She smiles warmly while rubbing away some poorly applied highlighter. “I promise I’m not trying to be flippant. But have you ever gone to therapy? I go to a great gal. She’s a little unorthodox, but…she might be helpful to you.”
11
Rafi
This is a weird therapist office. First of all, it’s located down the road from the gun range in a suburban shopping center, next to what looks like a sex club. Not that I would know anything about what a sex club looks like because that kind of thing scares the hell out of me.
The walk down the hall to the therapist’s office isn’t making me feel any better. The photographs on the walls are…well, they’re kink-positive, that’s for sure.
“Rafiq?”
A stunning woman with a braid of silver-and-white hair down her back and blue eyes that rival Everett’s, wearing black, skintight leather pants and a magenta silk blouse that matches the color of her lipstick, is standing in the doorway of the office, looking at me expectantly.
“Dr. Sparrow?”
She sticks out her hand with a cool smile. “You can call me Riley. Come on in.”
I shake her hand and follow her into a pristine office with lots of seating options, gorgeous potted plants on her windowsills, and a full-color version of one of the BDSM prints in the hallway. I remain standing, fairly sure Parker was pranking me when she made this recommendation.
“Rafiq, feel free to take any seat you’d like,” she says as she sits primly behind her desk.
“You can call me Rafi, but I have a feeling I’m in the wrong place. Like maybe my friend who recommended you did so to fuck with me a little bit.”
“Who’s your friend?”
“Parker Aquino.”
Her cool exterior warms ever so slightly. “I enjoy working with Parker, and from what I know of her, I don’t believe she would send you to me as a joke.”
“Well, she can’t think I’m into kinky shit, can she?”
“I couldn’t possibly begin to parse what she thinks about you. However, I don’t just deal in kinky shit. The art on the walls is to make people comfortable with the fact that I do, but that’s not a hard limit. Your intake form says your husband died about a year ago. Tell me, how are you dealing with that?”
Oh, this should be interesting.
“Well, I talk to him all the time, so there’s that.”
She considers me, then asks, “Can you see him?”
“No. It’s just me sort of knowing what he would say in the moment and having these imaginary conversations with him.” See? That sounds almost sane.
“What kind of imaginary conversations do you have with your husband?”
Yeah…this is probably where I lose her. “We’ve been talking a lot about the guy I suddenly have a crush on.”
A small smile appears on her very bright lips, but I don’t think she’s making fun of me. “And what does your husband have to say about this guy?”
“He seems pretty supportive of it, I guess.”
“Why do you sound so unsure, then?”
“Because Asadi died only a year ago, and I’m not sure if it’s too soon. I don’t know if I’m being disloyal to him, and the guy…” I say, pausing to neatly stack the papers on her desk which is probably rude, so I stop. “Uh, the guy is a friend who’s been helping me through this mourning process. He’s been there for me the whole time.”
“Sounds like a good friend. Are you worried he’s not interested?”
I shake my head. “He flirted with me in the beginning, but I finally shut him down and said we could only ever be friends, and he was fine with that. So now I have a dead husband who talks to me and a live man who I blew off six months ago because it was too soon and…all of a sudden, I can’t get him out of my head.” I run my hands through my hair, wondering if it’s possible to bore her to death while still being clinically insane. “I bet that all sounds pretty unimpressive to a kink therapist.”
Riley sits up straight in her seat, intertwining her fingers on top of her desk. “In the context of this visit, I’m not a kink therapist, because we’re not discussing kink. For you, I’m more of a grief counselor and…perhaps, a relationship counselor as well.”
