Torn [SHAWN MENDES]

~65~

After Amber showed Taryn several photos of her sweet foster baby, she sat back in her chair and looked at her notes from their last session. "How have you been feeling lately?"

"Okay."

"Any changes in your life, either positive or negative?"

Taryn nodded. "I joined a dating app like you suggested and went on the worst date ever." She then proceeded to give her therapist the run down of her encounter with Quinton.

"That's exceptionally awful, but I read a study once that said the average person goes on at least fifteen bad dates before finding someone they are compatible with. You can't give up just because your first one was so bad."

"I'm putting the app on pause because I'm kind of seeing someone, but it's super casual."

Amber looked at her client curiously. "Oh? Care to share more?"

"It's pretty much a hook-up thing, which is all I want. He's a musician, so he travels a lot for gigs. We've gotten together four times in the last couple weeks."

"And?"

"And the sex is great, plus he's a nice distraction. It's not going anywhere because neither of us wants that, and he's a lot younger than me," Taryn told her.

"It's difficult to not develop feelings for someone you're having sex with regularly. I know you want something without strings attached, but that's easier said than done."

"Considering Shawn is still living rent free in my brain, I don't see that happening."

Amber tapped her pen on her notepad. "Want to talk about that?"

"I'm having frequent nightmares again. Sometimes they are about the babies, but mostly they involve him. There's one where his wedding ring burns me while we're having sex, and I wake up and feel physical pain where the burns were, though obviously there's no mark. I've had others where he's with me one moment, and then he just vanishes."

"Hmmm. You don't have to be a dream analyst to figure out what either of those nightmares mean. Are you still struggling with the guilt of being part of a cheating love triangle?"

Taryn poured herself a cup of herbal tea. "I think I'm always going to feel bad about it. My mom says I need to shift more of the blame to Shawn since he's the one who made me believe things were over with Yasmin, but I knew all along that it was too soon, so I can't do that."

"I respect that you're holding yourself accountable."

"I took a big step recently by blocking him on my phone. I blocked Quinton after he sent me several harassing texts and decided to do the same for Shawn. It's unlikely he'll ever message or call me again, given how we left things, but symbolically it was a positive move for me."

"That's good!" Amber said with a broad smile. "Blocking someone is a much more definitive action than just removing them from your contacts. It tells me that you're not open to any communication with him."

"No good can come from us talking. The only hard part is resigning myself to not contacting him when Hendrix dies, but I can have his sister pass the information along."

Hen was a healthy dog, so she didn't think she'd need to worry about that for a few more years, but obviously Shawn would need to know when it happened.

"Back to the nightmares...what do you do after you've had one?" Amber asked.

"Cry. I'm left feeling really raw and I can't help but let my emotions out. Twice now it's happened when Elijah stayed over, so I hide in the bathroom until I can get myself together."