Page 14 of Exposed Ink

“No,” I admit. “Any tips?”

“Don’t cry,” Lachlan says, making Scott laugh.

“Kinsley’s pretty booked up,” Scott says.

“Let me see.” Lachlan grabs the iPad and clicks around for a minute and then says, “I can get you in tomorrow at ten,” making Scott throw his head back with a laugh.

Shit, that’s soon.But fuck it. What’s a little tattoo? I’ll just get it somewhere hidden, and it will give me a chance to convince Kinsley to go out with me.

“Sounds good,” I say. “I’ll be here tomorrow at ten.”

FIVE

Kinsley

“Kinsley,it’s been a long time since you requested an emergency appointment,” Dr. Julia Benedict says with her warm smile that makes it easy to open up to her. “What brings you in?”

She sits across from me, dressed in a long, flowy floral skirt and a white blouse, with her legs curled under her and her latest knitting project in her lap.

After months of my mom begging me to see a therapist, I met with Julia. I had planned to see her, tell my mom I hated it, and continue to grieve the way I wanted.

But Julia shocked me when we bonded over our favorite romance novels, and then instead of her forcing me to talk, she handed me a piece of paper and coloring pencils and told me to draw whatever came to mind.

I spent the next year coloring more than speaking during our sessions, but eventually, they led to us talking, and now, I can’t imagine not speaking to her.

Usually, our appointments are every two weeks, but after what happened this morning, I texted, asking if she had anything available.

“A guy asked me out today.” I chuckle humorlessly. “God, that sounds so inconsequential when I say it out loud.”

“Yet it was important enough to make you pick up the phone and text me. So, tell me what happened.”

I take a deep breath and then tell her, “His name is Shane, and he’s the paramedic who treated me for the food allergy.” She already knows about that incident since I saw her a couple of days after. “He came into the shop to see how I was doing and then asked me out.”

“And how did it make you feel when he showed up?” she asks with a soft smile.

“For a moment, when he was nervously trying to ask me out, my brain allowed me to pretend everything was simple. Like I was just a woman, standing in front of a man who was interested in her and wanted to take her out on a date.

“But then the question finally slid off his lips, and the memory of Brandon asking me out for the first time hit me like a ton of bricks,” I choke out, tears filling my lids. “I hate this. I hate that I can’t be normal.”

“You know how I feel about that word,” Julia chides playfully. “The expectation to benormalisn’t one that is achievable since one can’t accurately define it. What’s considered normal to one person is different for another.”

“I know,” I mumble, having heard her say this on more than one occasion.

“You mentioned when he asked you out, he reminded you of Brandon,” she says. “Are there similarities between the two?”

I think for a moment about Brandon. He was broody and mysterious, the ultimate tatted-up bad boy with a rough exterior who didn’t give a shit about what anyone thought of him besides me. He always had a soft spot for me. We had flirted for years, the chemistry between us sizzling, and when he asked me out, he was sure I would say yes. At that point, it was just a formality.

But Shane’s nothing like Brandon—at least not from what I’ve seen. He’s got this sweet sexiness to him, like he should be posing for a charity calendar in his uniform while holding a kitten he just saved. It’s clear, based on the way his shirt stretched across his chest, he’s in shape, and for a split second, I fantasized about him wearing that uniform in the bedroom as he reminded me what it felt like to be intimate with a man again.

As he stood in front of me and Scott, he was unsure of what I would say, yet he still took his shot. And when I turned him down and the look of defeat filled his features, I wanted to take back my answer and agree to go out with him just so that boyish grin would once again make an appearance.

But I couldn’t do it.

“No,” I tell her. “They’re actually nothing alike from what I can tell. But it wasn’t really about his looks or personality. It was the thought of getting to know another man—of possibly falling in love, having children, and creating a life with someone who wasn’t Brandon—and the memory of my daughter, who’d never gotten a chance to live, that filled me with guilt and made me turn him down.”

“Wow,” Julia says with a smirk that tells me she’s about to go all therapist on me. “You just created an entire fake future with a man before you even agreed to one date. For all you know, he was just looking to get laid.”

I bark out a laugh and shake my head. “He seems too sweet for that.”

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