“Didn’t get fried,” I say, flexing my fingers. “So… still attached. Boss gave his ‘I don’t want your mom suing me’ spielagain. Starting to think I’m going to be getting it weekly for the foreseeable future.”
“Reasonable concern,” he says dryly. “Getting electrocuted would be… bad for business.”
“Bad for my mom’s heart rate,” I say. “Caleb would never sleep again.”
His eyebrows tick up. “How’s he doing?” he asks.
I sink deeper into the armchair. “Complicated answer,” I say. “Exam week. Nightmares are back. Psych had him doing some greatest hits of ‘this is your trauma life.’ He’s… working his plan. Mostly. But the volume’s been at like a seven for days.”
“And you?” he asks. “What’s your volume like?”
My first instinct is to say, “Fine.” The second is to overcorrect and say, “Nine, everything’s on fire.”
Instead, I sit with it for a second. Check my own body the way I’ve been trained to check his.
“Tense,” I say slowly. “Like… holding a full bucket with my arms already tired. I’m not… at the edge. But I’m bracing.”
Nodding like that tracks exactly with whatever notes he’s got on me. “Tell me about last night,” he says.
I stare at him. “You a mind reader now?”
“You mentioned in your check-in email that he was at a seven and you were doing more… ‘body-based coping,’” he says, putting the quotes in the air. “That’s usually your code.”
I groan into my hands. “You and Dr. K have a group chat, don’t you?”
He chuckles. “We have professional courtesy and shared patients,” he says. “How did using sex as coping go?”
Heat crawls up my neck. “It was… good,” I say. “Like, physically. He wanted it. I wanted it. It wasn’t… coercive or anything. But I could tell he was trying to crawl out of his head with it. And I let him. I knew that’s what it was, and I let him.”
Dr. Ortega steeples his fingers, watching me. “What would you have preferred to do?” he asks.
“Both,” I say. “Talk and fuck. In that order.” I run a hand over my face. “He said he didn’t have the words yet. That he needed it to not be the main character. And I… believed him. Or I pretended to. I don’t know.”
“You did believe him,” Dr. Ortega says. “You also didn’t. Both can be true.”
I slump further. “That’s annoying,” I say.
“Feelings are irritating,” he agrees. “Let’s zoom out for a minute. You’ve described yourself, historically, as the only ‘line’ between him and a cliff.”
“Yeah. Not my favorite self-description, but sure.”
“What does it mean,” he asks, “to shift from being the line to part of a net?”
I pick at a loose thread on the arm of the chair. “It means… I’m not the only thing between him and disaster,” I say slowly. “There’s Dr. K. There’s Martin. There’s his coach, a little. There’s my mom. There’s our safety plan.”
“And what is the downside of still acting like you’re the only line?” he asks.
“I burn out,” I say. “He burns out. Everything becomes about managing his brain instead of… having a relationship. I become his full-time crisis manager and part-time boyfriend.”
He nods. “When you saw his text yesterday—‘My brain is being a dick’—you told me you didn’t immediately call him. That you answered supportively but didn’t escalate.”
“Yeah,” I say. “That felt wrong and right at the same time. Old me would’ve dropped everything, driven to campus, and hauled him into the truck. New me… took a breath, checked the pattern, responded, but didn’t go full SWAT.”
“How did that feel in your body?” he asks.
“Like I was… neglecting him,” I admit. “Like, if anything happened, it would be because I didn’t do enough. But also, like, I could breathe. A little.”
“‘If anything happened, it would be because I didn’t do enough,’” he repeats. “Let’s sit with that sentence. What do you hear when you say it out loud?”
