With Good Behavior (8 page)

Sophie considered that Jerry must think she was a total nut job to single her out for treatment. “You’re lucky then,” she said.

Turning to Roger, Sophie uneasily inquired, “Could you please contact Officer Jerry Stone by five today and tell him you hired me?” She rummaged around in her handbag until she located Jerry’s business card. Roger took it grumpily.

“Be here at ten-thirty tomorrow so you can complete some paperwork,” he ordered. Roger narrowed his eyes. “If she screws up one smidgen, Madsen, I’m blaming you.” With this warning, he abruptly turned and left the couple standing on the deck.

They stared at each other awkwardly until Sophie leaned back on the railing, taking in the spotless deck and gleaming metal of the ship. “So, um, what’s the pay like for this job?”

“For somebody who used to be a doctor, it’s not great,” Grant admitted, stepping closer to her. “But it can be temporary to keep Officer Stone off your back while you look for something better. And I figure you can get lots of tips as a server.”

“Oh? And why do you think I’d get lots of tips?”

Her question had its desired effect, and once again he looked nervous, stammering, “Uh, well, you know, um, you’re quite attractive …”

She grinned. “I’m just giving you a hard time.” Waves of relief coursed through Sophie, knowing she would not have to beg her father for a job. She leaned closer to Grant, catching a whiff of his bergamot scent, and her eyes flashed with mischief. “I bet the ladies tipped 
you
 very well when you were a server. They probably were all clamoring for the hot waiter.”

A crimson blush crept up his neck. Grant swallowed and inched toward Sophie, feeling the urge to gather her in his arms once again.

Staring into his blue-green eyes, which reflected the same hue as the river at the moment, Sophie felt a deep sense of intrigue. Yet the reality of obligations and cautions also filled her mind, and she broke their gaze. “I better go,” she said. “I have my stupid therapy appointment.”

Then, looking back up, she added, “I cannot thank you enough for what you did for me today. Somehow you knew how hard it would be for me to crawl back to my father, and I am so grateful for your help with this job. I promise, I’ll work hard, and I won’t let you down.”

“You don’t have to promise me anything,” he replied. “I’m just glad you’re not going back inside. I would miss seeing you every Wednesday.”

“Well, now we get to see each other more often than that. Like tomorrow, for example. I’ll be here,” she smiled. As she turned to go, she caught a glimpse of the black White Sox jacket hanging over the railing where he had left it. “Don’t forget your jacket. You have a tendency to leave it places.”

With that last piece of advice, she climbed onto the dock, and Grant watched her long, limber legs carry her away. He smiled as he headed toward the bridge. She said she would go to a baseball game with him! Even better, she would be working with him every day. He was quite proud of himself.

W
hat’s been on your mind, Sophie?” Hunter began their second therapy session.

“Not much,” Sophie replied breezily, pasting a smile on her face. She was resolute not to reveal too much, determined to tread carefully this time around. In addition, she felt a bit distracted. Her mind kept floating back to the man she’d just left behind on the ship. Grant’s kindness had been astonishing, and she could not get over the compassion he’d shown to a stranger.

Hunter sat back in his chair. An awkward silence descended upon them. She averted her eyes from his hazel gaze and stared instead at the fish tank, observing Nemo swimming lazy circles around the fake coral of his enclosed aquatic home. Sophie felt similarly trapped at the moment.

Her gaze then traveled to the set of framed documents over Hunter’s desk. She stood to get a closer look at his credentials, but then realized she was behaving exactly like Logan Barberi had during his first session with her—cagey and evasive, attempting to deflect the focus from client to therapist. She knew she must be frustrating the hell out of Hunter with her silence.

“Ten percent,” she finally said, sitting back down.

“Ten percent?”

Numbers had always come easily to her. Whereas most psychology doctoral students barely survived the rigors of graduate statistics, Sophie had thrived in the class, impressing her professor so thoroughly with her math skills that he had asked her to tutor the following year’s crop of students. Numbers were nice, neat, and tidy, unlike the messy ambiguity of people. Perhaps she should have taken her father’s advice and become an accountant for his construction business. Surely she would find herself in a better life situation now.

“I was just thinking about something I learned in my Professional Issues class,” she explained. “Ten percent of male therapists admit to having sex with their clients. Only one percent of female therapists report doing that.”

There was a slight lift to Hunter’s eyebrows. Of all the possible topics his client could begin with, this is what she selected. Was she coming on to him? “Were the male therapists heterosexual or homosexual?” he quietly asked.

“I don’t think this study reported the therapists’ sexual orientation,” she said. Did he realize she knew he was gay? Sophie wasn’t sure how to handle the situation.

Hunter began to speak and then faltered. Thank God he was out as a gay man in his personal life. He’d been out for fifteen years now, and it made life so much easier. Secrets could be quite destructive. However, he was not out to everyone professionally. He treated each client individually, only revealing his sexual orientation to particular clients, and only if it seemed clinically relevant to do so.

Was Sophie’s comment a subtle way to test him about therapeutic boundaries? If she was a psychologist, had she perhaps heard about him being gay from a colleague? Deciding this situation warranted a disclosure, Hunter said, “Well, I definitely won’t be in that ten percent when it comes to you then. I’m gay.”

She met his eyes for one of the first times in the session and swallowed anxiously. “I know. It was the deciding factor in me choosing you off that list. Well, that, and I heard that you are very good at what you do.”

“Thank you,” Hunter responded. “Though I have certainly made my share of mistakes over the years.”

“Haven’t we all,” Sophie said.

“I want to be a good therapist to you, Sophie,” he said. “I sense that it’s quite difficult for you to talk openly in here. Is there anything I can do to make you more comfortable?”

“You’ve been fine. I just … I … I’m just so mortified about what has gotten me here. I don’t know if I can talk about it. I never imagined myself in this position … on parole after a year in prison, my career in ruins, on the other side of the couch …”

Ah
, he thought. She had mentioned the study as a way to talk about herself. “You feel embarrassed to be in that one percent of female therapists?”

She sighed. “Precisely. Why couldn’t I be like the other ninety-nine percent? I committed the cardinal sin of therapists. I exploited my power. I exploited my client.”

“It sounds like he may have exploited you as well. Not many therapists spend time in prison as a result of falling in love with their client.”

“Not many therapists fall in love with a Mafia kingpin,” she countered. They sat quietly before Hunter broke the silence.

“Has he been bothering you since you got out of prison?”

A disgusted look crossed her face. “Apparently he’s nowhere to be found. Logan conveniently disappeared right when I was arrested, and no one has heard from him since.”

“Whoa. So, the man you loved betrayed you, and then left you alone to deal with the fallout?”

“Yes.” She felt bile in her throat, a rage that crept up her body with advancing tendrils of hostility and helplessness.

“You must feel so angry and bitter, and totally paralyzed when you try to move forward—like there’s no way to get closure with him disappearing like that.”

“Exactly!” she replied. “I haven’t had the chance to say one word to Logan since this all went down. He just … he just … 
left
 me. He screwed me over and then left me hanging.”

Watching her breathing quicken and her jaw clench, Hunter asked, “What would you like to tell him, if he was right here in this room with you?”

Her face contorted with anger. “I’d say, ‘How could you do this to me? You said that you loved …’” Abruptly she stopped. “What is this, the empty chair technique?”

“No techniques, Sophie. Just two people talking. Just two people trying to make sense of the past so that they can move on to the future.”

She folded her arms across her chest defensively, and Hunter sighed.

“I know how hard this is, for a shrink to talk to a shrink. Therapy felt stupid and artificial at first for me too. I tried to ‘out-therapize’ my psychologist—attempting to identify his theoretical orientation and the techniques he was using—but I didn’t get anything out of it until I let go and started to tell him my story without censoring myself every second. You were doing so well. Can you try to get out of your head a little bit?”

Sophie exhaled with frustration.

“You seem like a sharp, caring woman,” he continued. “How did all of this happen to you? When you’re ready, will you share it with me?”

Taking a deep breath, Sophie uncrossed her arms and fidgeted with her hands in her lap. One of the blue devil fishes darted up to the surface of the saltwater tank, then dived down to the rocks, appearing agitated for some unknown reason. Sophie wondered if the fish had signed contracts promising to maintain confidentiality. They must have heard quite a few shocking tales in their day.

Whenever she thought about Logan while wasting away in prison, it was always the same. In reverse chronology, she would feel the intense fury and sickening betrayal of that last phone conversation before the police barged into her office. Then her hot rage would morph into a fire of passion when the scorching stimulation of their initial sexual encounter flooded her body. But the pull of swirling emotions from their tentative first kiss was what stayed with her the most—the tenderness of his vulnerability revealed at last, the ache of empathy she felt for his wounds, the relief of turning to each other, comforting each other with their sensual touch.

It was that last memory that Sophie decided to share first.

“I’d been seeing Logan for about five months,” she began, looking down at her lap. Hunter settled into his chair and waited for her to continue. “We were making zero progress in therapy, and the judge was expecting an update from me soon. I told Logan I’d have to be honest in my letter to the court—he wasn’t attending Gamblers Anonymous meetings or participating in therapy—but he didn’t seem concerned.”

“Sounds tough to feel like you were pulling teeth every session, trying to help a client who didn’t want to be helped.”

“Yes. He was tough.”

“Were you in love with him then?”

“No. I barely knew him.” She pondered Hunter’s question for a moment and then added guiltily, “But I was thinking about him a lot. I was having dreams about him—frustrating dreams where I was chasing him or something stupid like that, and I …” She blushed as she admitted, “I found myself wearing shorter and shorter skirts on the days of our appointments.” She threw her arms in the air and then brought her palms on the side of her head. “God, I’m an awful person!”

Hunter watched her berate herself, mentally filing away that observation. “So, if your client wasn’t talking, how did you spend the sessions?”

“There was awkward silence at the beginning, and it was painful. Time would drag by. I’d try every trick in the book to get him to talk, but nothing seemed to work. He kept asking me questions about myself that I would try to deflect, but a couple of times he wore me down and I told him a few things. Then he would open up more, so I thought I’d found a way to get him to talk: reveal a little about myself, and get rewarded when he disclosed some personal information as well.”

“What kind of information did you reveal?”

“Um, benign stuff at first, you know, my age, that I was an only child, that I was from Chicago as well … We got into some good discussions about White Sox players, and I thought I was finally building rapport with him.

“Then I somehow let it slip that I was trying to schedule lots of clients, and when he asked me why, I told him I had substantial debt from school loans. He seemed interested in that information. We ended up scheduling an appointment for one evening, and he wondered why I was free then, why I didn’t have a date that night. Stupidly I told him I was single.”

She glanced nervously at Hunter, assuming he was thinking she was the most horrible therapist ever. “The truth is I have the absolute worst luck when it comes to dating.” Smiling, she added, “But maybe I’ll save that for another session.”

“I look forward to it.” Hunter winked. “So, it sounds like your situation with Logan was the slippery slope.”

“The slippery slope?”

“There was a good paper written a few years ago on therapists’ ethical violations. The authors described how therapists never start off by saying, ‘I’m going to have sex with my client and ruin everything.’ On the contrary, the boundary violations start subtly, innocently, then insidiously grow into something more dangerous and illicit. The psychologist might reveal that he had just gone through a divorce, for example, which inadvertently tells the client he is hurting and available. Then the psychologist gradually reveals more and more about himself, and with each disclosure, the boundary between therapist and client grows fuzzier and fuzzier until it is completely breached.”

“That about sums it up,” Sophie nodded. “I never intended for things to go so far, but at some point, I felt helpless to stop them. And when I finally realized what had happened and tried to put a stop to it all, it was too late. I was in too deep. And the only way to try to climb back up the slope was to pay the consequences by going to prison.”

“You were starting to tell me about a session five months into treatment,” Hunter prompted. “Was that the top of the slope?”

She sat pensively for a moment and then replied sadly, “I had already started slipping down the slope by that point, I guess.” She closed her eyes and remembered that September day almost two years ago.

The clock ticked loudly as they stared at each other in her sparsely furnished office. Logan wore a white T-shirt and faded jeans that showcased his lower body nicely. Sophie could not help but stare at that hard, gorgeous ass when he had crossed in front of her to sit on the sofa. The muscles of his forearms rippled each time he fidgeted, rubbing his solid thigh or scratching his thick neck nervously.

He had been letting his hair grow out from his summer buzz-cut, and the short, black spikes framed his tanned face handsomely. His mouth worked on a piece of gum, drawing Sophie’s attention to his perfectly shaped lips—full, luscious lips surrounded by the black stubble of five o’clock shadow lining his square jaw. Sophie was occasionally rewarded for her vigilant adoration of those lips when he would flick his tongue out to lick them slowly.

“How did you spend your Labor Day?” she inquired.

The thirty-three-year-old client chomped his gum. “You got any kids?” he shot back.

Sophie hesitated. “No.”

“Well, I do. I spent the day with my son.”

“You have a son?” she asked incredulously. “You never mentioned him before. How old is he?”

More chomping. “Thirteen. No, fourteen. He just had his birthday in July.”

“What’s his name?”

“You and all your questions,” he replied derisively. “Why do you need to know that?”

“What’s the big deal, Logan?” She was becoming frustrated. “I just asked you your son’s name, not the secret formula for cold fusion. Have you neglected to tell me that you’re married too?”

He frowned. “No, I’m not married. Just incredibly stupid. This chick I was dating back when I was nineteen told me she was on the pill. What a damn lie.”

Sophie was beginning to understand his difficulty with trust. “So, what did you do with your son on Labor Day?”

“You know, just hung out. Went to a barbecue. At my Uncle Ange’s.”