“Any time.” And she really meant it. Her heart ached knowing this was likely to be the one and only time she got Audrey here.
“Do you… Um. Do you think she has spare toothbrushes?”
Hallie elbowed her lightly. “I can promise you that Tracy Fuller has got all the spare toiletries your heart could desire.”
“I’d love to be able to say I’m casual and don’t need a lot, but, I think at this point, it would be a little foolish to pretend you don’t know I have a whole thing about… cleanliness.”
Hallie turned to face her. This was important. “I know you have OCD, and I know it’s really hard feeling like things are contaminated. And I also know that being around your family seems to make it worse.”
Audrey tried to speak a couple of times before she had to shake her head, look away, and try again. “People don’t usually notice that.”
“Because they don’t want to. Because, if they did, they’d need to hold themselves accountable for their part in what your family does to you.”
“I mean, maybe. It’s not like the OCD goes away when they’re not around, so it’s not all them.”
Hallie didn’t think she needed to point out that they were likely the root of it. Sure, she was pretty certain there was agenetic component to OCD, but it was more complex than that and they both knew it. Audrey’s family might have given her genes that were more susceptible to OCD, but the environment they’d given her to grow up in had undoubtedly contributed to it.
Audrey sighed heavily. “But I see your point.”
Hallie put her free hand, hidden inside a thick mitten, on top of Audrey’s. “I know it’s easy for me to say, and far more difficult for you to actually live with.”
She shook her head. “No, it’s okay. You’re right. My therapist and I have talked about it a lot over the years. Their belief is that, one day, I’ll stop feeling the need to defend them all in the same way.”
“It’s okay that you need to in the interim.”
“Is it?” She laughed bitterly and in a way that told Hallie she’d asked her therapist the same thing many times.
“Yes,” Hallie said with certainty.
“Most people find it… exhausting and annoying.”
“I’m not most people.”
Audrey pressed her lips together as she looked at Hallie, and Hallie worked very hard not to look at her mouth as she felt herself heating up under the intensity of Audrey’s gaze.
She really hoped her mom wasn’t watching through the windows.
“You’re definitely not,” Audrey eventually breathed, the words feeling like they wrapped around Hallie on the wind, teasing and exhilarating.
“I’m going to assume that’s a compliment.”
“You absolutely should.” Audrey’s voice was quiet but intense, and Hallie didn’t know what to do with herself. She could barely breathe through the incredible onslaught of emotions.
She has a girlfriend. She has a girlfriend. She has a girlfriend.
Audrey cleared her throat and looked away as she quickly sipped her drink again. “Well, I’m glad I’m not annoying you yet.”
“There is noyet,” Hallie said a little too quickly. “I don’t think you’d annoy me in a hundred years, Dr. Sinclair.”
Audrey’s cheeks were definitely a little pinker than they had been as she shot Hallie a shy look. “That’s not actually my name.”
“What?”
“I changed it. Before I got my PhD. It felt like something I needed to do, you know, for myself, and I knew it would be trickier after I’d started building a professional name. I couldn’t stand spending the rest of my life as one of them. So, yeah, I changed it.”
“Wow,” Hallie breathed. Audrey worried about her family and about her reactions to them, and, probably, a million other things connected to them and what they’d done to her self-worth, but here she was, protecting and making a name forherself.Not for them. She had no idea how amazing she was. “So… can I ask what your name is?”
“Hummel.”
