Page 147 of Letters From A Stalker

“Don’t do that.” His voice has changed. Not much, but the professional distance has begun wearing thin around the edges.

I finally look at him. “Do what?”

“Use one decision to invalidate everything you’ve done because it doesn’t fit whatever version of normal you think you’re supposed to want.” His gaze stays fixed on mine, frustration beginning to sharpen his expression. “There are legitimate safety concerns in what you’re describing, and I’m not going to minimize those, but that is different from deciding the fact that you wanted something unconventional means there is something fundamentally wrong with you.”

The conviction sounds exactly like Kai. The protectiveness underneath it sounds dangerously close to someone else. But the pretence pisses me off so I press harder.

“I let a man I couldn’t identify into my house, slept with him and then let him keep coming back. Maybe there actually is something wrong with me.”

“There isn’t.” The answer comes too quickly.

We both notice. Kai’s jaw shifts, but he doesn’t take it back. I lean into the opening.

“Maybe I’ve just gotten better at making bad choices sound empowering. Maybe I’m not more confident or healthier. Maybe I’m just fucked up in a more articulate way now.”

His expression hardens. “You know that isn’t true.”

“Do I?” My voice begins shaking, partly because I want it to and partly because this has stopped feeling like a game. “Maybe normal women don’t get wet because somebody watches them through their windows. Maybe they don’t leave doors unlocked for men whose names they don’t know and then fall asleep in their arms afterward.”

Pain flickers over Kai’s face. It is gone almost immediately, but I see it before it does. My chest tightens.

He leans forward, the notebook forgotten against his knee. “What you want sexually does not become pathological simply because it frightens you when you examine it outside the moment. You’re allowed to want intensity. You’re allowed to give someone control because giving it is different from having it taken from you. What matters is that the choice remains yours and that when you withdraw it, the other person stops.”

Every word lands harder than the one before it. Ghost stops. Every time. Kai knows exactly how important that is to me. Of course he does. I can barely breathe now, but I need one thing I cannot explain away.

“What if I can’t trust my own choices anymore?” I ask quietly. “Maybe after everything that happened to me, I shouldn’t. Maybe I need somebody else to decide what’s good for me because clearly I’m very talented at choosing men who aren’t.”

“Julia, that’s not—”

“Maybe I need somebody to save me from myself.”

Something in him snaps. Not loudly and not enough that anyone who didn’t know him would call it losing control, but I watch the psychiatrist disappear from his face for one devastating second and the man underneath take his place.

“You do not need to be saved, Julia.” His voice has dropped, emotion roughening the edges before he can smooth them away. “You need to be seen. You need somebody who can see every part of you without deciding the difficult ones make you broken or too much, and—” He stops.

The room goes completely still. My heart does too. I hear the sentence again in darkness, spoken in a deliberately altered voice through the narrow space between us.

You don’t need to be saved. You need to be seen.

My gaze drops toward the white cuff hiding his forearm. The tattoo no longer matters. Neither does the motorcycle or the eyes. Or the build I suddenly know perfectly well exists beneath the expensive suit. I know. And when I lift my gaze again, Kai knows that I know.

The anger that pulled the words out of him disappears from his face, leaving something that looks almost like fear behind his glasses.

“No,” I whisper.

He doesn’t answer. That silence tells me more than anything else could. I get to my feet because sitting across from him suddenly feels impossible, but when he moves instinctively as though he might stand too, I take one step backward.

“Don’t come near me.”

Kai freezes before he ever leaves the chair, his hand dropping back to his knee. The obedience makes nausea climb into my throat. Of course he stops. Ghost always fucking stops and Kai knows the meaning behind the no.

“Julia…”

“Don’t say my name like nothing just happened.”

His mouth closes. I stare at him while months of memories begin crashing into each other so quickly that I can barely separate them. Kai holding me in this room when I fell apart without ever touching me. Ghost holding me upright against my wall. Kai telling me that my no mattered even when nobody listened to it at eighteen. Ghost building every encounter around making me say yes aloud. The same man taught me how consent was supposed to feel while hiding the fact that he had already violated it.

“You wrote the letters.”