“Of course. I can bring it back tomorrow?”
“You sure you can keep sneaking away from your family? You don’t think they’re going to be suspicious?”
Enoch shook his head, his nose scrunching in a way that made me smile. Fuck, I’d missed him so much. My chest swelled with emotion, the overwhelming urge to cry bubbling in my throat.How the hell did I land this man? I feel like I’m stuck in some maladaptive daydream right now and I’m going to wake back up in hell at any second.
“For all they know, I could have a super long workday every day. It’s not a big deal.”
Enoch tucked the coin back into his wallet and leaned back on his palms to stare at me.
“So, your day was long. Was it a bad long or just a tiring long?”
I blew out a breath through puffed cheeks, shrugging.
“Mostly just tiring. I had therapy.”
“Yeah. How’s that going? Did you talk about the nightmare from the other day?”
“Yeah.”
Enoch just stared, waiting patiently for me to give more details.
“I agreed to seeing her twice a week with a commitment to actually talking about my past with her.”
“You weren’t before?”
I shook my head. “No, I…I didn’t want to. I still don’t want to, but I can’t keep living like this. I’m scared that I’m going to hurt you or do something worse that I can’t take back.”
Enoch nodded like he understood, but he clearly didn’t when he was fucking risking his life just being with me. Maybe I wasn’t the only one fucked in the head after all.
“So, does she think that talking about the past is going to help you stop having these episodes?”
“Yeah. She’s not really big on clinical diagnoses, like, she doesn’t like giving patients a label, but she says its PTSD and the only way to, I guess, ‘get over it’ for lack of a better explanation, is to remove the fear surrounding certain things.”
“Things?”
“Yeah. Triggers,” I mumbled. I hated that word. It’d lost its meaning when everyone started using it in everyday speech for anything that evoked any level of negative emotion.
“Right,” Enoch nodded. “Okay. Is there anything I can do?”
I sighed, pulled my hair over my shoulder, curling it around one of my fingers.
“I’m supposed to cut my hair. To face one of my fears.”
Enoch blinked, his eyes drifting to the long red strands that were still damp from my shower. “Oh. Well, I can’t say I’ve ever cut any girls’ hair before, but what can I do?”
I chuckled, rolling my eyes. “I don’t know, I don’t even know why I’m telling you about it. I mean,” I flicked my eyes to his, not wanting to offend him, “I just don’t want to bug you with my stuff any more than I already am.”
Enoch gave me an‘I’m gonna pretend you didn’t just say that’look and I rolled my eyes again.
“Anyways, I guess I should buy some proper hair scissors or something. Just thinking about cutting it makes me want to throw up and hide in a closet, but…I don’t know, maybe it won’t be as scary if I’m the one doing it. I just don’t want to fuck it up.”
“Well, there’s tons of YouTube videos we could watch together. Everyone was giving themselves haircuts during lockdown.”
“Yeah, but they were also in lockdown and didn’t have to worry about people seeing their terrible DIY haircuts.”
Enoch chuckled, “That’s fair. But if you just cut, like, a centimeter off, it shouldn’t be noticeable if it’s uneven.”
“Yeah, maybe. What about you? How was your day?”
