Unraveled Read online

  Swarms of insects crawled over my face. “We can’t always control our thoughts. We can control our choices.”

  “And this morning, you chose to be terse with him. Critical, even.”

  “Disagreements are a normal and healthy part of every marriage. We’ve both been under a lot of stress. Between work, the baby—”

  “Platitudes and excuses. Quote them all you like. It won’t change what’s already begun.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Silvia, of course. She’s young. Beautiful. And she wants your husband. Why, right this second, she’s smiling at him. He was upset when he arrived. She could tell. She’s very perceptive, you know. It’s a useful quality in an assassin-in-training. But I gather your husband knows that. It’s one of the reasons he’s convinced she’ll succeed in the business. With his help.”

  “Liam’s interest in Silvia is purely professional. If there was more than that, he’d tell me.” I swallowed the bitter taste of bile. “I trust my husband, and I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”

  “Not even to discuss what your husband is really doing with Silvia? Why he’s rented her an apartment, has been paying her bills…”

  “If Liam’s doing those things, then I’m certain he has a reasonable explanation.”

  “Even if he had, do you think he’d share it with you? After how you behaved this morning? If swapping out a car seat can cause such contention, how can he ever be expected to tell you the truth about far more pressing concerns?”

  The veracity of this statement stung my cheeks like a slap.

  “My marriage is none of your concern, Mr. Weyrick. I’ll thank you to keep your observations on that topic to yourself.”

  “Observations? No. These are simply the cold, hard facts. The eventuality triggered by your self-righteous indignation.”

  I shoved my notebook into my shoulder bag and stashed the pen in my jacket pocket. “Good bye, Mr. Weyrick.”

  I made it a few angry steps down the hallway with my heels beating a harsh tattoo against the waxed concrete floor.

  “Do you know what your husband was thinking this morning while your back was turned?” Weyrick called after me.

  My heart clawed its way up into my throat where it beat hard and tight. How I wanted to keep walking. To stride away from this awful place with head held high, confident and secure. But that wasn’t my truth. That wasn’t what I’d become.

  Weyrick didn’t wait for me to turn around. “He was thinking of you as you were in those early days. In the time of your first, dizzying free-fall into love. When just the scent of you on his shirt could weaken his knees. This is what he was thinking as you were so judiciously scrubbing the counter and banging around the flatware.” Weyrick’s voice seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere all at once. “Indulge in a scenario with me, Doctor Schmidt. Humor a prisoner, if only for a moment.”

  A therapist must become a connoisseur of silences. Know which ones to fill with comforting banter. Which ones to let alone. The beings I treated often had not just years, but centuries, sometimes even millennia to sift through. My decision process was considerably shorter.

  I turned on my heel and walked back toward Weyrick’s cell. I did not resume my seat at the desk, opting instead to stand before the clear barrier, looking everywhere, knowing he was in there somewhere, watching. “Go ahead,” I said.

  “What if I could fold time back over itself?” he whispered. “Put you back in the moment when you rushed out of your daughter’s day care, but instead turn you around and place your kiss on her warm, buttery cheek? Let you be in the present moment, but with the memory of her cries soothed under your careful touch?”

  I dashed away a hot, salty tear that had escaped the corner of my eye and found its way to the seam of my lips.

  “And what of your husband? What if instead of bickering over the kitchen counter this morning, you had allowed him to bend you over it instead? He wanted to, you know.”

  Drowsy warmth stole into my limbs, my eyelids falling half-closed.

  “Can you recall those early days?” Weyrick asked. “Before the child? The scents. The sounds. The feel of them?”

  “Yes,” I said. And it was true. I was back in those early, early days when just the sound of Liam’s voice spurred my sympathetic nervous system into tingling, electrified life. When the feel of his body was deliciously foreign. When we learned each other. My untried limbs winding around his in sweaty, awkward tangles. The broad planes of his back beneath the shower’s spray. His skin. The smell of it. Drinking droplets from his shoulder with my face buried in his neck. His naked, predatory grace. All of him. A man before he had ever been a husband.

  “Yes,” Weyrick whispered. “Where did you first meet your husband? Show me.”

  Overhead, the fluorescents buzzed and snapped.

  I no longer walked alone in the memory. Weyrick had joined me. His presence palpable in the pull just below my center of gravity. No barriers between us. Between past and present. Between reality and memory.

  “You’ve a far more vivid imagination than I would have guessed, Doctor Schmidt. Such superb detail.”

  Wonder and awe for the human mind assailed me anew. My temporal lobe manufactured the past so perfectly, I wanted to weep with relief and gratitude. Something I’d thought lost. It was all here. Just as it had been.

  “Where are we, Doctor Schmidt? Tell me what you smell.”

  “Leather. Lemon furniture polish. Industrial carpet. The antiseptic sting of fluoride and the smoky smell of powdered teeth. There’s an orthodontist’s office next door.”

  “Next door to what?” Weyrick had migrated away, the sound of his voice anchoring itself in the direction where I sensed something wooden and broad. A desk? A shelf? The varnish would be cool and slick beneath my palm. I knew this without trying.

  “Now tell me what you see,” Weyrick said.

  A funhouse fear had settled into the dark space behind my closed eyelids, welding them shut. Somehow I knew that opening them would change me. Opening them would change everything.

  “I can’t,” I said. Breath sawed in and out of my lungs but I couldn’t get enough oxygen to my brain. It was as if my body had forgotten how to do this on its own.

  “Listen, doctor. That sound. What is it?”

  “The fish tank.” Fish tank. Fish tank…it took a couple tries before my mind seized on the words and connected them to a memory. A name. Sigmund Freud. My goldfish. My heart knocked glad and light against my sternum.

  “What’s that beneath your fingertips?” Weyrick might have been at the opposite end of a long tunnel for how far and strange his voice sounded. “What do you feel?”

  I let my fingertips move slowly, searching. “Leather. Buttery. Well-worn. My chair.”

  “Where are you, Dr. Schmidt?”

  “I’m—I’m…”

  “Yes, Dr. Schmidt. Say it. Tell me where you are.”

  “I’m in my office. My first office. In Plattsburgh.”

  Plattsburgh. The small hamlet in upstate New York where I had lived and worked before I married Liam and moved to Las Vegas.

  My first office.

  The place where Crixus had changed my life at once and forever by escorting Cupid to my couch. The place where Liam had pulled a gun on me, had kidnapped me to answer for a gambling debt someone had thought to frame me for. This chain of events that had tipped my world off its axis and reorganized it around a new one.

  “This isn’t real,” I whispered to myself, fervent as a prayer. “This isn’t real.”

  “See for yourself. Open your eyes.”

  Slowly, the dark curtain of my lids lifted. All my muscles jerked in concert, nearly launching me from the oversized leather chair. A notepad and pen slid to the ground at my feet, the sensation of falling still clinging heavy to my lim
bs. I took a deep breath and willed my heart to cease its racing.

  What had happened?

  Had I fallen asleep in between clients?

  My mind harbored the unreality of a thick three-hour nap.

  Scouring my memory felt like trying to grab smoke. The harder I tried, the more the information leaked through my fingers in curling wisps. Images going diaphanous, as pale and translucent as the details of a dream. I’d been talking to someone. But who?

  The intercom on my desk chirped.

  “Dr. Schmidt?”

  “Julie.” The name appeared on my tongue without preamble or provocation. Julie. My bubbly blond assistant. Keeper of the calendar. Occupant of the desk outside my door. Queen of the waiting room, a country where hot pink and decorative pillows were the currency of the realm.

  I glanced at the coffee mug on the table at my elbow. The smooth, ceramic surface was still warm. I took a fortifying sip and willed the heat to thaw my heart.

  “What is it, Julie?” I asked.

  “Your twelve o’ clock is here.” The odd, teasing tone in her announcement gave me pause. “Would you like me to send him in?”

  “Remind me who it is?” Out of reflex, I glanced toward the stack of manila file folders on my desk. Just where they should be.

  My office door swung open and there Crixus stood. Solid as the Carrera marble generations of sculptors had obsessively, lovingly carved into figures not half as beautiful as the one before me. Sandy of hair and azure of eye. Smirking. Always smirking.

  “Who is it?” He planted two hands over his heart, feigning hurt. “Who is it?” he repeated. Then his long legs ate up the distance between us and he was leaning over me, hands planted on the arms of my chair. His grin liquefied some long neglected node of ice lodged behind my heart. “It’s me. Your husband.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Husband.

  I looked into those bluer-than-the sky eyes and tried to reconcile them with that word.

  Husband. It felt both true and strange. Another story lurked in my mind. Lurked the way a dream will after you wake up. The harder I tried to remember, the faster I forgot.

  “Crixus?” I tried out his name, sure it would trigger some recollection, that the familiarity of it would solidify the ground beneath my feet.

  It did.

  And it didn’t.

  “You’re having one of your episodes,” he said in a voice both warm and soothing. He took a seat on the ottoman before me, sitting close enough that our knees overlapped. “It’s okay. This has happened before, remember? It will pass.”

  “Episodes?”

  “Yes. You’ve had them ever since the accident.”

  “Accident? What—” But even as I asked, images floated to the surface of my mind.

  Me. Liam. A car. Metal and screams. He’d fired shots out the driver’s side window. I’d tried to stop him, yanked his arm away. The vehicle swerved. Flipped. A shower of glass biting into my cheeks.

  Then a hand. Reaching into the broken passenger’s side window. Unbuckling my seatbelt. Pulling me out. Carrying me to safety.

  The same hand now rested on my knee, lifted to my cheek and traced the particular line of my jaw where it met the curve of my ear, disappearing beneath my hair. His other hand rose to my temple and he was cupping my face, my head feeling somehow small and manageable within the span of his fingers.

  “Look at me,” he said.

  I looked at him then for what felt like the first time and the ten thousandth.

  Perfection is a word not often associated with anything crafted from mortal clay. The man before me could be credited as nothing less. An economy of aesthetics so skillfully calibrated they should have been unreal. From the sloping muscles beneath the tight black t-shirt to the indecently smooth skin of his neck and forehead. The sensory memory of how it felt glued to mine by a sheen of sweat sent lust skittering through my middle.

  “I’m right here, Doctor.”

  Doctor. Yes. He had always called me that.

  Even on our wedding day.

  Our wedding. With shock, I realized I could remember that too, if I tried.

  I, Crixus, take thee, Doctor Matilda Schmidt…

  A warm, intimate chuckle from the guests.

  The summer solstice sun making the world go rose-colored beyond the net of my veil. The longest day of the year. But it had been the night that seemed endless. Crixus and I in his big bed. Coiling and uncoiling like two parts of one animal. Finding each other in the dark. Moving together between cool sheets.

  Blissfully exhausted mornings.

  I now pronounce you demigod and wife.

  Because he was not a man. So much more than a man. A demigod.

  My husband. My mate.

  His thumbs massaged the indentations at my temple. Gentle pressure to ease the troubled mind beneath. “Focus on what’s here. On what’s real. What’s real right now?”

  I knew this technique well. I’d used it countless times on clients dealing with anxiety and PTSD. A powerful grounding technique. I let myself be coached.

  “You,” I said. I reached up to encircle his wrists with my fingers, feeling the veins beneath my fingertips. His strong pulse. Life.

  “And if you can touch me, then what does that mean?”

  “That’ I’m real too.”

  “That’s right. What else?” His eyes skated to the chair, providing me with a clue.

  “This chair.” I focused on feeling my weight pushing into it, its solidity beneath the backs of my thighs.

  “Good. Keep going.”

  Every breath grew easier. The answers arriving quicker now. Memories reassembling themselves like water draining from a tub. Slow at first, then coming faster and faster. “The floor beneath the chair. The ground beneath that.” All at once, my body deflated in a huge, relieved exhale.

  “See? Almost over.” He let his hands drop from my face and stood, taking me by the hand to tug me up with him. His arms circled around my back and I allowed myself to sag against him, reveling in the feeling of letting something else bear up my weight, if only for a second. His chin coming to rest upon the crown of my head felt like everything that had ever been right, and good, and true. The tiny bones of my inner ear vibrated with the steady beat of okay…okay…okay telegraphed by his big heart.

  “What triggered it this time?” he asked.

  “Triggered?” Again, the word had scarcely left my lips when the memory returned to me. “A name. Why would a name trigger me?”

  “The mind is a strange thing.” I felt as much as heard the words rumbling through his chest. “You know that better than anyone.” A protracted beat of silence spread between us. “What name?”

  I glanced down at my discarded notebook. The name was there in bold, black ink. I’d traced the letters several times in an urgent, unsteady hand.

  “Adelaide,” I said. Reading it came with that strange sensation of simultaneous reality and unreality common to déjà vu.

  “Where did you hear it?” Crixus asked.

  I refocused inward, mining my spotty short-term memory. “My last client. We were talking about—well, I can’t tell you what we were talking about. But I heard the name from him.”

  “Doctor-patient confidentiality?”

  “You know the rules,” I said. “If you were my client, you wouldn’t want me discussing your most intimate and twisted thoughts with just anyone, would you?”

  “If I was your client, we wouldn’t be discussing my most intimate and twisted thoughts.” His hands slid from my back to my waist, riding the curve of my hips downward. He cupped double handfuls of my butt and squeezed. “We’d be living them.”

  “Crixus.” My mock-critical tone discouraged him not at all. “Not in the office. We’ve talked about that.” At least, I had a memory of discussing i
t. Vaguely.

  “We’ve talked about how much fun it would be.”

  “You’ve talked about how much fun it would be.” I poked finger into his pectoral muscle. “I’ve talked about how hard it would be to concentrate on my clients if the entire time we were talking, I was remembering how we’d banged on the couch where they were sitting.”

  “Easily fixed,” Crixus said. I yelped as he lifted me off my feet and walked me backward, depositing me on the edge of my desk. “We’ll do it here.”

  “Crixus, no. We can’t—”

  He ate the rest of my sentence.

  Ate it. With his lips and his teeth and his tongue and a hunger that dizzied me. Any lingering doubts I might have had about my life, my love, and my place in this world were banished by that lush heat. Ours was a symphony of a kiss. Disparate notes coming together to form a melody so perfect my body couldn’t help but dance to it. It was a creation song. A ballad to bodies joined so well and so often, they knew each other’s notes by heart.

  I belonged here. With him.

  Crixus’s hand was halfway up my skirt when Julie’s voice came over the intercom.

  “Doctor Schmidt?”

  Sin itself couldn’t have been more compelling than the wicked grin Crixus gave me then. He pressed a finger to his lips and leaned forward, licking my neck just where my pulse throbbed delicately beneath my skin.

  Considerate bastard that he was, he left my mouth free to respond to Julie while he unbuttoned my blouse with his teeth.

  “Yes, Julie. What is it?” I managed to not sound like I was panting. For the most part. Even when Crixus pushed my bra up over my breasts without undoing it and brushed feverish lips over my nipple before testing it with his teeth.

  “I have a Doctor Wolfe on the phone.”

  Dr. Wolfe. Where had I heard that name?

  “Can you get a number? I think it would be better if—”

  “Go ahead and put him through.” Crixus’s words cooled the moisture he’d painted across my breast. “Far be it from me to distract you from your work.”

  “Here you go.” If Julie had guessed what we were up to, she hid it well.