So after a hike at Old Mission Point Park and a quick session at the gym, I showered, dressed, and went to his office.
“I slept with someone last night,” I announced as I slumped onto the couch in his office.
Ken, who hadn’t even sat down yet, looked a little taken aback at my choice of openers, but recovered quickly, lowering himself into his leather chair. “Oh?”
“Yes. That girl—woman—I mentioned a couple weeks ago. The one I used to have the crush on.” I stared at my jeans, an older pair that had been washed so many times the denim had faded to that blue color I loved.
He flipped back a page on his notepad. “This is the one you were going to approach again because you’d had the setback the first time?”
“Yes. I approached her the next day.” I could still see the happy surprise on her face when she ran to the door to let my dripping wet ass in.
“It went well, I take it.” Ken’s tone was amused.
“Yeah.” I frowned. “Too well.”
“How so?”
“I went out with her Tuesday night, then spent almost all day yesterday with her, then last night we—” I rubbed the stubble on my jaw, still feeling her satin thigh against my cheek. “You know.”
He kept a straight face. “Go on.”
“At first I was troubled by the thoughts of harming her, and I can’t say that’s entirely gone away. But over the course of the day, it was replaced with this…I don’t know. Wanting.”
“Wanting for what?”
“To be someone else.” To be the kind of guy who can touch her every day without fear. To be the kind of guy who can get on a plane and fly her somewhere romantic. To be the kind of guy whose mind doesn’t convince him of things his heart knows aren’t true. “To be different.”
He lifted his shoulders. “Sounds like she likes who you are. Does she know about—”
“Yes,” I interrupted. “Right up front I told her about my anxieties and why they make it tough to be close to me.” I sighed, closing my eyes for a second. “She said she was willing to try.”
“Good.” He sat back and pushed his glasses farther up on the narrow bridge of his nose. “So why do you want to be someone else?”
“I want to be someone that could make her happy,” I said, crossing my arms in frustration, hands fisted. “And I can’t because my mind won’t let me.”
“There’s more to your mind than OCD,” Ken reminded me. “A lot more than that.”
I studied my legs, seeing her straddling them. Fuck. I closed my eyes again, but she was there too. “I’m not right for her. She deserves better, or at least normal, and she’d realize that fast. She could have anyone. Why would she want me?”
Ken crossed an ankle over a knee. “So let her make that decision. Fear of intimacy is not OCD, by the way. Neither is being afraid to commit. There’s no reason why you can’t give this a try, Sebastian.”
“Yes there is,” I said, annoyed with him. Ken was probably married with three kids and thought it was all so fucking easy when you met someone you wanted to be with. “My entire being is the reason. All the shit in my head. She says she likes me, but she also said I frustrate and confuse her. That shit doesn’t go away.”
“She’s confused by your thoughts? Your compulsions?”
“No, I mean those would probably get to her eventually, but right now it’s my moods. My silences. Whenever I sense myself letting my guard down, I retreat into myself and push her away. But I have to, because I know how this ends.”
Ken’s brow furrowed and he set his notepad aside in favor of crossing his arms just like I was. “I’m not sure I understand. You’re scared of physically harming her? That’s why you push her away? Or you’re scared of getting emotionally attached to her? Those are two very different things. Let’s figure out which we’re dealing with.”
I hesitated. Some part of me didn’t want to admit to Ken that I was scared for my own sake—that I saw myself falling for Skylar, that I was half in love with her already, but that I’d be unable to make it work, and losing her would destroy me.
“What happens when I have a bad day?” I asked. “When I make us miss dinner reservations for the tenth time because I have to check the locks again and we’re halfway there? What happens when she asks me to slice the turkey at Thanksgiving and I can’t pick up the fucking knife because I think I’ll stab someone? What happens when she needs to fly somewhere and it’s an odd day and I get down on my knees in the airport and beg her not to get on that plane?”
“I don’t know, Sebastian. Because that’s just fearcasting. It’s not real. And you’ve got ways to cope with those things.”
“Well, I know what happens.” I stared Ken dead in the eye. “I drive her mad. She leaves.”
“But that’s not what happened with your last relationship, is it?” he pressed. “You broke things off. You realized you didn’t actually want to marry Diana. That means your doubts were not inconsistent with your true feelings. That’s not OCD, Sebastian. That’s stopping yourself from making a mistake.” He held up his hands. “Now. Maybe you went about it all wrong, but that’s another matter entirely.”
I dropped my gaze to my legs again, spoke a little more quietly. “It won’t work in the end. I don’t know how to make it work. She leaves, Ken. I know she does.”
“And then you’re alone again,” Ken said. “Probably forever.”
“Exactly.”
“Because you’re a horrible person who doesn’t deserve to be happy.”
I nodded. This guy knew me way too well by now. It was aggravating as fuck.
“Bullshit, Sebastian.”
“Huh?”
He shrugged. “Bullshit. If you truly believed you’re a horrible person, you wouldn’t be here talking about her. You’d have given up already and holed up somewhere to be alone and miserable for the rest of your life. And you do know how to make it work—you’re just scared.”
I swallowed, unsure if I should tell Ken to fuck off or keep talking.
“The truth is, you’re letting guilt from the past and fear of the future poison the potential of this relationship already, even though you really like this woman and she likes you.” He pushed up his glasses again and leaned forward, knees on his elbows. “But you have to be willing to try, Sebastian. You have to be willing to fail. And that takes guts.”
My arms came uncrossed. Was he calling me a coward? “I have guts,” I said defensively. “I’m just trying to think things though. I don’t want to make the same mistakes I’ve made before, Ken. This girl is…special to me. She’s different.” I took a breath. “She’s perfect.”
Ken shook his head. “Nobody’s perfect. Not her, not you, not me…I don’t even think this is all stemming from OCD. Mostly, I think this is just a man scared to let himself be emotionally vulnerable to a woman he cares about.” He smiled wryly. “Oldest story in the book.”
• • •
Later that afternoon I took the boat out on the bay and thought about what Ken had said. Was he right? Was it plain old fear of rejection rather than my OCD getting in the way of my taking a risk? How could he know, anyway? He didn’t hear that voice in my head that made me doubt everything. God, what I wouldn’t give for some fucking conviction about something.
The truth was, I didn’t want to be closed-off and miserable for the rest of my life. Maybe I’d thought I could be alone, but that was before I knew what it was like to be with Skylar, to feel that kind of connection to someone. And it wasn’t all sexual—well, it was a lot sexual—but it was also emotional. She made me want to share things with her I’d never talked about outside therapy. She made me want to change the way I lived my life. She made me want to deserve her, or at least try.