What We Called Therapy After Dark novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Locked Door
In a locked therapy room, the doctor says Marin and her stepfather Mitch share unresolved attraction and orders her to take off her dress; her mother has already signed for it.
At four o'clock on a Thursday, Dr. Keene locked the door of his office with a key and put the key in his pocket.
I was sitting on his leather couch in a yellow sundress, and I watched him do it.
This was our third session.
My mother had signed us up after a fight in our kitchen.
I had walked past Mitch in cut-off shorts to get a glass of water, and he had told me to put on something else.
I had told him he wasn't my father.
My mother had come in from the garden, looked at both of us, and said the house was coming apart.
Mitch had said it was a waste of money, and then he had said yes.
Nobody asked me, and I came anyway.
Now he sat at the far end of the couch, in a pressed white shirt and dark slacks, with his arms crossed.
He kept his eyes on the sage-green wall across the room.
He had not looked straight at me in weeks.
A tall plant stood in the corner under a soft lamp.
The chairs and the paintings were all chosen to say that nothing bad could happen here.
Dr. Keene sat back down in the armchair across from us, with a notepad on his knee.
He was somewhere near fifty, with grey in his hair and glasses that caught the lamp.
He had a low, patient voice, and it made you want to answer him.
"We've done the easy part," he said. "The arguments. The way the two of you can't stand in one room."
He clicked his pen.
"I think the real problem is attraction between you. The kind nobody says out loud."
My stomach dropped.
I felt Mitch go still at the other end of the couch.
"That's ridiculous," Mitch said. His voice came out rough. "She's my stepdaughter."
"People deny it," Dr. Keene said, in the same gentle tone. "It is the most common reaction."
He turned his pen toward me.
"Marin, I've watched you. You dress to be noticed. You push him to see how far he'll let you."
I opened my mouth to tell him he was wrong.
Nothing came out.
I thought about that morning, when I had picked up the yellow sundress from my bed.
My mother had left it there, folded, with a note on top in her round handwriting.
Wear this one, it's hot out. Love you.
I had put it on because she asked.
Mitch's white shirt had been ironed and hanging on his bedroom door.
My mother had done that too.
The part I hadn't said to anyone was that Dr. Keene wasn't completely wrong.
Mitch was thirty-six and quiet, with scarred forearms and a voice that dropped when he was tired.
Since the winter, I had noticed all of it.
I had started wearing shorter things when he was home, and I called it comfort.
That excuse had stopped working on me a while ago.
Mitch's phone buzzed on the cushion between us.
He glanced at it, and I read the lock screen upside down.
Mom: Dr. Keene is doing wonders. Stay open-minded, love you both xx
He turned the phone over.
Dr. Keene set his notepad on the table and leaned forward.
"Talking won't fix this," he said. "We need to be more direct. A kind of exposure therapy."
"What does that mean?" Mitch asked.
Dr. Keene stood and crossed to the door.
That was when he turned the key.
The click was small, and it was the loudest thing in the room.
He came back and stood in front of the couch.
"It means we stop circling and look at it. Marin, stand up."
My hands had gone cold.
I looked at Mitch.
For one second he looked straight at me, and he was as lost as I was.
Then he looked away again.
I stood up.
The skirt of the sundress brushed the tops of my thighs.
"Take off your dress," Dr. Keene said.
He said it in the same mild voice he had used all afternoon.
My ears rang.
"What?" I said.
"You heard me. Take it off. Mitch will sit and watch, and neither of you will look away."
Mitch was on his feet, fast, and his hand was already out toward the door.
"No," he said. "We're leaving."
"The door is locked," Dr. Keene said, without raising his voice. "I'd advise you to sit down."
I looked at the zipper strap over my shoulder.
I looked at the doctor's calm face, and at the plant in the corner, and at the key bulging in his pocket.
I did not reach for the zipper.
I said, "No."
I said it clearly, standing in the middle of his floor with both hands at my sides.
Dr. Keene didn't seem surprised at all.
He took a folded paper from the pocket of his cardigan and held it out to me.
"Your mother signed the consent form for exactly this," he said.
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