Beard In Mind: (Winston Brothers, #4)

by Penny Reid

  She felt just right. Soft and strong, solid and real. She felt like an anchor in this new storm. Safety.

  “You give the best hugs.” I felt her cheek curve with a smile.

  I lowered my lips to her shoulder, kissed her on the spot I knew she liked. “Then we should hug forever.”

  “Then how will we work?”

  “We can work and hug at the same time.” I forced teasing into my voice, good humor I didn’t feel.

  I needed this. I needed a touchstone. I needed normal. And somehow, so quickly, Shelly had become what I needed.

  She huffed a laugh. “I’m sure your brothers will not mind. And it wouldn’t be at all difficult to work while hugging.”

  I leaned away, smiling down at her. “Was that sarcasm of the playful variety?”

  Shelly bit her bottom lip to disguise a smile, her eyes bright as she peered up at me.

  Pulling her close again, I gave her a kiss. And then another, and another. And that was my mistake.

  She caught my hand on the way to her breast. “Beau—”

  “You feel so good. I love how you feel.” I dug my fingers into her backside.

  “Wait.” She lifted her chin, turning her face from mine. “Beau, wait, stop.”

  I did. I stopped. I lowered my forehead to her shoulder. Breathing hard, my head swimming with the feel of her body, the smell of her, the heat of her mouth.

  Just let me drown in you, I wanted to beg.

  Her nails combed through the hair on the back of my head, then threaded through my beard. She waited, petting me, giving my temple kisses.

  “What’s going on?”

  “I don’t know where to start.”

  Her hands paused, likely due to the desolation of my tone. “We didn’t make new plans last night.”

  “No, we didn’t.”

  “What are you doing tonight?”

  Squeezing my eyes shut, I sighed, hesitated, talked myself out of dark impulses.

  It would be so easy, so easy, to lose myself in this beautiful, complex, compelling, remarkable woman. She didn’t deserve that. She didn’t deserve to be that for me. She wasn’t my escape. I needed to sort through my own shit, not take advantage or weigh her down with my troubles.

  I was supposed to be helping her. She was the one with a diagnosis.

  Straightening, releasing her, taking a step away, I rubbed my forehead. “Let’s see . . .” Twisting back to my locker, I tried to parse through my disordered mind enough to concoct a believable excuse. “I woke up early this morning, to go fishing with Hank, and I reckon I won’t be good company tonight.” Technically true. “How about tomorrow? Or Friday after the appointment?”

  I felt the weight of her eyes on my profile. “Friday is fine,” she said, sounding faraway, distracted.

  I nodded once, knowing I’d made the right choice even as my chest constricted, making it near impossible to breathe.

  By some miracle, I managed a small smile. But I couldn’t look at her as I said, “Great. Let’s get to work.”

  * * *

  I made mistakes, thoughtless ones, all day Wednesday.

  Like using SAE 5W-30 motor oil for a change when I should have used SAE 10W-30. Or when I stripped a bolt during a routine tire change and had to use a kit to remove it. Then I disregarded the torque spec, didn’t pay attention to the switch direction, and the tire fell off.

  Each time I blundered, Shelly was there, stepping in, helping me to fix the issue.

  “Sorry,” I’d murmur, “and thank you.”

  “You are welcome,” she’d say. But that soon became, “I’ll do it for you.”

  When she wasn’t straightening my messes, I felt her eyes on me. Each time I looked up to find her staring, her glare would intensify, like she was trying to both read my thoughts and communicate hers at the same time.

  I couldn’t see clearly, I couldn’t read Shelly because I couldn’t read myself. I was distracted.

  Complicating matters, I couldn’t quite make eye contact with Duane—so I avoided him—and Hank was calling me non-stop. He left a voice message each time. Eventually, I turned off my phone completely. I wasn’t ready to deal with him. I couldn’t even think about him, not with so much going on. His tricking me was way, way, way down on the list of my worries right now.

  Where does the good come from? turned into, Maybe there’s more to Christine than meets the eye. Maybe there’s some good in her, which had me wondering, What was her childhood like? Maybe there’s an explanation for her choices. Maybe I should give her the benefit of the doubt.

  But every time I came to that conclusion, I remembered how she’d stood by while Razor Dennings threatened to cut on Duane last fall.

  There was no excuse for that. There was no explaining away letting someone do that to your child.

  Since I was running behind all day, I finished work much later than anticipated. Cletus was scheduled to close up and Shelly hadn’t left yet, but I wasn’t in the mood to talk to anybody.

  When I was finally done with my last job, I marched upstairs to grab my stuff. As soon as I opened my locker, I spotted the paper Shelly had given me earlier in the day.

  I took it. I opened it. It was entitled, Exposure Response Prevention Therapy for OCD. I also saw Dr. West had written her name and number on the paper with instructions to call her prior to the appointment on Friday.

  Curious, and glad for the distraction, I read the whole paper on the short walk to one of the shop’s loaner cars. The GTO was still at Shelly’s and I didn’t want to wait around for Cletus to finish, so a loaner would do fine for me.

  “Beau!”

  I glanced up from the paper, turning over my shoulder to find Shelly jogging toward me.

  “Hey.”

  Her gaze flickered between me and the paper. “Are you leaving? Do you want me to drive you to my place so you can pick up your car?”

  “No, thanks. I’ll take one of the loaners.”

  “Okay.” She nodded, glancing at the POS car behind me. “Are you sure? I don’t mind. I’ll just be a minute.”

  “It’s fine.”

  “Are you fine?”

  We traded stares, and in the moment I almost told her. I almost told her about the missile that had detonated on my life earlier in the day.

  Don’t burden her with this.

  “I’m always fine.” I gave her a grin, and slid into the old beater. “See you on Friday.”

  She watched me through the windshield for several seconds, like she wanted to say more, and then turned and strolled back to the shop. I watched her go, a sinking feeling in my chest. When she made it back to the shop, I pulled out my cell and powered it up.

  Ignoring Hank’s twenty or so messages, I left the shop and drove a few minutes until I reached a pull off. Sitting idle but mostly hidden on the side of the road, I navigated to my phone’s browser and spent the next ten minutes reading about exposure therapy.

  And then I drove home, certain that the best use of my time on Thursday—which was my day off—would be researching and learning everything I could about the topic. And then I’d call Dr. West.

  I wanted to be prepared to help Shelly.

  * * *

  I reached out to Dr. West Thursday morning and she called me back that afternoon.

  “Sorry for the delay in calling.” I didn’t want to say that Shelly’s reluctance to give me the informational paper—and Dr. West’s phone number—had been the reason for my tardiness.

  It had been, but I wasn’t going to throw Shelly under the bus.

  “It’s perfectly fine. And know that you are under no obligation to come tomorrow if you’d rather not.”

  “No. I definitely want to come.”

  “May I suggest you withhold your commitment until after we speak?” I heard the doctor take a deep breath. “You might change your mind.”

  I shook my head even though she couldn’t see me. “I’ve been researching Exposure Response Prevention Therapy all morning
. I know it can be difficult to watch. On the other hand, it also seems like it’s been proven to help a lot of people. I do have concerns, but first I wanted to ask you about Shelly’s fear of touch.”

  “Go ahead. I’ll answer what I can.”

  “It doesn’t seem consistent. Sometimes, if I’m already touching her, then it’s like she doesn’t have any fear about touching me anywhere. And sometimes, even if I’m already touching her, it’s like she can’t reach for me.”

  “The only answer I can give you is that the patterns and rules for some obsessions make more logical sense than others. Sometimes they don’t seem to make any sense at all. They don’t have to, they’re all irrational. One person’s experience with OCD can be night and day different from another person’s. The rules for what triggers anxiety can change daily, or it might never change over the course of a person’s life. The finer details and patterns surrounding Shelly’s aversion to touching being somewhat unevenly applied—based on whether you’re already touching—doesn’t surprise me.”

  “Hmm . . .”

  I hadn’t delved too deeply into the different types of OCD, but I did read everything I could find on Exposure Response Prevention Therapy as a treatment for the disorder. The gist of the procedure was to expose the patient—Shelly—to what she feared, and then prevent her from ritualizing her response, as the scholarly papers described it.

  One of the examples I found was about a woman who was afraid of germs. She was forced to stick her hands in a toilet and then keep them there for hours. She’d screamed and pleaded. And then, after a time, she’d calmed down. And then she had to follow a plan for months where she was exposed to her fear and had to work through it. When it was over, and in her interviews over the next few months, she talked about how it had changed her life for the better. That it had saved her life.

  The sites I read described the therapy as a way for a person to face their fear in a safe environment, realize the fear was irrational, and stop the person from engaging in the compulsion as a way to avoid the fear.

  It made sense. But it also made me worry for Shelly. She’d clearly been struggling with initiating touch for years, and now we were going to be able to fix that? It didn’t seem likely.

  But that wasn’t my biggest concern.

  “How are you going to make sure she doesn’t self-harm later? At home when she’s alone?”

  “That’s not Shelly’s pattern. When she was cutting, she had to do it immediately after touching a person. She’d excuse herself to the bathroom. She carried packets of razors on her. She had to do it right away.”

  “But didn’t you just say that the compulsion can change?”

  “No, I said the aversion—the fear, the obsessive thought—which is usually the most irrational part of the equation, it can change and is difficult to nail down. But the compulsion, the part that provides relief, most of the time has to be followed precisely. But again, each case of OCD is different. I won’t ever speak in absolutes about this disorder.”

  “Okay. I think I get it.”

  “Good. Let’s see, the session tomorrow will be several hours long and she’ll have no opportunity to self-harm. I’ll have a male nurse present."

  What the?

  “What?” I asked sharply, unable to keep the spike of alarm from my voice. “No, no, no. She doesn’t like it when people touch her, but she trusts me.”

  The doctor didn’t respond right away and I got the sense she was going to argue, so I added, “Take it or leave it. I’m not coming if you bring in a stranger.”

  Just the idea of someone else’s hands on her against her will, it made me want to break something. A lot of somethings.

  “What if I have him wait outside? And if you’re unable—for whatever reason—to keep her from injuring herself, we’ll ask him to come in.”

  “Okay. That’s fair.” But I’ll keep her safe.

  “Let’s get to the details. There are five conditions that must be met.”

  Dr. West went through the next several minutes explaining about the mandatory conditions of the therapy: graded, prolonged, repeated, without distraction, and without compulsion. Then she went over the meaning of each, how they would be applied in the initial attempt, and guidelines for how they should be followed over the next week.

  “From your perspective tomorrow, your role in this will be to sit quietly while she touches you. She may not succeed this time, and that means we’ll have several weeks of sessions ahead of us. And if she does make an unexpected breakthrough, then it’ll need to be constantly reinforced. She has a plan, which she and I drafted together over a month ago, specifically for her aversion to touch. She’s done one plan before, for a different obsession, and it worked well for her. She has confidence, but I need you to understand this is only the first step.”

  “Yes.” I closed my eyes, rubbing my forehead. “I understand.”

  “Also, Shelly will become extremely agitated. She might scream, or cry, or try to run. It will be very difficult to watch.”

  “I understand. I’ve . . . I have experience seeing someone I care about in pain, making decisions for someone when she couldn’t make them for herself. I can do this.”

  “Good. Good.” She trailed off and then released another sigh. “I’ve seen this therapy do wonders. Instead of avoiding her fears, she’ll be forced to look at situations realistically. Those with OCD must learn to rationally evaluate the risks of their actions. Touching a person, laying her hands on them, holding her nephew, hugging her brother—these things cause no harm. Until Shelly truly accepts that her fear of touching people is absurd, she’ll never be able to strive for the life she wants, because she’ll always be frightened by the consequences.”

  Dr. West paused, as though giving me a moment to think about her statements, and then added, “When viewed from the outside, this approach can appear cruel. But it’s not. It works, not every time, but most of the time when done correctly. And it might be Shelly’s only hope.”

  * * *

  Shelly and I left work around two on Friday afternoon, intent on grabbing a quick lunch before heading into town.

  I was nervous. But I was also determined.

  She’d been watching me like a hawk early in the day, but once I proved I could change an oil filter and replace a radiator without needing my hand held, she seemed to relax. Duane didn’t arrive until the afternoon—he was scheduled to close up the shop—which meant I didn’t have to avoid his probing, perpetually dissatisfied glare of suspicion for very long.

  I could understand his frustration with me; it was clear I was avoiding him. Especially after our talk earlier in the week, my walking in the opposite direction every time he appeared seemed to really piss him off. I was being the asshole he told me not to be.

  But I didn’t know what to do about it. I couldn’t tell him about Christine, not until I figured out what was best for him. Instead of figuring it out, I decided to focus on Shelly and helping her first. That was something I knew I could do.

  Once again, we were at Daisy’s, sitting in the back-most booth. And once again, Shelly ordered buttermilk pancakes, an unpeeled banana, with butter on the side.

  “What time do you think we’ll be back from your appointment?” I asked, taking a bite from my club sandwich and trying to ignore the way she was glaring at my food.

  I’d realized my mistake too late, after I’d already ordered the club. Shelly appeared distraught when I didn’t order my usual meal. And once it arrived, she kept giving the sandwich dirty looks, like it couldn’t be trusted.

  I should have known better, especially based on my phone call with Dr. West and all the reading I’d done yesterday.

  “I usually make it home around seven.” Shelly was still giving my sandwich the side-eye. “After meeting with Dr. West, I go to the mall and walk. It’s good practice.”

  “Practice for what?”

  “Being around people.”

  That had me arching my eyebrows at he
r. “Say what?”

  She gave a self-deprecating shrug. “After I left art school, I lived by myself on a secluded farm, visiting my brother Quinn once a week at most. He hired a driver to take me back and forth.”

  “Holy Moly Moses. Are you serious?”

  Shelly grinned at me. “Did you just say, Holy Moly Moses?”

  “I did, and I meant every word of it.”

  “I love how you speak.”

  “How do I speak?”

  “Adorable. Funny. Entertaining.”

  “Just wait ’til I tell you my joke about the fishing pole.” I grinned at her and she gave me a barely there smile in return. “But back to Chicago, you never went out in public? Other than to see your brother once a week?”

  Shelly began her banana peeling-slicing ritual. “No, not really.”

  “How did you buy groceries?”

  “Quinn had them delivered, or he brought them.”

  “How did you make money?”

  “Selling commissioned pieces mostly. I also fixed up old cars, but I donated those to animal shelters to raise funds.”

  “And your art paid your mortgage?”

  “I don’t know.” Shelly shifted uncomfortably. “Quinn handled the bills. Or he did, until I moved here.”

  I studied her downcast eyes, the line of her mouth. “I’m sorry, am I being impolite? We can talk about something else.”

  “No, it’s fine. Quinn was trying to help. He did help. But . . .”

  “What?”

  “I think it enabled me.” She’d finished peeling the banana and was now arranging the slices in the spiral design.

  “To avoid people?”

  “Yes. And indulge obsessions. Dr. West says I need to interrupt the pattern, every day. I need people, distraction, surprises, ‘normal’ stress. Routines are okay as long as they reinforce good habits, like running in the morning, walking the dogs at night, or arriving to work on time. They keep my anxiety low because they’re part of making responsible decisions and keeping me healthy. But other routines, those that I put in place only to avoid anxiety, can become like a prison.”