Group Therapy, page 14
“Real helpful.” I glare at her before running back over to the crowd.
Thomas is on his ass again, but Beth is standing behind him, rubbing his now-shirtless shoulders like Rocky’s coach.
I’m momentarily distracted by the sight of Thomas’s glistening, heaving, naked chest and abs, which gives Beth just enough time to finish her pep talk.
“Come on, champ. You got ’im up against the ropes. You just gotta dig a little deeper.”
Thomas pulls himself up with a determined nod and begins shadow-boxing with Bill.
For fuck’s sake!
“Beth!” I shout, raising my arms in her direction from the other side of the crowd.
“What?” She shrugs. “I’m a coach!”
“A life coach!”
“This is life, Sterling. Life or death!” She turns from me to Thomas and yells, “Uppercut, Tommy Boy! Get him!”
Thomas takes a hit so hard that his head jerks to the side. I gasp as his eyes open, landing on me. Then, a wide, maniacal smile spreads across his face before he cocks his fist back, twists forward, and clocks Bill right on the chin.
I scream.
Bill reels from the hit, almost falling over, but then he lurches forward and tackles Thomas. They stumble backward until they crash into the empty table next to Courtney’s group, knocking it over and falling to the ground along with it.
I hadn’t realized it before, but Courtney’s group is the only one still seated. Her group members are twitchy-eyed and sweating profusely as they stare intently at the middle of the table. There, Courtney has about twenty straws lined up in a perfectly spaced row with one straw slightly askew.
In a moment of weakness, Nervous Nicole glances down at the men fighting next to her. A water balloon immediately explodes in her face.
Courtney smiles, holding up another water-filled orb as a warning to the rest of the group. “Life is chaos, y’all. All you can do is breathe and ignore that which you cannot control. Say it with me: breathe … and ignore.”
I race around to the other side of the fallen table and find Bill squeezing Thomas’s neck in a sleeper hold.
“Bill, if you don’t let go in three seconds, I’m calling the police!” I yell. “One, two... …”
Before I get to three, Thomas’s eyes close, and his head rolls forward. Bill lets go of his unconscious body as Mark yanks him up by the arm, congratulating the victor.
With a scream lodged in my throat, I drop to my knees beside Thomas. Lifting his head with both hands, I place it in my lap and begin rapidly patting his cheek.
“Thomas!” Tap, tap, tap. “Thomas, wake up!”
His eyelids begin to flutter, and I exhale in relief as they slowly open and focus on me. Despite his split lip—or perhaps because of it—Thomas’s mouth widens into a heart-stopping grin. For someone who was going for a “manlier, more confident” vibe tonight, Thomas looks about as boyish and vulnerable as he’s capable of being. Boyish, vulnerable, and really fucking happy.
“Did I win?” he asks with a sleepy grin.
My eyebrows practically hit the roof. “Seriously? Do you feel like you won?”
“I feel bloody amazing.” He beams. Then, without warning, he lifts his head and presses those battered lips to mine, stopping more than just my heart.
Time dissolves along with the entire outside world as all five of my senses narrow their focus to the tiny spot in the universe where Thomas’s lips are touching my lips.
I see nothing.
I hear nothing.
I taste mint, laced with the faintest metallic tang of blood.
I smell the ocean, if the ocean smelled the way it felt. Bright and cool, like the color aqua.
And I feel … everything. I feel fizzy, candy-colored bubbles shooting through my bloodstream as a Molotov cocktail of hormones and pheromones and excited, adrenaline-laced yes signals explode in my brain. I feel the curvature of Thomas’s smile against my lips. I feel the warmth of his breath and the weight of his body in my arms. I feel the space in my heart where he lived before he entered my life stretching to accommodate the enormity of my feelings for him now. And as my awareness slowly begins to retract …
I also feel as though I’m being watched.
I crack open one eye, just a sliver, but it’s enough for me to see that all four groups—even Courtney’s—are staring at us with their mouths hanging open.
Panic hijacks all control of my extremities, causing me to scoot away from Thomas faster than you can say ethics violation.
Thomas props himself up on one elbow and blinks at me, as if awoken from a dream.
“You need to leave,” I announce, loud enough for everyone to hear. My voice is angry and authoritative, but my eyes plead with him to go along with it.
If Thomas gets the memo, he’s way too convincing for me to tell. With his eyebrows pulled together and his bottom lip beginning to swell, he runs a bloody-knuckled hand through his hair and nods his head.
“Lou, I’m so sorry—”
“You too, Bill,” I shout, cutting Thomas off before he has a chance to make this any harder than it already is. “I want both of you out—now. Everybody else, back to your groups!”
Hauling himself off the ground, Thomas gives me one last remorseful glance before turning to grab his T-shirt off the floor.
I pin the rest of my shirtless clients with a sobering stare as I pull myself to my feet. “Anger Management, y’all are with me.”
I continue barking orders as my clients scatter, but my eyes are on Thomas as he pushes his way through the crowd and out the door.
I want to run after him. I want to tell him to wait for me.
But what I want doesn’t matter.
It never has, and it never will.
Thomas
“ANOTHER, MR. O’REARDON?”
I shrug and slide my nearly empty highball glass across the bar to the bloke waiting to refill it for the fourth or fifth or seventh time.
“Smooth, isn’t it?” he asks, as if I’m drinking them at this rate because I give a toss about the flavor. “Lagavulin, from your side of the pond.”
All scotch is from my side of the pond. I wish I could roll my eyes, but my proper English manners are even harder to shake than the memory of what happened tonight. Hence all the drinking.
“Aged sixteen years.” He swirls my glass under his nose. “Strong, smoky notes of peat … sherry … and a sweet vanilla finish.” He sets the glass down in front of me, a proud smile lifting the curled points of his fluffy mustache.
I swallow it with zero appreciation for the peat or the bloody fucking sherry.
I’ve been avoiding this pub since the first time I came here, right after I moved in. I thought it would be so convenient to have a pub in the lobby of my building, a place to get away from the deafening silence of that soundproof box upstairs, but unfortunately, one of the other patrons recognized me immediately and proceeded to spend the next hour and a half talking my ear off about the psychological thriller he was going to write and asking for my advice on every ill-conceived plot point and half-cocked red herring he’d ever thought up.
But tonight, I was desperate enough to try again. I got nervous when the barman knew my name as soon as I walked in, but at least he hasn’t asked me to read his manuscript. Yet.
“It’s none of my business, but … I hope you kicked his ass,” he says, blessedly pouring another round.
“Hmm?” I raise an eyebrow as I swirl the amber liquid in a lazy circle around the sides of the glass. It’s the same color as Lou’s eyes. Goddamn it.
“The fella who busted your lip there.” He points to my face, which I can no longer access through my nerve endings so I reach up and touch the spot with my hand. I can’t feel that either, but my eyes still work well enough to register a faint smear of red on my index finger, which I now have three of, apparently.
“I believe I gave the gentleman a black eye,” I announce before returning my gaze to Lou’s unblinking, liquid iris.
I don’t think there’s enough scotch on this entire cursed continent to make me forget the way she looked at me when I kissed her tonight. Like I was a monster. And she was right. What I did was … inexcusable. Reprehensible. Unforgivable. Tomorrow, she’ll be fired, and the only thing I will have succeeded in doing by coming to America is destroying the future of a brilliant, beautiful, blindingly sexy young woman … right along with my own.
I ball up a black serviette and drop it into the glass so that I won’t have to look at that color anymore.
“I know it’s not my place, but whatever’s going on that’s got you down, it’ll change. Just give it time.”
“That’s just it,” I say, clutching the edges of the bar to keep it from tilting. “There is no more time. I’ve wasted all my time.” I shake my head with a bitter, humorless laugh, causing the room to spin. “And now, I’m wasting yours. Good night, sir.”
I stand up and steady myself before making my way toward the door.
“Mr. O’Reardon, your tab!”
“Whatever it is,” I mumble without turning around, “double it as a token of my appreciation for not asking me to read your manuscript.”
“How do you know I have a manuscript?”
I stumble across the empty marble lobby, thankful that no other sad sacks are milling about at two a.m. on a Monday morning, and board one of the dozen or so shiny lifts waiting to deliver me back to my prison. It only takes three tries for my finger to finally connect with the correct button.
Inside, the walls are made of mirrors, but for some reason, they’re crisscrossed with golden streaks, as if an army of slugs, drunker than me, slithered through metallic paint and then wandered aimlessly inside this box until the toxic chemicals eventually seeped into their tiny, porous bodies and killed them all.
The motion of the lift causes my stomach to lurch, so I try to focus on my own reflection—or one of them at least. That’s when I notice the bloody gash on my lip that the barman pointed out. It looks familiar. Like something from an action movie. A Jason Statham film perhaps. Or Liam Neeson.
No.
Goddamn it.
I pull out my phone and illuminate the screen. There, staring back at me, are two Harry Potters with identical cuts on their determined bottom lips. I close my right eye to reduce the number down to one, and then I unlock my phone and delete the photo entirely.
“Sod off, Harry.”
As soon as his image disappears from my screen, I feel a sense of relief. Control.
And I want more.
When the door finally opens on the nineteenth floor, I stumble down the carpeted hallway on a mission.
I drop my keys on the table just inside the door without pausing to remove my shoes.
I stomp through the sitting room without opening the balcony door.
I don’t turn on the lights.
I don’t stop to take a piss.
I keep going until I’m hovering over a glowing laptop on the desk in the office.
I highlight everything I’ve written since I got here. Every trite, predictable, disposable word.
And then …
I press Delete.
Lou
TODAY WAS BASICALLY JUST one long panic attack. Every time someone appeared in my office doorway, I had to stifle the urge to scream. I knew Dr. E.I.C. was going to waltz through that door any second and tell me that I was being sued or physically escorted from the building or both. And every time my phone vibrated, my heart rate would skyrocket hoping it was a text from Thomas. Or a call from Thomas. Or an email from Thomas. But mostly, it was just Dee, asking if I’d been fired yet.
When I told her no for the hundredth time, I guess she sensed that I wasn’t in a great place and volunteered to give me a ride home. Which only made me feel worse.
If Dee Dawson is taking pity on you, you’re in bad fucking shape.
“Thanks for the ride,” I say as I flip on the lights and drop my bag on the counter separating the kitchen from the living room. When I notice my roommate lounging on the couch in his shiny nylon American flag track suit, I raise my voice and add, “Mark and I AREN’T EXACTLY ON SPEAKING TERMS RIGHT NOW.”
Mark ignores my comment but switches to his middle finger as he continues scrolling on his phone.
“He’s not happy that I shut down his fight club last night,” I explain as I head over to the fridge and pull out a five-dollar white wine blend that was probably made from fruit fermented in a tenement bathtub in New Jersey, “and I’m not happy that HE STARTED A FUCKING FIGHT CLUB LAST NIGHT.”
“Well, I ain’t mad about it.” Dee chuckles as I pull a giant plastic souvenir cup out of the giant plastic souvenir cup cabinet and set it on the counter. “I haven’t seen a fight that good since Boss Wives of Atlanta got canceled.”
“What am I gonna do, Dee?” I ask, twisting the cap off the bottle of piss-colored alcohol. “Thomas punched my client—”
“Bit him too.” She smirks.
“Thomas punched and bit my client and then kissed me in front of everybody! He’s out of control.”
“Looked to me like he was havin’ a good-ass time. Matter fact, I think everybody there had a good-ass time, except for you.”
“Exactly.” I concentrate on pouring as I try to make sense of my racing thoughts. “Because I’m the one taking all the risk. Nobody cares if I lose my job. Thomas obviously doesn’t care. This is one big vacation to him. And at the end of it, when his deadline’s up, he’s gonna get on a plane and fly back to his penthouse in London and land right between the legs of another supermodel.”
Glug, glug, glug.
“And where will I be? Unemployed, unlicensed, and living in an RV on the side of a mountain. This has gone way too far. I mean, Angry Bill had a black eye today.”
“My boy Bill?” Mark calls out. “How’s he doin’?”
I think back over our session this morning.
Bill actually seemed … great. He was calmer, less agitated, and for once, he didn’t punch a single thing in my office. And also, he literally said, “I feel better than ever.”
Of course, I’m not going to tell Mark that.
“Dee, will you please remind Mark that I’m not speaking to him right now?”
Dee rolls her eyes. “This is why you gotta work with kids. I keep tellin’ you, adults are not right. You gotta get ’em while they’re young. By the time they come to you, they’re too far gone.”
“They are. They really are.” I shake my head sadly as the last few drops of wine roll out of the bottle and into my dangerously full cup. “Oh shit. Did you want some?” I lean over and take a noisy sip from the rim to keep it from overflowing.
“Nah. I’m fuckin’ pregnant.”
Aaaaand I spit it right back out.
“What?” I cough. “How? With Vasectomy Mike?”
“Turns out, those bitches are only, like, ninety-nine percent effective.” Dee lifts an apathetic shoulder, but the slight tilt of her usually pursed lips tells me she’s happier about her situation than she’s letting on.
“Deeeeee!” I squeal. “You’re gonna be a mommy!”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“Oh my God. Can I... …” I reach out to touch her belly, and Dee smacks me on the head.
“What are you doin’? Stop it.”
“Congratulations, breeder!” Mark calls from the living room.
Dee’s self-contained pout slips even further, revealing a wide, uncomfortable smile. “Jesus, can we talk about something else? I’m tryin’ to be in denial over here.”
I press my grinning lips together and nod.
“So … back to your drama.” Dee rummages through her purse and pulls out a tube of lip balm. It’s like that single smile was so taxing that she has to slather her lips in moisturizer to make them feel better about what just happened.
I take another sip from my wine and wait for her to drop the hammer.
“Listen,” she says, tossing the ChapStick back into her bag, “I’m wrong all the time, but in my experience, the best way to get over one dick is to get on a different dick.”
I swallow with an audible gulp. “A different dick?”
Dee nods. “If you wanna stop obsessing about Thomas, you’re gonna need some vitamin D.” With a wink, she turns toward the living room and shouts, “Mark, get yo fine ass in here and help ya girl out.”
I glance into the living room just in time to see a red, white, and blue blur disappear from the couch. Half a second later, Mark has me bent over the counter, dry-humping the side of my ass with one foot propped up on the peeling laminate surface. I have to grab the edge of the sink just to stay upright.
“Get off of me!”
“Ooh, she’s talkin’ to me now!” Mark tosses his head back to look at my BFF. “The make-up sex is workin’ already.”
“Not helping!” I squeal, holding on for dear life.
Dee cackles. “Okay, so maybe a different, different dick.”
Two hours later, I’m standing on the porch of a townhouse that I literally ran away from three weeks ago, trying to figure out what to say to its owner.
Excuse me, sir, I hope you’re not busy, but may I borrow your dick real quick?
Hello. Sorry to bother you, but is your dick home?
Hi. I’m here for my dick appointment. I hope walk-ins are welcome.
When Dr. Callahan finally opens the door, he’s wearing nothing but a bathrobe the same color as the fluffy white chest hair poking out of it … and a smile.
“Luna, to what do I owe the—”
“Nope.” That’s all I manage to say before I turn and bolt off that porch for the second time in less than a month.
Sprinting down the driveway, I wave my arms and shout at my Uber driver, who is just starting to pull away from the curb. The brake lights of her Honda Pilot light up, and I dive into the pine-scented backseat like a bank robber after a botched heist.
“Go, go, go!”
The driver—a woman with short gray hair, wearing leather driving gloves and sunglasses at night—chuckles as she pulls away from the curb.
