“And I’m glad you found me,” she said, and privately she was grateful that all he seemed to care about were her professional credentials, not her personal track record in bed. “Let’s talk some about why you feel true intimacy has died. Can you give me an example?”
He nodded several times and exhaled heavily, as if what he was about to say would be hard. “I feel like Sarah doesn’t want to have sex anymore. The other night I was—”
He hacked sharply. A loud, bark of a cough. Then came another. His hand flew to cover his mouth, and he coughed once more, like a wheezing trombone. His cheeks began turning red.
Michelle sprang up. “Let me get you some water,” she said, and quickly headed to the door, then down the hall to the small kitchen tucked in a corner of the office suite. She opened the fridge to grab a water bottle, but it was empty. Crap. They’d need to replenish the supply. She swiveled around, spotted a clean mug from the cupboard, filled it from the tap, and returned to her office, the sound of wheezing like a homing beacon guiding her back. She handed him the cup, and he gulped most of the water down greedily. Then he took a deep breath, and finished it off.
“You okay now?” she asked gently.
He nodded.
“Do you want more?”
He peered in the cup and tossed the rest of it back. “I think I’m better now. That was embarrassing. I’m so sorry.”
“Please don’t apologize for coughing. Shall we go back to your concerns about true intimacy?”
They chatted more, and as he shared his concerns about the lack of sex with his wife, she felt a strange sense of déjà vu. She flashed back to her last session with Shayla. The problems mirrored Shayla’s challenges. Shayla had even said before that her husband had a paranoid side. Could he be so worried about trying to keep her that he was infiltrating her therapist to try to learn what sort of advice Shayla was getting? Could this man actually be Shayla’s husband? With a fake name?
No, she sharply admonished herself. Plenty of couples had marital woes and there was no need for her to jump to any conclusions, and assume Shayla’s hubby was here under false pretenses.
She had no true evidence that he was a fraud, so she mentally talked herself down. For now she had to treat him as she would anyone else. Besides, he seemed open to some of her suggestions about reconnecting with his wife, so she recommended a book for him that she thought might be helpful. “I don’t have a copy to loan you, but perhaps you could check it out on Amazon or your bookstore,” she said, and he grabbed a pen and small notebook from inside his jacket.
He spread the notebook open on the ottoman in front of him, then dipped his hand into his pocket once more and pushed on a pair of glasses. “Can’t see a damn thing up close without these on,” he said, then wrote down the name she gave him, folded up the paper and removed his glasses once more. She caught the briefest glimpse of him with the glasses on—thick and black—and it was as if she’d been shot back to the night she went to Gia’s with Jack. The man she’d bumped into outside her building had worn glasses like that—thick and black. He’d had dark hair too, but it was longer, wasn’t it? The memory was far too fuzzy, and that’s all she could latch onto. It had been such a lightning-fast encounter that more than two weeks later she couldn’t recall any more details.
And really, what were the chances that this man was the same guy? Even if she had bumped into Clark, maybe he’d just been doing his research and scoping out the building before the appointment, to get the lay of the land. A lot of patients did that. That was normal. Plus, he’d said he was a market researcher, so it would make sense that he’d checked things out in advance.
But after he left, she couldn’t shake the feeling that something was amiss. Perhaps it was simply this day. Perhaps it was a side effect of Shayla’s nosiness. Lately, she’d been feeling like others knew things about her before she learned them. And she didn’t like being in that position.
She didn’t have another session for an hour, so she locked her door. She never locked her door. But then, she was about to do something she rarely did. She was going to Google a patient. She’d made it a point not to search out her patients online—what mattered was what they shared in her time with them. Still, Clark Davidson had left her feeling unsettled, no matter how hard she tried to apply logic to the situation. She flipped open her laptop, and plugged his name into Google.
She found a Clark Davidson who was a realtor. A Clark Davidson who was a sales manager at an advertising technology company. And a Clark Davidson who was a lawyer. But none were market researchers. And none of the images that returned matched the man who’d been in her office.
She dropped Shayla’s name into Google next, but very little turned up about her that Michelle didn’t already know. Where she went to college. Her brief time working at an art gallery. Some of her charitable donations. She moved onto Facebook next, even though she didn’t have a Facebook profile for herself, and had never felt any need to. Dropping Shayla’s name into the search bar on the social site made her feel dirty. She felt even seedier when she spotted the icon for photos on Shayla’s profile. But they were set to private.
Michelle closed the browser, disgusted with herself, and grateful that she’d been stopped from going too far. The tabloids were already invading her personal life; she didn’t need to start doing that to a client. It would simply be wrong.
Perhaps Clark was just a troubled man who needed help. Not someone who’d studied up on her more than she would have liked. She hopped over to her work email, and smiled broadly when she read a note from her Paris contact, Julien, about how much they were looking forward to her talk.
She was excited for the trip too. The only problem was she’d miss Jack terribly during those five days she’d be away. Especially after she took her phone from the desk drawer and clicked open a new note from him.
from: [email protected]
date: Sept 22, 11:47 AM
subject: You
Hi. You might have seen the picture of us dancing at Lincoln Center. We’re online again on Page Six. I know this is probably more than you bargained for the night we met. I guess I’m just used to it now. The press has been fascinated with my dating, or non-dating, as the case was until I met you. I suspect it will all blow over soon, and they’ll move on to someone else in this city. I hope you don’t mind, though, when I say that I can’t stop looking at this picture of you in my arms. It captured that moment so perfectly and everything I see when I look at you—you are so beautiful and in this photo you look simply incandescent. I am going to miss you when I go to California later this week.