought it would. Sawyer had made some mistakes, sure, but he’d clearly recognized them. Most people would consider a brief stay in rehab or a breakup to be substantial reform from a situation like that. Sawyer had gone overseas for six entire years to get away from it all. It wouldn’t be fair to force him to further prove himself.

  “Definitely,” he said. “They teach a lot about independence. Well, independence as a civilian, anyway. Self-discipline, things like that. I feel totally different than when I left. I wasn’t about to take them up on it, on Saturday night. Pete intervened, but I would have walked away on my own.”

  I nodded and believed him. If he’d taken the drugs, after all, he likely wouldn’t even be here. He certainly wouldn’t have told me about it. When people relapsed, they tended to vanish, at least from people they didn’t know too well. Did I qualify as a person close to Sawyer?

  “I think that’s a good sign,” I said. “You’re staying out of the wrong crowd. It’s important to stay away from people that encourage drug use. One of the biggest things I see is good people hanging around bad people and acting like them. It’s a mob mentality thing, and it brings out the worst in people.”

  “It does,” Sawyer agreed. “I don’t want to go back to my old life.”

  “That’s also good,” I said. “Especially if you’re dealing with night terrors and things like that. Drugs can make all of that much, much worse. Sometimes people turn to drugs for temporary relief from a traumatic experience, they want an escape, but it always makes everything much worse in the end.”

  “I believe that,” Sawyer said. “Doing drugs was like… I don’t know, digging yourself into a deeper hole. You feel like you’re going somewhere, but one day you realize you’re stuck.”

  It was a flawed metaphor, but I knew what he meant. “Right. There are some AA meetings nearby, and those aren’t just for alcoholics. They’re great for people dealing with drug addiction, too, and there are some specific to veterans that I can look up if you’d like.”

  Sawyer shook his head. “I don’t think I need that. I’ll let you know if I do, though.”

  I appreciated how compliant he was. A lot of people got ornery when I suggested that they get help for their problems. Stacy, in particular, was angry when it was suggested she seek help. The times she’d been in rehab hadn’t been her decision; more often than not they were court-ordered, and she’d been happy to take it over the jail sentence.

  Frankly, the thought of Sawyer in a similar position made me sad. I didn’t want him to go back down that road. He looked too dignified to be involved with drugs.

  When the session ended, he hung back a moment to clarify our next appointment. “We have an appointment Wednesday?”

  “If they’re helping you,” I agreed. “I don’t want to waste your time three times a week if it’s not helping.”

  “It really is,” Sawyer said. “Not just… last time, I mean sessions like this help a lot. You listen better than anyone I’ve ever talked to.”

  I couldn’t help the blush that rose to my cheeks. I appreciated being complimented on my professional skills. It wasn’t the same as being told I was beautiful or being told how badly he wanted me, but it
was certainly still something I treasured.

  “Well, thank you,” I said. “I’m glad to help.”

  “Actually…” Sawyer trailed off for a second. “I was thinking, I still wanted to talk to you before the meeting Wednesday. If you’re still opposed to it, I understand, but I’d still love to take you to dinner if you’d let me.”

  He was terribly bold, asking me again. I smiled, recalling something of a promise from him not to ask me to dinner again. But a lot had changed since then. We’d done a lot since then to make it foolish to try and say, ‘Oh, no, dinner would be too brash!’

  I’d already slept with him. Dinner certainly couldn’t hurt at this point.

  “That sounds great,” I said. “You’ve got my number. Just let me know when you want to pick me up, alright?”

  He looked shocked, and I suppressed a laugh at that shock.

  “Of course,” he said. “I’ll… I’ll let you know.”

  I bit my lip and waved as he walked out of my office.

  Chapter Seventeen

  SAWYER

  “Sawyer, don’t put those there. Those don’t grow in the shade.”

  I blinked and looked down at what I was doing. I appeared to be placing a tomato plant in the wrong place, and I put it back in the pot and set it to the side.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  Pete walked over and picked the pot up. “You got something on your mind?”

  “I’m having dinner with Quinn tonight,” I said. “I’m not sure where to take her. A bar is a little too… I don’t know. And I don’t want to take her somewhere super upscale for a first date. It’s overcompensating, you know?” I hadn’t been on a date in six years. Hell, it had been longer than six years. Stacy and I hadn’t gone on any dates. So it had been since college since I’d been on a date, and I couldn’t even recall it.

  “You’re going to dinner with Quinn?” Pete asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “What happened to ‘I need to sleep with someone else or see a different therapist?’” Pete paraphrased what I’d told him a few days before, and I sighed, not surprised that he had it ready to throw back in my face.

  “I decided I might as well try,” I said. “She’s a damn good therapist, and I don’t want to not see her. Someone else might not do as good a job, you know? And I also know that I don’t want to see another girl.”

  Pete frowned. “It sounds to me like a conflict of interest. It’s messy, that’s all. I don’t think it’s a good idea to be her patient if you’re dating her.”

  “Well, I think it’ll be alright.” Logically, I knew it was a horrible idea, but my gut told me that this was something I could pull off. “Besides, worst case scenario, I go see someone else. Might as well try.”

  “I suppose.” Pete shoved his cap onto his head and went back to moving dirt around. I could tell that he still didn’t approve, but frankly, I couldn’t expect him ever to approve, and this was better than getting back into drugs.

  When I got home, I spent a little too long trying to decide what to wear. I didn’t want to look stupidly overdressed, but I didn’t want to look casual, and my inexperience was starting to grate on me. I was almost thirty years old—I shouldn’t be nervous about going on a date with someone! I finally ended up with a clean pair of dark jeans and a button-down shirt, nothing too uptight but not my t-shirt from the day before, either.

  The air was a little hot outside, so I rolled the sleeves of my shirt up to my elbows, careful to smooth out the cuff. I texted her to let her know that I was on my way, and she sent me her address with a smiley face. I tapped it into my phone and made my way to her house.

  The fact that she lived so close to Austin told me she was doing well for herself. It was hugely expensive to live in the city—most of my professors from the University of Texas lived in San Marcos or San Antonio and commuted every day to work. The closer you got to Austin, the more money you had.

  Her house was lovely. It wasn’t anything ostentatious, but it was a beautiful house with a green lawn and vivacious flowerbed. I stepped up to the front door and knocked carefully.

  Quinn opened the door with a smile on her face. I took her in for just a moment—she wore a dress that hugged the curves of her body, and her hair had been curled. I remembered being told by one of my girlfriends in college that the effortless curls were the ones that took the longest to do.

  “You look lovely,” I told her, and a blush came up to her cheeks.

  “You don’t look too bad yourself,” she told me. I smiled and led her back to my car.

  “Where are we going?” She asked.

  I tapped my thumbs on the steering wheel. “There’s a little restaurant in Austin by one of the parks that does some live music and all fresh, local-grown food. There’s a lot of college kids, but if you can get past that, it’s nice.”

  “I don’t mind college kids,” she said. “Sometimes they remind me I’m getting old.”

  “You are absolutely not old,” I assured her. She was still in her twenties!

  “Well, I’m not a college student,” she said.

  “Neither am I,” I pointed out. “But I’m not old.”

  “No, you’re certainly not,” she said, and it seemed we’d reasoned it out, both of us smiling. We pulled up to the parking garage, and I picked up my ticket on our way out.

  It was too loud on the street to make conversation, so we didn’t say much of anything until we reached the restaurant. It was a small place sort of crammed up against the park, but the setting was beautiful, with an elaborately decorated interior and even candles at the dinner tables.

  The hostess got us seated, and then, finally, we could have some conversation.

  “This place is beautiful,” Quinn said. “It feels like I haven’t been on a date in ages.”

  “Oh?” I found it hard to believe that someone like Quinn could go very long without finding someone or another to take her out. She was absolutely everything most people looked for in a person—or perhaps she was everything that I looked for in a person, and my opinions were skewed.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I mean, I guess I shouldn’t talk about it, but you know, it’s not a big deal. It’s just been some time since I was on a date.”

  “Me too,” I said.

  “You didn’t get up to anything overseas?” She asked. “You had women in the army, right?”

  “Well, the men and women’s units are separate, to begin with,” I said. “And the women who are native to the area… they either hated us, fell all over us, or wanted to sell themselves to us. Mostly they just wanted to be left the hell alone. It wouldn’t have been right to go over there and bother them.”

  “Definitely not,” she said. “But you must have been lonely.”

  I had been. I watched her across the table, dark blue eyes scanning me like she knew every thought in my head already. She leaned her head against her hand, and it was difficult not to trace the slender wrist to the pale arm, up to the shoulder, to the neck, every curve of her body mesmerizing in an unexplainable way.

  “Sometimes,” I said. “But we’ve talked plenty about me. Why don’t you go out and find someone to take home? You could, if you wanted to.”

  “Am I not?” The corner of Quinn’s mouth cocked up in a smile, and I bit the inside of my cheek. This woman was going to be the death of me, and we hadn’t even been served our food yet.

  “I think that’s why we did what we did,” Quinn mentioned at some point.

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s been ages since I’ve been on a date. You’ve been in the military for some years. I think we both just had a lot of pent-up tension,” she said. “A lot of the work around sexual repression is Freudian, and I’m not very keen on Freud, but some of it holds.”

  “It did happen quickly,” I said. “But I can’t pretend I tried to stop it.”

  “Someone might have seen us,” Quinn said, almost like she was teasing. When she moved her shoulder forward,
the sleeve of her dress drooped against her arm, and she didn’t move to correct it. Like a bloodthirsty hound, I stared after that bit of exposed skin and met the smirk she gave me when I returned to her face.

  “I’d have let them watch,” I said, struggling to keep my voice from betraying my intentions. “You have a way of making me forget myself.”

  “I have several ways,” Quinn corrected. “And you’ve only seen a few.”

  Her cheeks blushed pink, and I tilted my head to the side, intrigued by this sexual tension. We were in public, but the surrounding noise was loud enough that no one would overhear. The waiter could be seen coming from far enough away that he wouldn’t overhear it, either. I leaned forward.

  “What am I going to do with you?” I asked her, shaking my head. I was still certain she’d be my undoing. I didn’t know how yet, or to what end, but I knew she would eventually drive me mad. Still, I was hardly leaving.

  “I was hoping whatever you wanted,” Quinn returned. She was too good at flirting where I was terribly, terribly rusty.

  So I sat back in my chair a little, frowning. “I’ll admit, I’m a little rusty with this.”

  “You’ll pick it up in time,” Quinn said, smiling. “I think it’s sweet. It’s never good to go out with someone and find out that they’re terribly smooth. That always lends itself to nasty surprises later.”

  “I think I’ll still be able to surprise you,” I mused. “But I wouldn’t call it nasty.”

  “Some would,” she retorted and grinned. It was almost a game now to see what we could turn into an innuendo. It was a relief to have that pressure off; the tension was still there, oddly enough, but I didn’t feel pressure to be sexy or suave.

  “You’re pretty good at this,” I conceded, taking a sip of my water.

  “I’m better at other things,” she said. She made a face. “No, that one didn’t work as well.”

  “It could have,” I insisted.