“You know what I like about you, counselor?” he asked.
I didn’t answer.
“I like that you listen,” he said. “You look a man in the eye when he talks about losing his cool, his sanity. Most people, they look away. But not you, Blair. Makes me wonder if you’re curious.”
His words crawled under my skin as I shifted my grip on the bags.
I was immediately hyper-aware of how vulnerable I was. My hands were occupied, my pulse raced. I was trapped between a car door and a man who’d bragged about putting someone in the hospital for a month.
Some therapist. Panic button in my office, out here I had nothing but keys and paper bags.
Travis tilted his head as he waited for a reaction I refused to provide.
“Nothing to say?”
I swallowed so hard I wondered if he might hear it. “I think you should go, Travis.”
For a brief second, I thought he’d leave. I hoped, wished, prayed he would.
Travis rocked back on his heels and scanned the mostly empty lot. Checking for an audience.
His new curfew probably dictated he be home by nine. But if the late hour was any indicator, he didn’t care.
His smile returned—lazier, and meaner than before.
“I wanted to see if the good therapist looks calm and collected when he’s not hidden behind his precious little circle of chairs.”
My grip tightened on the grocery bags and the thin paper crumpled under my fingers.
I hated how my palms were slick, and my ears rang relentlessly.
Travis advanced, closer, and closed the last few feet of space between us. He didn’t touch me, but his body loomed overmine. I could smell the sour scent of sweat beneath the cloud of cologne around him.
“You seem nervous,” he said. “Relax, Blair, I told you; I just wanted to talk to you.”
To my surprise, my back hit the car door. I hadn’t realized I’d inched backward. The metal was cold against my skin, and a shiver ran up my spine.
I forced myself to swallow so my voice wouldn’t crack. “It’s late, Travis. You should go home.”
He leaned in closer to me.
“Home’s boring,” he said as his voice dropped lower, rougher. “But you, you listen. I prefer when people listen.”
I opened my mouth to speak, but words failed me. My brain frantically scrambled for something remotely professional. Magic words that would de-escalate him the way they might have in my office.
But my office had walls, locks, and people within shouting distance.
This lot had flickering lights and concrete.
Morning would bring new rules, new sanctions, more paperwork, phone calls. But paper couldn’t stand between the two of us in a barely lit lot.
Travis’s gaze shifted and raked over me as he measured me, noting every flinch.
Every tremor.
His smirk grew wider. “You’re shaking.”
True. My hands, knees, my entire body.
