Page 71 of It's Holy Matrimony, Baby

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

If at first you don’t succeed...

Seek therapy

BECK

“The thing is, emotions are what drives us.” The woman across from me in the overstuffed armchair leans forward and places the notepad she’s been writing in for the past forty-five minutes on the chunky white table between us.

What I wouldn’t give to know what she’s written about me. But then again I expect I’d open it up to see ‘she’s crazy’ scrawled across the page a couple hundred times. And after I told her I tried to run into a burning building and then left the one man I have ever loved because of a curse, I wouldn’t be surprised.

She shifts position, smoothing her expensive navy suit skirt over her knees while she crosses her legs. “Sometimes that’s a good thing because it keeps us safe, or we find opportunities where others might not. Other times our emotions come from past issues that we haven’t dealt with and acting on them might not be in our best interest.”

She takes a breath, and I clasp my bandaged hands together in my lap until my fingers start to turn as white as the gauze. I glance at the potted fern that’s too green and too neat, like she takes a pair of scissors to it after every difficult client. I’m probably one of those clients. And I know what she’s going to say. I let my emotions get the better of me, and all it’s caused is heartbreak.

After the fire and finding Hollander like that I thought leaving Nox was the only thing I could do. God, I miss that cat. And Nox. Every day. Every minute. Every single breath I take.

I didn’t expect it to be like this. I thought I could shut off my feelings for him. Go back to the way I used to be when I was logical about everything. But I can’t. I don’t sleep. I barely eat. There’s a giant hole in my heart now that I don’t know how to fill without him. Everything reminds me of what I had and chose to let go of. Because I thought it would be better this way. God, I didn’t have a clue.

Dash made a dish with Tofu last night, and I spent the next three hours crying into his shoulder because it reminded me of Nox.

She leans across the table and hands me a tissue. “You’ve been through a very traumatic situation, Beckett. That experience has colored the way you function in the world. You told me in our first session that you’re a fan of logic. Statistics and scientific facts. And that you believe in curses.”

“That’s correct.”

She offers me a sympathetic smile as I blot my eyes. “Do you think that could be because that was the only way you could cope with what happened to you? Often after a traumatic experience, especially when there’s a death, it’s easier to shut off our emotions than deal with them. Easier to find something to blame for what happened to us, no matter how far-fetched it might seem, than to accept that there’s no reason for what happened to us. Do you think that’s what you were doing?”

“Maybe.” I turn my gaze to the big glass windows and the street below. There are no orange trees here. Nothing but pavement and asphalt and luxury cars. It’s all too sterile. “But now I can’t stop feeling. Everything.” I imagine that I’m talking to Nox. That we’re sitting on his couch and he’s stroking my hair away from my face. I thought knowing that he was okay without me would make leaving him worthwhile, but that isn’t what this feels like. “It hurts so damn much.”

“It’s a process,” she says. “It’s not one that you can hope to avoid long term. You get to work through the steps in your own time and your own way, but you still have to work through them. When you suppress your emotions you can’t heal, so when something like...” she checks her notes again, “...the events of the past few months forces you to face your emotions head on, it isn’t unexpected that old emotions would resurface too. That those emotions would act as a driving force in your decision to leave your husband. Do you think that might be the case?”

“Did I leave Nox because I was terrified of losing him?” Or of being lost myself?

I bite my thumbnail and go back to staring at the fern. “Yes. I couldn’t let anything happen to him.”

“You also told me that your best friend...” she glances down at the notepad on her lap again, “...Liv made a deal with your husband that had a substantial impact on your relationship. That you weren’t sure of his feelings.”

“That’s right.” After what Liv told me about how she’d pushed him into not signing the papers, how could I be certain that any of what happened between us was true? But the way he looked at me when I told him to sign the papers that last time, and the way he wouldn’t look at me after he did keeps replaying in my mind and breaking my heart over and over. It certainly seemed real.

“Have you come to any decision on that?”

“This again?” Dash wanders into the kitchen with his coffee mug in one hand and his glasses clutched in the other while he uses the back of that hand to rub his bleary eyes.

He’s probably sick of me by now. I’ve been crashing on his couch for almost a month.

The pen in my hand hovers above the paper, my fingers beginning to cramp. A few more splotches of ink have landed on the paper.

“Every single morning you’ve sat there for an hour, trying to put your signature on that thing.” He taps the corner of the form while he pours coffee. “Either you want a divorce, or you don’t. Either you love him, or you don’t. Coffee?”

I nod, and he pours another cup that he places in front of me. “So which is it?”

“It’s not that simple.” I run my fingers over Nox’s signature. It’s the closest I can get to him and it spreads the tiniest amount of warmth to my stupid broken heart. He’d signed the forms and given me my freedom, but I hadn’t signed them and taken it. With a groan I drop my head on the form. It’s crinkled and the ink is smudged. I’m not even sure I can file this copy anymore. There’s no way I can ask for his signature again. It would kill me.

“Well, I think you’ve run out of time anyway.” Dash picks up the mail. Starts sorting through it. “Didn’t you want to be divorced before your two-year anniversary? You’ve got less than two weeks so I’m going to suggest that’s out the window.”

“The curse is a bunch of baloney,” I say. After copious therapy sessions and hours of talking about the curse this is the first time I can say that and not have the familiar buzz of doubt that makes me want to knock on the wooden underside of the countertop. Whether any of it was ever real, or whether it was fiction, when I’d died I’d grabbed onto it as a way to explain how I could have ended up in that situation. But there was no rhyme or reason. I can see that now.

“Did you learn that in therapy?” Dash asks, lifting an envelope out of the pile and dropping it in front of me.

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