She breathed a quiet sigh of relief, then sat up, trying to calm down. She needed a few minutes to get herself together before she had to look him in the eye again.
Wren scrubbed both hands over her face and groaned softly into her palms.
What the hell was happening to her?
Her mind spun wildly, searching for some explanation about why last night had been different.
Maybe it was just exhaustion. After all, she’d been emotionally and physically wrung out, overwhelmed from pretending to be Lark all damn day. Add in that asshole at the festival, the fact that she was sharing a bed with Grayson, and the strange yet wonderful intimacy of lying in the dark talking, and it made sense that her brain had temporarily malfunctioned.
Deep down, though, she knew better.
Last night happened because she’d wanted it to. None of it had been an accident. She’d been the one to move the pillow wall, to shift closer.
And when he kissed her, she hadn’t recoiled at all. She’d opened for him eagerly, instinctively, like some starving part of her had recognized him immediately.
The truth of that was undeniable.
Then another possibility drifted through her mind.
Maybe therapy was finally working.
If her mother knew that Sophie had accomplished more in the past year than Dr. Holloway had in over a decade of Wren’s childhood, she’d probably faint dead away.
Wren’s parents had put her in therapy when she was nine, and she remembered every detail about her childhood therapist. Dr. Holloway always smelled of cigarette smoke and peppermint gum, an oddly nauseating combination that clung to the office furniture and thick beige curtains. She also wore the same gray cardigan with frayed sleeves every session, her sharp eyes missing nothing.
Except Wren.
Dr. Holloway had spent years asking questions in a gravelly voice while scribbling Wren’s one- and two-words responses on her yellow legal pad. Wren had spent a lot of the earlier years answering with shrugs and sometimes outright lies, because she’d been a child and she didn’t know how to explain that talking to the woman made her feel worse instead of better.
Talking about things with Dr. Holloway didn’t make the fear go away. If anything, it made it stronger. But by the time she realized that, Wren had learned how to lock all her feelings away—the good and the bad—so she went through the motions without ever sharing anything real.
By the time she hit high school, Wren had gotten well-versed in “playing sick” on therapy days, managing to avoid every third session or so. Mercifully, by that point, her parents were only taking her once a month.
When Wren went away to college, she lied to her mother and told her that she’d found a new therapist near campus. In truth, she hadn’t bothered. She was convinced that she didn’t need therapy. She was functioning just fine.
Then, she moved home after graduation a year ago—Wren had stuck around an extra year to earn her Master’s—and Lark had called her “I’m fine” assurances exactly what they were.
Bullshit.
“You’re twenty-three and you’ve only had two crappy kisses from two lame guys,” Lark had said bluntly, while stealing one of Wren’s fries at McDonald’s. “That’s not fine. That’s emotional constipation.”
Wren had nearly choked on her burger laughing, but Lark didn’t even crack a smile. She also didn’t let it go, and Wren had instantly regretted telling her twin about her two failed attempts at dating.
For weeks, her sister had nagged relentlessly. “Try again with a new therapist. They aren’t all chain-smoking dinosaurs, Wren.”
So Wren took her sister’s advice and discovered she could do therapy online through an app. That was how she’d found Sophie, an amazing counselor who lived in North Carolina and had the cutest Southern accent. Every other week, she sat down on her lunch break for her scheduled Zoom session with the woman.
Sweet, patient Sophie had warm brown eyes that saw Wren in ways Dr. Holloway never had. She listened and she never pushed too hard, never made her feel broken or pathetic or weak. For the first time, therapy felt less like an ordeal and more like…hope.
Over the course of the last year, she’d slowly noticed differences in herself. Small things at first. She could handle crowded places a little bit better. She didn’t flinch whenever a man walked too closely to her.
Unfortunately, she was still afraid of the dark, but Sophie said there was absolutely nothing wrong with leaving a light on at night if it brought her comfort or helped her sleep better.
Wren found herself wondering if her therapy was the reason why last night had been different. Because kissing Grayson hadn’t felt terrifying or threatening, like it did with the other two guys. It had felt safe.
At least, until he’d pulled her beneath him. That was when she was cast back to?—
She closed her eyes and stopped that memory from landing.
