Page 164 of Letters From A Stalker

I don’t need to excavate my childhood to understand them. I don’t need another explanation involving my father, my mother, Henry or Pine Ridge. I was attracted to Julia. I was worried about Julia. Both things existed at the same time, and instead of recognizing that combination as a reason to put more distance between us, I treated the concern as proof that my interest was somehow different from what it actually was.

“And when she got home safely?” Bennett asks.

That is the part I have thought about enough that the answer arrives immediately. “I should have left.”

“But you didn’t.”

“No.” I stare at a loose thread near my knee. “She got home. I knew she was safe. Every reason I had used to justify following her had been satisfied, and I stayed anyway.”

“Why?”

I let out a breath. “Because I wanted to see her.”

There it is. Stripped of terminology and professional explanation. No fucking Ghost. Just the truth.

Bennett watches me for several seconds before speaking. “Do you think that’s the defining moment?”

“I think that’s the moment I stopped being able to pretend it was about protecting her.”

The session moves on after that, although not far. He asks about the difference between guilt and accountability, which irritates me enough I tell him he sounds like a therapist and earns absolutely no sympathy for the observation. We talk briefly about the Board investigation and whether the possibility of losing my license has changed the way I understand what happened. I tell him that it’s not. I want to keep my license. I want my work back but none of that is the reason I regret what I did. If the Board called tomorrow and told me there would be no discipline whatsoever, Julia would still have looked at me exactly the way she did when she realized the man she trusted in my office was the same one who had been standing outside her windows. No ruling can make that worse or better.

When the clock announces the end of our session, Bennett closes the notebook on his lap and tells me we’re done until next week.

I stand, reach for my jacket and pause when he says my name. “What?”

“Try not to spend the next seven days turning everything we discussed into another form of punishment.”

I stare at him. “You understand how irritating that sentence is coming from you.”

His mouth curves. “See you Tuesday, Kai.”

“Unfortunately.”

His laugh follows me into the hall. I almost smile. Almost.

Late night sessions at the gym have become my new thing. The gym used to be something I fit around work. Now I sometimes stay until the staff start wiping down machines around me with increasingly pointed enthusiasm.

Tonight, I have lifted enough weight to make my shoulders hurt and still haven’t exhausted myself enough to want to sleep. I shower there only long enough to get the sweat off, change into a clean shirt and hoodie, then head into the underground garage where my bike waits beneath fluorescent light. The sight of it still does something immediate to me. Maybe because the bike predates almost every version of my life that became complicated.

There is no office attached to it — no Board, no reports and no patient files. And, if I am being remotely honest, there was a time before Julia when riding had nothing to do with following anybody.

I pull on my gloves, fasten the helmet and swing my leg over. The Kawasaki comes alive beneath me with that familiar hard-edged growl that settles through the frame and into my body before the engine note climbs. The inline-four has always sounded impatient at low revs, as though the machine knows exactly what it was built to do and considers city speed limits as a personal insult.

Tonight I keep it in the city anyway. I ease out of the garage and let Minneapolis swallow me. The night air pushes cold around my neck where the helmet doesn’t meet the jacket completely, while storefronts smear into bands of white and amber along the edge of my vision. Traffic has thinned enough that I can move without fighting it, shifting through gears while the engine rises and settles beneath me, the vibration clean and familiar between my knees. I take Washington for a while, cut across toward the river and then turn again without thinking much about where I am going except for one thing.

I stay nowhere near Julia’s neighborhood. Not by accident. I promised so I keep the city between us. For weeks, that has been the part nobody sees. There is no applause for not riding past a woman’s house after she told you to stay away from her, nor should there fucking be. Respecting a boundary after violating so many others does not earn points. There are intersections where one turn would eventually put me on roads I know too well, and every time I take the other one. But every ride still contains the choice, only this time I make the right ones.

The engine snarls when I open the throttle across an empty stretch, acceleration pressing me back before I settle over the tank. For several seconds there is nothing in my head except the machine, the road and the instinctive mathematics of speed, distance, braking and balance. That is why I ride. Not because it solves anything. Because for as long as I do, there isn’t enough room inside my head for anything that isn’t happening over hundred miles an hour or more.

The moment I slow for a light, Julia comes back into my head. She never left, only allows me to rest my brain when I’m out like tonight. Every other waking moment, — she’s there. Sometimes it is something sexual, and this appears to be one of those times, because I’m still a man and apparently my body has no moral interest in making any of this easier. I remember black lace reflected in a fitting-room mirror or her legs around me in the dark, or her fucking crawling to me and have to sit at a red light with both hands on the bars while my brain helpfully reminds me of exactly how she sounded when she forgot to be quiet.

Often, though, it’s the every other moment with her and that is somehow worse. It’s her laughing because I told her tacos counted as therapy. Her calling me an asshole and then asking whether she needed to apologize. The way she looked at me when I told her about Sunday dinners at Mara’s, interested in something as boring as my actual life. It’s her sleeping against me or the little crease between her brows when she was trying to decide whether I had just insulted her. I miss the parts of her I had no right to know and the parts she gave me freely. There is no clean way to separate them anymore. Apparently there never was.

The light changes and I ride.

Home is silent when I get there little after eleven. I leave the helmet on the console, peel off my jacket and stand in the kitchen long enough to drink half a bottle of water before heading towards the bedroom. The shower is long enough that the mirror disappears behind steam. It doesn’t help. Nothing really does. The water beats against the back of my neck while I brace one hand against the tile and let my head hang forward, sore muscles gradually loosening beneath the heat.

My life has become very fucking simple — gym, therapy, rides and an occasional Board correspondence if it’s required of me. There are also dinners at Mara’s house often enough that she has stopped pretending the invitations are optional. Calls with Renee and whatever administrative work I can still do for the foundation without stepping anywhere near clinical care. Sleep at this point feels occasional.