Page 179 of Piece Us Together

So, not through talk at the house, but through someone coming here for a session.Was it Carter? Travis? Someone else?

“Are you alright?” he asks.

I nearly laugh. “Yeah, Doc. I’m fucking great.”

“Physically?”

“Yeah. It’s just a graze.”

“Then I’ll assume that your huff was because you’re not alright mentally.”

I drop my gaze to the front of the sweatshirt. It has me tilting my chin enough to get a fresh whiff of Hunter’s cologne. I close my eyes, pretending he’s beside me. Pretending he and Nolan both are.

“Nolan and I have found someone. He’s—well, he’s a dom. For the kink stuff we were trying. I couldn’t do it, so we thought we’d try having someone else come in.” When he doesn’t say anything, I peek my eyes open. He’s just stroking the tip of his thumb against his lip, looking thoughtful. I hate him for being able to hide his emotions so well. At least with Hunter, I can poke at him until emotion breaks through. I don’t think I want to know what would happen if I poked at Singh. I have a feeling he’d poke right back.

“That must have been incredibly hard, trusting someone like that.”

“Yeah.” I frown though, because that’s not exactly right. “Actually—I mean, yes, but also…no?”

“Can you try to explain that?”

“There’s always been something about him. Something that just…settled me, I guess. It’s stupid. I didn’t even know him, but I trusted him enough to let him touch Nolan. It should have been something that ate me alive, you know? That kept me up at night and had me on edge whenever we were with him.”

He tilts his head. “But?”

“But the world goes quiet, with Hunter.” I laugh at myself, feeling idiotic. “I told you, it’s stupid.”

“That doesn’t sound stupid at all. That sounds wonderful.”

I sink into the couch, inhaling deeply to get more of Hunter’s cologne. “Yeah. Yeah, it is.”

“Hunter is the man that was at Thanksgiving, right?”

“Yeah. He’s friends with Travis and Carter.”

He smiles. “Yes, I’m aware of Hunter’s back story. It’s nice that he seems to have gotten something good out of his collision with our group.”

I laugh, just realizing that he knows I’ve pulled a gun on Hunter. Then the image pops in my head and I’m suddenly not laughing at all. I feel sick.

“Mmm.” Dr. Singh leans back, lifting his leg to rest the ankle on the opposite knee. “What did you just think about?”

“I didn’t know him, when I was there that night. The night with Carter. I’d never point a gun at him now.”

“I have no doubt about that.” When I say nothing, he asks, “Does he doubt that? Is he afraid of you?”

I huff in amusement. “No. He’s pretty much got me wrapped around his finger, actually.”

“How do you feel about that?”

“Like I don’t deserve it.”

“Can you tell me why that is?”

“I—” I look down at my hands, thinking about how Travis believed they were relatively clean. It isn’t all of the blood I’ve spilled that really haunts me, though. It’s not even the innocent lives I lost over the years. Not really. It’s Carter’s blood. Carter’s tears. Carter’s heart, torn apart and bleeding out in the palms of my hands. “I say it’s my fault, what happened to Carter. And everyone gives me these reasons why it’s not true. Logically, I get it. I get that even if I hadn’t joined the operation, he may have had something else horrible happen to him, maybe somethingI couldn’t have saved him from. I get that there’s no way of knowing if he really could have handled the truth right away. I get that the head would have killed him—and probably me—if I went rogue and pulled him out of there early. I get all of it, you know? I get it.”

“But?”

I close my eyes and I’m there again. My arms had been so fucking sore, pulled around the back of the chair and so loosely tied in a knot I could easily escape. My body was on the verge of all sorts of meltdowns. I’d been bleeding from places I didn’t want to think about. I’d been bleeding from places people could see. I couldn’t breathe because of my ribs, because of my bruised throat, because of my panic.

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