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After their first separation, Aaron convinced Holly he had changed. And he did, for a while. But he eventually reverted back to old habits. He once even spoke up in the middle of her presentation at a psychiatric conference, to disparage her conclusions on psychedelics. She thought that was the final straw. It wasn’t. There has always been an inexplicable, and not necessarily healthy, magnetism between the two of them. And despite her current resolve, she isn’t convinced this separation will end differently than the first one.
“Are you two on speaking terms?” Walter asks.
“Of course. Aaron and I are still linked professionally. Financially, too.”
He raises an eyebrow. “But not emotionally?”
“It’s complicated.”
“Hmmm.” Walter eyes her quietly for a moment. “You remember Peru?”
As if Holly could ever forget.
She and Walter left for Lima exactly two years from the day of the car crash that killed her father, and Walter’s only son, Martin. Holly, who was sixteen at the time, had been in the station wagon, too, when it flipped and rolled. Aside from extensive bruising and a lingering concussion, she emerged physically intact, but she couldn’t shake the darkness and loneliness that followed. And while she had no memory of the accident, she felt somehow responsible. In the two years that followed, her pervasive guilt and hopelessness inched ever closer to suicidality. Her mom, who had never been emotionally well equipped, basically shut down after the accident. Only Walter recognized how dire his granddaughter’s situation had become. He forcefully persuaded her to accompany him on the ayahuasca retreat.
Though she left for Peru feeling nothing but doubt and dread, she returned with a new lease on life. The experience converted her into a devotee of psychedelic therapy. And she’s still in awe of its restorative power.
“What does my separation from Aaron have to do with Peru?” Holly asks.
Walter views her with an amused grin. “At the risk of sounding like a fortune cookie, Koala, sometimes you need to travel far away to make lasting changes at home.”
Holly can’t tell if he is encouraging her to reconcile with Aaron or to make the break permanent. And, at this point, she would rather not know.
CHAPTER 5
Tuesday, April 2
Simon Lowry tries to swing his leg over the armrest of the padded chair but is stopped by a twinge of pain. The discomfort in his left groin reminds him that sooner or later he’s going to have to have that hip replaced, too, just as he did with his right one.
What kind of self-respecting rocker has two prosthetic hips? he wonders again. If Jeremy could see me now, he’d be kitty flipping in his grave.
Like Jeremy, his best friend and cofounder of their band, Simon was convinced they would both die young. Only one of them realized the self-prophecy. Then again, it wasn’t a fair comparison since Jeremy had taken his own life after he found his naked wife in Simon’s bed with her arms and legs bound to the bedposts and her face still flushed with arousal.
Pushing aside the uncomfortable memory, Simon sits up straighter and focuses on Dr. Danvers. She’s seated in the matching chair across from his, one leg crossed over the other and hands folded in her lap, as still as the aloe vera plant on her desk.
“Trust me, Dr. D, I’ve dropped a ton of acid in my day.” Simon chuckles. “Shit, being in the music industry all these years… there isn’t a drug I haven’t dabbled in. But I got to tell you that trip with MDMA and ketamine, now that was something!”
Dr. Danvers leans forward in her seat. “Something good or…?”
“Something amazing.”
“Elaborate, please.” Dr. Danvers shows him one of those cute closed-mouth half smiles, as she pushes her glasses back up her nose.
Simon loves that look. It reminds him of his sixth-grade teacher, Miss Mullen. How he used to crave that shy grin of hers, too. And the resemblance between the two women is uncanny—both lean and flat-chested, with narrow hips, mid-length dark hair, long angular faces, and soulful eyes that ooze sensuality behind their glasses. Before he even realized the world of BDSM existed, Simon used to fantasize about binding his teacher’s limbs with rope and taking her like that. On her desk. On his desk.
Simon has had similar thoughts about his therapist, too, but there’s nothing sexual in what he’s experiencing now. All he wants at the moment is Dr. Danvers’s approval. Maybe his second wife was right? Maybe his whole life has been spent trying to compensate for his perpetually detached and disapproving mother?
“I went places…” Simon struggles to put yesterday’s wild double psychedelic trip into words. “Like I saw and heard things. Plants that walked. Animals that talked. It’s so weird. Like it was so intense, but it was also so… peaceful.”
“A paradox?”
“Yes!” Simon snaps his fingers. “Exactly!”
“And how do you feel today?”
“In a word or three? Fan-fucking-tastic!”
“And the urges?”
