“What then? I should freeze him out? Change my number? Move away so he can’t find me?”
Amy lifted an eyebrow. “I want to draw attention to the black and white thinking, the extremes you’re reverting to. I haven’t heard you speak that way in a long time.”
Riza leaned back in her chair. “You know, half of what I read in these self-help books is that everyone appears in our life for a reason. They have things to teach us. We can look at the good or the bad. It’s our perception. This feels like you’re automatically lumping him in with the bad because he’s part of my past.”
“Not at all,” Amy said. “I’m drawing your attention to the possibility here, Riza. Maybe this man has done the work towards his own healing. Maybe this relationship would be mutually beneficial to you both. In order to see that, you have to set the boundaries, get some distance, not physically but in your mind and heart so that you can see him with clarity and not through the distorted lens of a child’s memories. That’s where your black and white thinking emerged. He was a good guy or a bad guy. Obviously based on what you’ve told me, he was a good guy. But now he’s a man, and he’s sought you out. You have to evaluate the person he is today apart from who he was when you were children.”
“I slept with him last night.” Riza heard the challenge in her voice and rubbed her eyes. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said it that way.”
Amy chuckled. “You don’t owe me an apology, Riza. But do you owe one to yourself? Casual sex was… well, an addiction, right? A self-damaging behavior? How do you feel about having slept with him?”
“And apparently I’m descended from a woman who cursed the asylum grounds a hundred or so years ago. How’s that for progress?”
“Cursed the asylum? How did she do that?”
“I don’t know yet. We haven’t figured out much about her.”
“Then let’s talk about the sex.”
Riza yawned and looked at her watch. “I don’t want to talk about the sex. I want to talk about the curse.”
“The curse is still a mystery. We could puzzle over it for days and not have a breakthrough. The sex is in the here and now—well, the recent here and now, anyway. And it’s an unhealthy coping strategy we’ve dealt with before.”
“It was a mistake. I’m not going to do it again.”
“In order to not do it again, you have to shine the light of consciousness upon it, take it out of the shadow, out of the unconscious. Come on, Riza. You know how important this work is to your surviving, and not just surviving, but thriving.”
“You sound like a self-help book.”
“I might just write one someday. But for now, let’s talk about what happened.”
“I fucked Casey. That’s it. It was”—Riza shrugged—“sex.”
“Perhaps, but this is sex with a man you have a history with. In fact, the first man you were ever intimate with.”
“Well, it wasn’t different from any of the other fifty or a hundred or so guys I’ve slept with.”
“Is that real? True? Just allow yourself to go there. Set aside your shame. It’s been a long time since you’ve had casual sex, dangerous sex. What is it about Casey that compelled you to take it there?”
Riza looked away. She didn’t want to go there. She wanted to be insolent, rude. She wanted to storm out of the office like she would have done all those years ago, but she’d come so far, despite her recent regressions, she refused to believe all that work had been for nothing. She swallowed the lump gathering in her throat.
“He brings out… that part of me. That dark part. It was like the moment I saw him again, she took over.”
“She as in the dark Riza?”
“Yeah. The bad kid.”
“Are you attracted to him?”
“I don’t know. He’s attractive.” Riza thought of his body, a man’s body, and squirmed in her chair. “He knows me in a way that no one else ever will. Never. He knows things about me and still…”
“Wants you?”
“Yeah.”
“And when you had sex, was it pleasurable?”
“It’s a blur. I wanted to dominate him and I did, sort of. It was a power struggle, but we both got off, if that’s what you mean.”
“Not exactly, but it’s a place to start. Do you intend to do it again?”
“No, but…”
“But you might lose control?”
“I’m an adult woman. Adults have sex all the time. I should be able to have sex when I want.”
“You are able to. You have. But we’re not really talking about the sex at all. We’re talking about impulse control. We’re talking about shutting down half your brain and lighting up the part of you that you’ve worked very hard to remove from the driver’s seat. The part of you that is self-sabotaging, self-destructive. I’d love to see you in a healthy, intimate partnership with a man, but that’s not what I’m seeing and it’s not what you’re seeing based on how you’re describing this relationship.”
Riza stood and wrung out her hands. “I feel out of control. I feel like I’m teetering on the edge.”
Amy nodded. “Okay. I understand. Perhaps getting back to basics? A yoga or meditation class? A few days back in your routine with little or no contact with Casey?”
Riza nodded. “Yeah. That’s probably for the best.”
Casey’s basement of secrets seemed to call out to her. It was like a drug, all that information. She wanted to go back. The urge was as powerful as heroin and she knew she should tell Amy, but she said nothing.
8
The following day, Riza opted for work despite it being her usual day off. She readied three cottages for their owners and then signed up for a five o’clock gentle yoga class.
At the end of class, she whispered, “Namaste,” and blinked around the room.
A man she’d never seen before sat on the opposite side of the room. Shaggy blond hair fell across his forehead.
“That was total bliss,” he told the teacher, who beamed at him.
“Thanks, Nolan. Always great to see new faces around here. I hope we’ll see you again.”
“You most definitely will,” he assured her.
As Riza walked to her car, she encountered the blond man again. He looked up at her and grinned sheepishly. “Don’t happen to have a wire hanger, do ya?”
Riza paused and wrinkled her forehead. “Not on me.”
He laughed. “Yeah, it hardly goes with that outfit. I’ve locked myself out.”
“That’s your Jeep?”
He nodded. “I swear I’m not breaking into it. These last few days have been a cyclone. I left my house in slippers yesterday.”
She chuckled and walked over to his Jeep. The driver’s window was cracked a tiny amount. “If you can give me a boost, I can snake my arm through there and unlock it.”
“Really? Can you somehow flatten your arm into a sheet of paper?”
“Something like that.”
The man got on all fours. “Step on my back,” he said.