Page 79 of Cursing My Cheating Husband

But I was so turned around. So lost in the labyrinth of what was real and what was performance. And the awful truth was… I did need this. I was feeling so shaken, so unsure of what I could trust. I needed to see the real inner truth, even if it made me pathetic to need the proof this badly.

“I hate that I need this,” I murmured.

“I know.” His voice was gentle.

My hand was trembling as I reached out.

The moment my fingers touched his face, the connection roared to life. That familiar magical tether snapped taut between us, his mind opening to mine like a door swinging wide.

And then I was falling. Into Maddox, and into the truth.

CHAPTER 33

CALLIE

Ilanded in Maddox’s consciousness with a forceful jolt. I was in a completely unremarkable beige office, feeling the heavy sensation of being gigantic Maddox-size again.

My first surprise was Dr. DeMille. If Maddox were to attend therapy at all, I assumed he would insist on a doctor who was also a gorgeous sex bomb, who conducted all her sessions in micro-miniskirts and with cleavage bursting out of her plunging necklines. Instead, I found myself looking at a regular woman, dressed professionally.

At this point in the session, Maddox’s mind was swirling with recollections of how he would emotionally shut down with me during our marriage, and the layering of memories over memories was momentarily dizzying.

“When do you remember first going quiet like that?” Dr. DeMille asked.

The question yanked another memory to the forefront of Maddox’s consciousness: shutting down as a child when his father would start verbally ripping him apart.

Direct contact with that memory was searing. Maddox was so young, so tiny, and the language from his father so unbelievably vicious.

I felt immense relief when Maddox’s focus returned to the actual therapy session, as he connected for the first time that his father had taught him love and pain were the same thing. The people closest to you were the ones who could destroy you. So he’d learned to keep everyone at arm’s length, especially the people who mattered most. With me, real intimacy meant real danger. It meant being seen, being known, being vulnerable to someone who could hurt him the way his father had.

As I explored his mind during this, I encountered only earnest sincerity. And pain, and regret, and remorse. I found none of the scheming and calculation I would have expected.

That being said, this was the session he’d chosen to bring me to. This could have been the only one that would play well out of the dozens of times he’d been.

But he had granted me a level of mind access that I’d never had before, so I might as well take advantage of it. Seizing control of the wheel, I yanked us out of this stirring emotional breakthrough. Sensing the memories of his other sessions, I focused in on one at random and zoomed myself into it.

And again, I found Maddox feeling only sincerity and an authentic desire to change. This time he was realizing that, deep down inside, he saw himself as worthless because of his father’s treatment, and it caused him to seek external validation from things like fancy cars, an overly extravagant home, an impressive job title… and lots of other women.

I pulled myself out of that memory and snatched onto another session. In this one, he was reflecting on the cheap emptiness of his other hookups, how he was compelled to have so many of them because the relief they brought was so short-lived. He was disgusted with himself for becoming so fixated and compulsive. The heaviness and magnitude of the regret staggered me, as did the fact that nowhere in his active awareness were thoughts of the curse. For any of these.

Flying out of that one, I hopped into another session. And here he was on the verge of tears!

But not good tears. Selfish and self-pitying ones. He was spiraling about how badly he’d fucked up his life, how he’d lost everything that mattered, how he didn’t know how to fix any of it, and feeling that he was just the most fucked man on the planet. Making it all about himself.

Grim satisfaction flared. This was exactly what I’d expected to find!

But then Dr. DeMille’s voice cut through. “What could you do that isn’t about fixing your life or getting something back?”

Maddox went quiet. I felt his mind working, struggling with the question. And then, rising slowly, the notion to… help people, maybe? Volunteer somewhere?

The simplicity of it seemed to stagger him. The idea that he could just give, for no reward.

As he focused there, the self-pity receded from his thoughts.

I stayed in that session a while longer, riding along as he kept circling back to the volunteering idea. A homeless shelter, maybe. Somewhere he could actually be useful. The more he talked about it, the more genuine it became. Like he was discovering he could matter in a way that had nothing to do with who he fucked.

Oh my gods! He was legitimately serious about this!

But so far, I’ve only looked at his actual therapy sessions. Could he really be like this all the time now?