He watches her, waiting to see if the wall behind the words holds. She doesn’t fill the space with comfort. She lets it stand there and be big. He relaxes exactly half a millimeter. Onanother day, with someone else, I would miss it. In this room, it’s a headline.
Cassian kneels at the cart. He takes out two paper cups, fills one at the sink, and sets it on the floor halfway between the boy and the door. He drinks from the other cup himself and sets it on the edge of the cart.
“Ribs,” he says to Simone. “He’s guarding.”
Simone nods. “We can wrap if he says yes,” she sighs. “No hurry.”
The boy keeps his hands jammed into his sleeves. His eyes flick to the water and away. Nobody moves to hand it to him. Nobody asksdo you want this?He does not have to saynoto anything that would break this room’s promise. After a minute, he slides one hand out, reaches down, and drags the cup across the floor like he’s stealing it back from a version of himself that would have refused. He drinks half, stops, swallows like it hurts, then drinks the rest because he decided he wanted it and he’s going to follow through.
I start to draw before I can talk myself out of it. I draw the cup, the way his sleeve swallows his wrist, the set of Simone’s hands at rest, the edge of the rolling cart’s wheel. Cassian’s shoes enter the edge of the frame, and I consider leaving them out on principle; instead I mark their outline as if I’m annotating a map. My hand trembles, a small useless quiver I can’t wish away. I get it under control by drawing slower.
Cassian kneels, quietly. He does not touch the boy. He doesn’t even look at him directly. “When you’re ready,” he says to the floor, “we are always here.”
“You’re the boss,” the boy says without turning.
Cassian’s mouth tightens. “Only of the door,” he says. “You own your body.”
That sentence lands in me with an honesty I don’t want to give him. I draw the hinge of the clinic door and the blanksquare where a window would be in a different building. I shade the square lightly. It’s a habit now—placing the idea of an exit in every room like a talisman.
“Tell me one thing,” Simone says to the boy, “that would make the next five minutes better.”
He thinks. He stares at my shoes, not my face, like he’s trying to decide if I’m part of better or something that makes better harder.
“Music,” he says finally. “Not sad.”
“Not sad is a good idea” Simone says, amused at herself. She pulls her phone out, taps something, and the faintest thread of a beat hums from a speaker in the corner.
The boy’s mouth loosens. He rolls his shoulders once like he wants to drop a weight and can’t quite commit. Cassian doesn’t look satisfied. He looks like a man who is allowed to exhale one rib’s worth of air.
Watching him here is different from watching him behind smoked glass or in that studio where the air itself felt like a dare. He’s smaller in a room like this, because everyone is, but it suits him. His competence is quiet instead of staged. He moves like he used to set bones and stop bleeding for a living. He also watches me from the corner of his eye when he thinks I’m not looking, and that makes me want to throw my sketchbook at his head.
I draw his hands instead. The lines are clean, tendons standing out at the wrist as if they’re remembering the weight of a body. I know how to capture hunger; artists get trained in it whether they choose that lesson or not. Competence is harder. Competence doesn’t beg to be seen. It sits in the corner and makes itself indispensable.
A knock sounds at the door. Imani steps in with a roll of elastic wrap and a smile that’s just a mouth lifting. “This is warm,” she says to the boy. “Feels better that way. Want to try it?”
He doesn’t answer. She waits. He finally gives a small nod. She moves to his side like a person stepping into a photograph she’s already seen. “Okay,” she says. “Arms up just a little, not a lot. Tell me if I do too much.”
She wraps the ribs with hands that make me want to cry and don’t. The boy flinches exactly once. She stops. He nods again, more real. She finishes, tapes the wrap, and meets his eyes only when she’s done. “How’s that?” she asks.
“Hurts less,” he says. It sounds like a confession he wasn’t sure was allowed.
“Perfect,” she says. She looks at Simone. “I’ll bring food in ten. No mustard.”
He huffs a laugh so small I wouldn’t have noticed if I wasn’t looking at his mouth instead of Cassian’s for once. I draw the softening.
The session isn’t a session the way journalists mean it. Notell me about your feelingsorwhat happened when.It’s a set of rooms inside one room: a body that needs wrap, a hunger that needs bread, a brain that needs the rules changed about what doors do. When it ends, it doesn’t end; it just stops being this shape and becomes another. Simone gives the boy choices, and the boy takes none of them and that’s still a choice. Imani leaves the door open the width of a hand, so the air keeps moving. Cassian stands, knees cracking, because his body remembers what work feels like too.
He looks at me. Then he tips his head toward the corridor, and I follow because I want to be in a place where my anger doesn’t have to share the air with a boy who needs it more.
The adjacent office is small and plain, as if plain is a disguise. He gestures for me to take the chair; I don’t. I stay standing because my body needs height to remind my mouth it’s mine.
“Impressions?” he asks.
“You’re actually saving people,” I say, and I don’t put a question mark at the end.
“We are,” he says, not claiming the pronoun the way men like to. He steps closer by degrees. “And you’re finally seeing me.”
“I saw you last night,” I say. “With your hands on my hand.”
