6
Olivia
It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
It was only when we had almost reached Dr. Kane’s offices that I saw the hole—as big as a five pence piece—in my tights. Scowling I stared at the tear running along my leg trying to remember where I could have snagged it when I was suddenly hurled into the middle of a full-blown panic attack.
My throat constricted. As if a ball was
stuck in it. I started to choke, my breathing becoming shallow and fast. My skin started to tingle warningly: lack of oxygen. That instantly upped the fright factor: I was going to die in the back seat of this car. My heart began to race, surely fast enough to burst.
Utter terror took over.
The urgency and intense fear that flooded into my being had no basis in reality. Nothing had happened, and yet it was so real it was causing my body to shut down right before my eyes. It would be hard to explain to someone who had never experienced such an attack what it felt like. Perhaps they would understand if they imagined being trapped in a corner of a burning room with no escape and watching the fire licking closer and closer.
The sensation was clear: RUN! NOW!
But of course I was totally frozen. Unable to move a single muscle! Soon I knew I would start sweating like a horse or I might even start hyperventilating and throw up. That would mean canceling my appointment and going home.
NO!
I didn’t want that. More than anything in the world I wanted to go for my appointment. The back of the chauffeur’s head was doing a dolly zoom in my head, but, ignoring it, I started to practice what Dr. Greenhalgh taught me to do. The first thing you had to do was fight off the cascade of irrational emotions that swamped you. The first line of defense was to slow down—thoughts, breathing, feelings.
Deliberately, I started a totally different internal dialog. Slow breaths. This is not a trigger. So what if you have a hole in your tights?
I took another deep breath.
No one is going to see it. It is nothing. It is absolutely nothing. Everything is going well.
I coughed hard and it felt as if that ball in my throat was expelled. Silently I repeated All is well, all is well like a mantra until the terror slunk away and my muscles slowly unlocked.
Breathing deeply I looked out of the window. The world outside me was unchanged. We were less than ten minutes away. I opened my purse and took my compact out and looked at my face. My pupils were still dilated and I looked a bit pale, but otherwise I was normal. See? Everything is fine. I closed the compact and slipped it back into my purse.
These attacks were coming more and more frequently and for less and less important things. The last time was yesterday in the shower as soon as the water hit my face. I couldn’t breathe.
I looked down at the hole in my tights. It was still there. I ran my hand along the snagged material. I shook my head. Silly, silly Olivia. Then I twisted the material around my thigh so it would be at the side of my leg. Far less obvious. Perhaps I would keep my coat on. Not that anyone would notice anyway. Beryl was too star-struck. Anyone would think I had done something important or invented something hugely clever, and Dr. Kane was of course too professional and aloof. His eyes never strayed below my modest necklines.
The thought of the detached Dr. Kane was like a loving caress in my brain. Though I recognized that he was becoming something of an obsession with me, I could not stop thinking about him. He drew me like a moth to a flame. And a flame he was. Beautiful and bright but not to be touched.
Our first meeting was a shock to my system. Perhaps if I had not been so dreading the session, or if the reception area of his offices had not been quite so plain and ordinary, or if Beryl hadn’t been so terribly impressed by my title, it wouldn’t have been as startling when she opened a door and revealed him.
Backlit by the window he stood beside his desk, hands by his sides, the jacket of his navy suit open, a charcoal shirt showing underneath. No tie. His shoulders were broad and powerful and his legs planted shoulder-width apart. I had never seen a man look so rugged and powerfully masculine in a suit.
His hair, straight and so black it was almost blue, touched his collar and his eyebrows were thick and straight. Though it was impossible to make out the color of his eyes, they were harsh and urgent and, teamed with the tenseness of his stance, for a split second I had the impression of a gun-slinger, readying himself for a draw.
My skin had prickled at the threat, but he came forward, his manner cool and put together, and the impression became a fleeting trick of the light.
Wiped of all expression, his eyes were exact and penetrating. Like looking into a one-way glass. You couldn’t see who was on the other side, but you knew someone was watching and assessing. As he came closer I saw his eyes were, in fact, whiskey with gold flecks glittering in them, and his nose, lips and jaw were so perfectly chiseled, they were as if cut from glass. He was an extraordinarily stunning specimen of the male species.
I had felt a thrill run through me. It was insane to be so affected by a man who had not even touched you, but God! I wanted him. I felt myself blush. Since coming out of hospital I could not remember ever feeling such an instantaneous and powerful attraction for anyone. My life was already a complicated mess, though. I most definitely did not need to fall headlong into a crush on my hypnotist.
He came forward as if to shake my hand, but he did not. Instead he waved me toward a seat. As I started walking toward it I became hyper-aware of my own body, the way it moved, instinctively, sensuous as a snake, totally unlike me.
But he was professional, precise and detached, and after a while my body stopped trembling with a strange craving for the feel of his skin, his mouth, his teeth. Just once when I had come out of the hypnosis he had looked at me, and desire had hummed between us. It was as if his body was talking to me. I felt it like a tingling between my legs.
Again it was he who coldly terminated the exchange. And after that there were no more such occurrences. He held his distance and made it plain that there was to be nothing between us except the sterile politeness of a professional relationship. We were to be two people who had nothing in common and didn’t particularly like each other.