It’s been almost a year, and even before then the appointments had been sporadic at best. Hardly conducive to making any kind of progress, and yet you’d allowed it to continue because if nothing else, your client is the kind of patient every therapist dreams of. So that’s why you’re here at 5 a.m. as your family sleeps upstairs, logging on to Zoom for a wildly out of hours appointment that you know you’ll be paid handsomely for.
You’ve barely had time to open his file and take a sip of coffee when he appears on the screen in front of you, punctual as always. Smiling that wide, imperious smile that never, ever reaches his eyes. “Sweetheart, it’s wonderful to see you,” he says, as though greeting an old friend. “Thank you for agreeing to my request. How are you? How are the wife and kids?”
It should worry you, the amount of private information he’s managed to sweet-talk out of you in the two years since he came to you, requesting your assistance in processing a messy, painful divorce. But often, your reciprocal games of twenty-questions have been the only way to extract anything of substance from your meetings. You don’t know if you’ve ever met someone who can talk so eloquently and for so long without saying anything at all.
“That isn’t why we’re here, Charlie,” you remind him. You’ve learned it’s best to set boundaries early on, even though you know he’s probably going to keep pushing against them until you cave, as always. “We’re here to talk about you. How are you?”
You’re probably expecting one of his typical rants about the world, and how unfair it is. Or some lewd tale of a recent conquest. His stories are always amusing, and often disturbing. You find you rather enjoy them. But this time, he goes quiet. The shit-eating grin slowly slides off his face, and he stares just to the right of the screen, chewing on the inside of his lip, lost in thought. You sit up a little bit straighter, clutch your pen a little bit tighter. This is new.
He looks more or less the same as you remember him. Impeccably dressed in spite of how early it is. His hair is neatly styled, and his face looks freshly shaved. But there are dark shadows under his eyes, and there is a definite tension in the set of his jaw that you remember particularly well from the very early days of your acquaintance.
You try again. “Is there something on your mind? There must have been a reason for you to request to speak with me so urgently.”
Charlie runs his hand through his hair, a gesture that in anyone else you would say verges on a nervous tic. He clears his throat before he speaks. “An awful lot has changed since the last time we spoke, sweetheart. Most of it very recently. I’m engaged to be married again, believe it or not.”
Given the very insistent proclamations you’ve heard him make about monogamy being an unnatural state, you’re more than a little surprised to hear this. And yet, as you glance down at your old notes, you find you’re not so taken aback. The last couple of sessions before he ghosted you last fall had consisted almost entirely of him waxing lyrical about the charms of some woman he’d called Kitten. Given how thin the boundaries between fantasy and reality seem to be for him at times, you’d wondered if this perfect person he described in great detail even existed at all. But the warmth in his voice and his eyes had been undeniable as he’d spoken of her; you can see it there now, albeit tempered by some other emotion you can’t quite identify. “Congratulations. How do you feel about it?”
He exhales sharply through his nose, and tilts his head to one side. “How many times do I have to tell you? How I feel is irrelevant. She is happy. That’s more than enough for me.”
In your ten plus years as a therapist, you’ve never met someone so overconfident, yet with such an underdeveloped sense of self. You’d love to do some existential work with him, but this is as close as he’s ever come to anything resembling honesty. Perhaps he is lulled, as you are, by the quiet stillness of the early hour. The city that never sleeps is dozing right now, and it feels like the two of you could be the only ones awake. Maybe this is what gives you the boldness to push a little bit further. “What makes you say that?”
“Because it’s true?” He’s looking straight at the camera now, and you are struck, as always, by the intensity of his gaze. If you weren’t gay, you suspect you’d have a big problem on your hands. “My love is everything, and I am nothing. And …”
“And?” you prompt. You’re leaning forward now, hands steepled on the desk in front of you.
He sighs. “It’s not going to last, is it? It can’t. She understands me better than anyone ever has. She’s seen me at my worst, and loves me still. Yet there are parts of my life I hide from her. Parts of me. When she finds out the truth, when she finds out who I really am, that will be the end of it. She will reject me ... just like they always do.”
“Who’s ‘they’?” you ask, but in the split second between him pausing and you speaking, you’ve lost him. His fingers rake through his hair, he adjust his collar, and the mask slips back into place again. DAMMIT. “Charlie-”
“It was lovely talking with you,” he says, his smile even broader than at the beginning of your conversation, and just a tiny bit brittle, if you aren’t imagining things. “I’ve missed your pretty face, darling. We must do this again sometime. Do give my love to Miranda and the twins. ”
As you open your mouth to respond, the call cuts out.
SHIT.
You sit there until the sun rises, tapping your pen against your notepad, and staring at the blank screen in front of you.
***
Twenty blocks away, Charlie puts his head in his hands, and tries to will away the beginnings of a headache.
SHIT.
He sits there until the sun rises, and the city wakes up.
Doing a heroic when there's another player nearby is stressful. Especially when they ask to group up and you can't think of a reason to say "no" that isn't vaguely antisocial
