Page 14 of Letters From A Stalker

The man in front of me looks less like someone preparing to unpack thirty years of trauma and more like he is about to acquire my company through a hostile takeover. He is tall enough that I have to lift my chin when he approaches. His charcoal three-piece suit is fitted perfectly across broad shoulders and a chest that has no business existing beneath psychiatric credentials. His hair is black and straight, falling neatly across his forehead without looking styled, and thin-framed glasses sit against features too sharp to qualify as comforting. There is something striking about him that goes beyond being handsome. Something controlled. Every movement appears deliberate, from the way he closes the distance between us to the calm placement of his hand when he offers it.

“Julia,” he says, and his voice is lower than I expected, steady without sounding rehearsed. “I’m Dr. Kai Blackwood. It’s good to meet you.”

His handshake is warm and firm, but he does not hold on longer than necessary.

“Nice to meet you,” I manage, silently congratulating myself for not saying anything idiotic.

His eyes move briefly over my face, not in the careless way men sometimes look at women, but with an attention that feels far more unsettling because it seems to register everything. The tension in my shoulders. The bottle held too tightly between my fingers. The fact that I remain standing near the door instead of stepping farther into the room. He gestures toward the seating area.

“You can sit wherever you feel most comfortable. The chair, the sofa, or somewhere else if neither works for you.”

I choose the lounge chair across from his, mostly because the sofa feels too exposed and sitting anywhere unconventional would require a personality I do not currently possess. He waits until I am seated before taking the chair opposite from me. As he settles back, he unbuttons his suit jacket with one smooth movement and lets it fall open over the vest beneath it. Everything about him feels measured. Not cold. Contained. The distinction should not matter at all, but somehow it does.

4

Kai

Julia Hayes looks at me the way new patients sometimes do when the person standing in front of them bears very little resemblance to whoever they imagined after reading my credentials online. There’s always a moment. Sometimes it’s barely noticeable, just as a slight pause before they shake my hand. Other times their surprise is so obvious that I can practically watch whatever image they built of Dr. Kai Blackwood collapse behind their eyes. Years ago, one woman actually admitted she expected someone older, softer around the middle, and significantly more grandfatherly, which was probably the politest way anyone had ever told me I looked wrong for my profession.

I’ve never taken offense. At thirty-seven, six feet and change, with enough time spent in the gym to make three-piece suits considerably more expensive than they need to be, I’m aware I don’t fit the stereotype. The tattoos stay covered beneath long sleeves during working hours, my hair remains considerably more civilized than it does beneath a motorcycle helmet, and the glasses help. Although apparently not enough to make me look like the comforting middle-aged therapist people seem determined to expect.

Julia is having that moment now. She doesn’t say anything, but surprise passes openly across her face before she catches it. Her green eyes move over me once, quickly and without anything I would mistake for attraction, before returning to my face with the alert concentration of someone recalculating a situation she had already prepared herself for. Whatever version of me she expected, I’m clearly not it.

The photograph attached to her intake form hadn’t done her justice either. It captured the obvious details well enough. Auburn hair falling past her shoulders, pale skin, the faint scar beside her right eye, and two small beauty marks near the beginning of her brows. What it failed to capture was the quiet intensity of her attention or the way anxiety seems to live beneath every careful movement she makes. There’s exhaustion beneath her eyes and tension held high across her shoulders, but neither makes her look fragile. She looks contained, as though something warm has been sealed beneath layers of caution and is still burning despite everything that has tried to put it out. A nickname little ember came to mind almost instantly and so naturally that it takes me a moment to recognize how inappropriate it is.

“Julia,” I say, crossing the room toward her. “I’m Dr. Kai Blackwood. It’s good to meet you.”

Her attention drops briefly toward the hand I offer before she takes it. Her fingers are cool, and her handshake is polite but cautious. Firm enough that there’s nothing timid about it, yet brief enough to tell me she has no interest in allowing unnecessary contact with a stranger.

“Nice to meet you,” she says.

Her voice is softer than I expected, though there’s nothing uncertain about the words. I release her hand immediately and gesture toward the seating area.

“You can sit wherever you feel most comfortable. The chair, the sofa, or somewhere else if neither works for you.”

Her gaze moves toward the sofa first, but only for a second. Most patients choose it because it looks less formal and offers enough space to shift away when a conversation becomes uncomfortable. Julia considers it, dismisses it almost immediately, and chooses the lounge chair across from mine instead. She lowers herself onto the front half of the cushion, keeping her purse beside her right foot and both feet positioned firmly beneath her. The bottle Mara gave her remains clasped between her hands while she settles, her posture so carefully arranged that she could stand and be halfway to the door before I had time to ask where she was going. Prepared to leave before we’ve even started.

When I’m confident enough she is settled, I take the chair opposite her, then unbutton my suit jacket and allow it to fall open over the vest beneath it. Her attention follows the movement only long enough to track where my hands are before returning to my face. Not with interest but with the concentration of someone trying to predict what’s expected of her.

That’s when I notice the crescent-shaped mark below her right thumb when the cuff of her sweater shifts. The bruising is recent, darker along the center where her teeth appear to have broken the skin, and the placement is too deliberate to have happened by accident. Julia catches me looking and immediately tugs the sleeve farther down, hiding the mark beneath soft blue fabric as though covering it makes it disappear. The movement should register as nothing more than information, an injury requiring context, a possible grounding behavior, an indication of distress I need to assess before deciding what it means.

Instead, something violent and entirely inappropriate stirs beneath the calm I’ve spent years perfecting.

Who did this to you? Who made you hurt like this?

The questions arrive before reason has the chance to correct them. I already know enough from her intake to understand some of the pain sitting across from me. I know her father killed himself on her birthday. I know she has a history of panic attacks, complicated grief, and previous therapy that ended without resolution. What I don’t know yet is what happened long before the bus, what taught a grown woman that putting her own teeth through her skin was somehow preferable over allowing anyone to hear her scream.

That distinction matters professionally because reactions like hers are learned somewhere. Privately, the fact that I want to know badly enough to feel anger about it is a fucking problem I’ll deal with later.

For now, I place her intake file on the table beside me, rest the notepad against my knee, and give her enough time to realize I’m not going to start digging into her head before she’s ready.

“Before we begin, I want to go over confidentiality, even though Mara included the information in the forms you completed. Almost everything you say here stays between us. The exceptions are situations where I believe you’re in immediate danger, someone else is in immediate danger, or a child or vulnerable adult is being harmed. Do you have any questions about that?”

“Is there a correct answer?”

“No.”

“Then I’m going to say no and hope that it wasn't secretly a test.”