Chapter 10: Too Loud

She noticed it on a Tuesday.

Not that it started on a Tuesday. It had been coming for a while — she knew that, she was a therapist, she understood the mechanics of denial better than most people — but Tuesday was the day she ran out of road.

She was sitting across from a client. A woman in her early thirties, good job, complicated interior life, the kind of patient who came in every week and said something that sounded like progress and then dismantled it in the last five minutes. Olivia liked her. She was good at her job and the session was going well and somewhere in the middle of it, while her client was describing the particular exhaustion of wanting something you have decided you cannot have, Olivia thought about the way Damien had looked at her over breakfast that morning.

Not vaguely. Specifically. The angle of him at the counter. The thing he had said that made her laugh before she was properly awake.

She thought about it in the middle of someone else’s session.

She wrapped up, said the right things, closed the door, and sat in her chair in the quiet for a moment.

Right, she thought. Okay.

It was not the feeling that was the problem. She was past pretending the feeling did not exist — the arcade had sorted that, and the cinema had sorted it further, and three weeks of his bed and his coffee and his arm around her in the evenings had finished the job completely. It was the size of it. The way it had started showing up in places she had not invited it. The way it no longer felt like something she was holding but something that was simply there, permanent and unheld, taking up space on its own terms.

She did not like things that took up space on their own terms.

She went home quieter than usual and told herself it was a long day.

He clocked it the next morning. She had not expected him to clock it quite so fast.

She was at the counter with her coffee and her phone, doing a very convincing impression of someone who was fine and just reading the news, when she felt him looking. She kept her eyes down.

“You’re somewhere else,” he said.

“I’m right here.”

“Your body is.”

She looked up. He was leaning against the opposite counter, cup in hand, watching her with that expression she had never once been able to bluff her way past.

“I’m tired,” she said.

“Alright,” he said, and looked back at his coffee, and she told herself the conversation being over was a relief.

It was not a relief.

She spent three days at a careful distance.

Not obviously — she was too practiced for obvious. Just slightly less present. Slightly more in her own head. The kind of withdrawal that would read as tiredness to anyone who did not know her well and would read as exactly what it was to anyone who did.

Damien knew her well.

On the third evening he sat down beside her on the sofa and stayed quiet for a while. She watched television. Or performed watching television. He did not watch it at all.

“How long are you planning to do this?” he said.

“Do what?”

“Come on.”

She kept her eyes on the screen. He waited. He was very good at waiting — it was one of the things about him that had undone her from the beginning, that particular brand of patience that was not passive, that was simply certain. He could outwait her indefinitely and they both knew it.

“I got scared,” she said, eventually. Quietly. To the television.

He did not say anything.

“The feeling got big,” she said. “Bigger than I was expecting. And I didn’t — I don’t do well when things are bigger than I was expecting.”

“What kind of scared?” he said.

She thought about how to answer that honestly. How to explain the specific terror of feeling something at full volume when you have spent years keeping the dial carefully turned down. How to say I am not afraid of you, I am afraid of how much I want this without it sounding like something from a film.

“The kind where you start managing things that didn’t need managing,” she said. “Because managing feels safer than just — feeling it.”

He was quiet for a moment.

“Is it working?” he said. “The managing.”

She almost laughed. “No.”

“Then maybe stop,” he said.

He said it so simply. Like it was obvious. Like the solution to three days of careful constructed distance was just — stop doing that. She turned and looked at him and he was already looking at her, calm and steady and completely unafraid of whatever size the feeling was.

She hated how much that helped.

“You make it sound easy,” she said.

“I didn’t say it was easy,” he said. “I said stop.”

She looked at him for a long moment.

Then she stopped.

She leaned into him and he put his arm around her and she let herself feel the whole thing — unmanaged, unfiltered, the full weight of it — and it was enormous and it was terrifying and it did not kill her.

She had suspected it would not.

It still helped to know for certain.

End of Chapter 10