Page 37 of True Sight
1 New Message: Conrad Miller
We should hang out sometime. You know, before we pick out hardware.
My eyes flit around the room nervously as I bite my bottom lip.
Maybe I’m not reading the signs wrong after all.
17
CONRAD
“How was game night last night?” Hanna asks once we’re both in our respective spots. I’m starting to think she enjoys that I always see her the day after game night because it gives me plenty to talk about.
“Well, all of my friends are happily engaged in healthy relationships, meanwhile the only relationship I have is with my dog. Clearly I’m doing a bang up job at all this healing stuff,” I self-deprecate. She cocks her head to one side and her eyebrows narrow a fraction of an inch which tells me she’s about to ask a question I’ll hate.
What I lack in interpersonal skills I make up for in observational skills. After my parents died, I was practically mute until I met my friends but that didn’t mean I wasn’t paying attention. While everyone was talking and playing, I was watching. How people interacted, their expressions, how they reacted to things. Even as an almost thirty year old, I still choose to watch first and speak second. I could read my friends like a fucking book—each one of them with their own signals of stress. Kolbi rubbed his thumbs into thebacks of his hands, Hank ran his hands through his hair, and Malcolm would avoid your gaze and smirk to himself, knowing he was caught. And after six weeks of sitting across from Hanna for forty-five minutes, I’ve picked up on some of her own personal tells.
“You’re going to ask me something I’ll hate,” I announce with a straight face. This causes her to sit up straight and try to force a smile back down.
“And what makes you say that?”
“The way your eyebrows twitched together and you moved your chin to the side. You do that when you’re about to ask or say something you know might annoy me.” This earns me an impressed expression from her.
She fixes her glasses even though they don’t need fixing—another tell, this time that she appreciates what I said—and tucks her feet under herself. “You know that hyper awareness and heightened observation is a trauma response.”
“Everything is a trauma response according to you.”
If I earned a dollar for every time she told me something I did was a ‘trauma response’ I’d have enough money to pay someone to scoop out my brain and replace it with a fresh one that wasn’t so royally fucked up.
“Well, most things you do are a response to your past trauma. Hyper awareness, the need for control, feeling like you’re being left behind…” Her voice lingers on the last one.
“I’m not being left behind,” I try even though to a certain extent I feel like I am.
“Then why mention your friends’ relationships? You’ve mentioned them in”—she flips through her notes before looking back at me—“five of our last six sessions.”
“I have not. Your notes are wrong.”
“Four weeks ago you talked about how Hank and Baileywere going on a trip and you thought it was a waste of money. The week after you mentioned how Kolbi is, and I quote, ‘so totally pussywhipped he would do anything for Magnolia.’ Then last week you grumbled about how Malcolm and Ophelia were two ‘horn dogs’ for one another, again a quote, and then today you start by talking about how the only relationship you’re in is with your dog.” When she finishes rattling off her notes like she is reading a grocery list, she looks at me over the edge of her glasses. “So would you like to talk about your feelings around being left behind or would you like to avoid them for another week?”
I press my lips together and drop my eyes to the floor, too annoyed to look at her. Not because she’s wrong, but because she’s right. Just like she always is. There’s been more than one occasion where my friends mentioned doing something or going somewhere with their partners that made me wonder how much longer things would stay the way they were. If, at one point, they would all be too busy and I’d be on my own again. As I avoid her gaze, the image of a dimpled cheeked Brit pops into my head.
“How do you know if you’re into someone?” Hanna sits up straight in her chair and puts her pen down. I’ve surprised her.
“Into someone how?” she asks.
“Oh, don’t play dumb. You got your license to practice right before your thirty-second birthday, you know what I mean,” I snap, annoyed by her veiled innocence.
“Aww, you remembered”—she smirks and places a hand on her heart—“I’m touched.”
“Would you pleaseanswer my question?” I sigh. I hate that I even asked the stupid question but it’s out there now and I can’t take it back. Plus, I want to know her answer.
“I don’t know, you just…know. There’s a feeling,” she tries to explain.
“But what’s that feeling feel like?”
“Are you seriously trying to tell me you’ve never had a crush on someone before?” She asks with enough snark to cover four sessions. I open my mouth to respond but nothing comes out and I’m left looking like a fish out of water, gasping for air. When I can’t come up with an answer, I look towards my shoes and wrap my lips around my teeth.
“Oh my god, you’ve never had a crush on someone before?” she gasps.
