Her cheeks flushed.
“So, anyway, um,” he ran a hand through his light brown hair. “I should probably get ready for class.”
“Yeah, totally,” she quickly agreed, straightening up, ready to close the door as soon as he walked away.
He wanted to say more, to broach the subject of her drunken admission of being lonely, or sad, or both, but she seemed eager to retreat from their conversation, so he just lifted his hand in a wave and said, “See you around.”
She gave him a brief smile and shut the door.
Doctor Summers was staring at him with skepticism, and it snapped him out of his memories. “You sound hesitant about this girl,” she commented, waiting for an explanation.
Jacob let out a small sigh, shaking his head. It was impossible to get anything by this woman. “I don’t know,” he began, leaning forward to rest his arms on his legs. “She kinda has some problems. But, I mean, who doesn’t? Maybe she just needs a friend,” he added.
“What kind of problems?”
“Well, for starters, the last time I saw her she was drunk,” he said. “Like… really drunk. This guy was trying to take her back to his room, so I interceded, and –”
Jacob stopped short when he met the Doctor’s eyes and saw the concerned questions there.
“I’ll circle back to that,” he reassured her. She didn’t seem appeased, so he rolled his eyes added, “Don’t worry, I used my words.”
Doctor Summers swallowed her concern and nodded her head. “We’ll come back to that, but continue,” she said.
“Well, anyway, I walked her back to…,” he trailed off, trying to choose his words wisely, “to our building,” he decided, not technically a lie, “and she told me something…. I don’t think she meant to, but… she kinda told me she was sad, or lonely or something.”
Doctor Summers nodded empathetically, remaining silent.
Jacob shook his head. “And I don’t know, between the drinking, how quickly she ran out of my room the next morning, and what she clearly thought we had done the night before, I got the sense that this wasn’t exactly a first-time experience for her.”
He met Doctor Summers’ surprised eyes, taking note of her raised brows. For a moment he didn’t understand her reaction until she spoke.
“The next morning?” she asked.
Shit.
“I… forgot that I was leaving that part out,” Jacob answered with a blush.
Doctor Summers just chuckled. “Look, Jacob, you know this is a judgement-free-zone,” she said, gesturing around the room with the pen in her hand. “But I can’t help you with anything if you aren’t open with me, so why don’t we go back to the beginning.”
Jacob sighed and leaned back in his chair. “I ran into her at the party. Kind of literally, actually. She was in pretty bad shape, so I asked if I could walk her home, and she said yes. But then this...,” he trailed off, trying to think of a less vulgar noun, “guy… came up and said that he was taking her home. At first, I thought he meant that he was walking her back to her dorm, but it quickly became clear that he had… other intentions,” he spoke the last two words with a slight grind in his teeth.
“And… this is when you ‘used your words’?” she asked.
Jacob chuckled once. “Yes. I used my words, and eventually convinced him that it would be better if I walked her home.”
“So…,” she paused, pursing her lips and tapping her pen against her notepad for a lingering moment. “When you came upon this drunk girl, in a precarious position, potentially about to be taken advantage of… how did that make you feel?” she asked, resting her chin on her hand as she awaited his response.
The memory drifted through him again, and he huffed out a breath. He was still angry, even now, but the anger stayed in his mind. It no longer travelled down through his fingers and toes, provoking his heartrate to rise and calling him to action.
“Angry,” he replied.
She nodded. “How angry?”
He scoffed at the question and shrugged. “How am I supposed to answer that?”
“Well, how did you feel? Were you prepared to let the issue go, if he didn’t comply with your request, or were you ready to use action if you deemed it necessary?” she elaborated.
He sighed again, looking down at the last sip of coffee swirling in his mug.
“If words weren’t enough, what would you have done?” she challenged.
He shook his head. “I…,” he started, thinking back to the rage he felt pulsing through his veins, how firmly he clung to Jenna, not just to keep her upright, but to keep himself grounded. “I don’t know,” he admitted in a small voice, keeping his eyes safely on the swirling colors on his mug.
He could see Doctor Summers writing something down from the corner of his eye, and then she interjected with a new question. “You’ve been taking your medication, yes?”
“Yeah,” he replied, happy to have something positive to say. “I mean, I usually take them earlier in the night, but since I was out late, I had to wait until I got back from the party.”
“Hm,” she pursed her lips again, considering that. “Did that help?”
“Yeah, definitely,” Jacob answered, still happy to have moved on from her previous line of questioning. “I felt a lot calmer afterward.”
“Good,” she nodded to herself, looking down at her notepad and chewing on her bottom lip. She jotted something down, and said, “You know, I think I may have spoken too soon about changing up your medication so early. I think we should keep things as they are, for now.”
Jacob didn’t want to be off his medication in the first place, but now that the option had been presented and subsequently removed, he felt like he was taking a step backward. Peeved by the over-reaction, he clarified again, “Nothing happened.”
She looked up at him and placed a smile over the top of her concern. “Of course,” she said. “We’d just like to keep it that way, yes?”
She always used the formal, plural pronoun when addressing the tough topics, as if to distance herself from whatever bad news or criticism she was delivering. He wondered if that was intentional, to keep up their pleasant relationship, or if she just didn’t like to be seen as the bad guy.
Either way, he just said, “Yes,” and she gave him another smile.
She tapped her pen on her notepad again, and it looked as if she was trying to solve an elaborate algebraic equation in her head. With a sigh, she closed her notebook and set it in her lap.
“Jacob… it occurs to me that we haven’t talked about what happened to your sister,” she said in a delicate, professional tone.
He raised an eyebrow. “That she died?” he asked doubtingly. “I’m pretty sure we’ve touched on that a few times,” he quipped, as it was a common topic of conversation in their weekly meetings.
“Well, we’ve talked about her death, yes,” Doctor Summers replied, still retaining her mild voice. “But I’m referring to what happened before that.”
His heart raced when the words sank in. “What does that have to do with anything?” he muttered, turning his eyes to his hands.