Page 51 of Hypnotized By Love

There was some underlying subtext there that I couldn’t quite make out. He was asking for something beyond just permission to interview me, but my brain was too scrambled from his nearness to figure it out.

Did it matter, though? I was having a good time.

I knew I might regret it later, but I said, “Ask me your questions, pretty boy.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Of course he couldn’t pretend like he hadn’t just heard my drunken slip. “Pretty boy?”

“It’s your fault I’m drunk,” I pointed out.

“But you’re so delightful this way. You remind me of the old Sinclair.”

His words caused a painful pressure in my chest. “You mean back before I had enough baggage to fill an airport?”

His smile dropped. “Everybody has baggage and issues. Even me.”

I was about to ask him what kind when he said, “So why Playa Placida? What brought you back?”

“I am getting my master’s degree in mental health counseling and it’s expensive, so I thought maybe I should move back home and do it all online. Sierra had already moved home to save up money to get her own place, so it seemed like a good idea.”

“But I thought you were happy doing hypnosis. Why would you go back to school to become a therapist?”

“Oh, I don’t know, probably because when people find out what I do, they accuse me of being a fraud or in a cult.”

“Defensive walls reengaged,” he noted. “What causes that?”

“Where do my defensive walls come from with regard to my job? A lot of places, probably. I know that part of it is from getting labeled in school. That when they say you’re ‘gifted and talented,’ there’s these expectations of the kind of life you’ll lead, the sort of job you’ll have. That if you’re not out in the world curing cancer, then you’re just wasting your life, even if what you’re doing makes you happy. How even when you are actually doing well, you still feel like a failure.”

“I know how that goes.”

Huh. He had been in all those advanced academic classes with me and Sierra. He probably did know exactly how I felt—how I became a teacher because I thought I had to live up to my potential or whatever. “Plus, if you were in a job that’s always portrayed as some kind of joke, you’d be defensive, too.”

“Yes, journalists have no idea what that’s like,” he said with a note of sarcasm, and I realized he was right.

“Then you will understand why I decided to go that extra mile. My mentor is a licensed therapist who does traditional therapy and uses hypnosis as an extra tool, and people tend to take her more seriously.”

“So ... it’s because of what other people might think of you? You can’t live your life caring what other people think. You should become a therapist because you want to be one, not because of someone else’s expectations, or to get other people to take you more seriously.”

But I had spent so much of my life doing just that. Caring about what everyone thought and living in pain when I wasn’t rising to their expectations. My eyes went a little blurry with unshed tears, but he didn’t seem to notice.

He said, “I’m sorry I said what I did about your job being like a cult or fake. I was actually teasing you, and I guess it didn’t come off that way.”

I remembered Sierra declaring that I was an unreliable narrator and didn’t see things as they actually were but rather as I imagined them to be. I wondered if that was the case here.

What if I had perceived other things in my life incorrectly? Viewing them through a distorted gaze so that I didn’t have the whole picture?

What if that had happened with Mason?

And I must have spent a long time mulling over what Sierra had said and whether or not it was true because Mason waved one of his hands at me. “Earth to Sinclair! Want to share your deep thoughts?”

I cleared my throat. “They’re not that deep. I was just thinking about the fact that chocolate is a flavor of milk, but milk is also a flavor of chocolate.”

He smiled slightly, as if he didn’t believe me, but he just nodded. I could tell my joke hadn’t deterred him, which he proved by saying, “Tell me a bit more about this deep stage of hypnosis you accidentally put me in. I know you said there was heightened awareness and responsiveness, and that some people undergo surgeries without anesthesia in that state.”

“It’s big in some childbirth circles, too. They use hypnosis instead of drugs.”

His eyes widened. “Would you do that?”

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