Event in Progress

Chapter Twenty

Sean left Dr. Fielder's office feeling like he'd gone nine rounds with Sugar Ray Leonard. Not that he would have lasted that long, but still the metaphor worked.

After the obligatory blood pressure check, pulse check, lung check, and blood check, he had told Fielder a little of what had happened in his childhood. Not too much detail, not yet. You had to figure out the boundaries before you danced in a minefield.

He wanted to tell someone, yet he felt the internal hesitance despite that. Information was power, and if he gave people information he gave them power over him. Information meant they would know all the better how to hurt him. They would know what insults wounded him the most, what betrayals had hurt the most, where his pain threshold was. They would know and that knowledge would allow them access to up the ante.

He knew that was paranoia, that he wasn't going to be persecuted by his own therapist. But that knowledge didn't rest well in his heart. It didn't much make it past his brain at all, to be honest. It was the kind of knowledge he found he just couldn't put his faith in.

So he skirted the issues, painted with broad strokes. All the while he knew that Laurie could read between the lines anyway. But it had to be done, and he knew that Dr. Fielder knew it too, and she knew exactly when to ease up and when to press for more.

Sean walked out of the office with slightly more confidence than he had had when he entered. He felt just that tiny bit of hope once more. And he left with one other thing too. A prescription for Prozac.

He returned to his apartment, sat at his computer, and turned on the screen. Insomniac was there, minimized to the toolbar. But before he wrote more, he knew he had to do something else.

* * *

Christine was rinsing out the shot glasses when her cell phone rang. She looked at the caller ID, recognized Sean's number. "Hey there, Sean. Can I call you back in about ten minutes?"

"Oh. Sorry, didn't mean to disrupt you."

"It's no biggie," she said with a smile she hoped was conveyed in her voice too. "They just prefer we not talk on the phone at work."

"Bosses can be pesky that way."

"Indeed. I'll call you back soon."

She disconnected.

* * *

McKnight set his phone down. Well, that hadn't gone as planned. He shrugged it off and turned back to his computer monitor. He had already clicked on the header for Insomniac when it hit him.

He had shrugged it off like it hadn't mattered. Because it didn't. He had tried to call a girl and she hadn't been able to take his call...and he didn't care.

It wasn't apathy like it would have been before...well, before today. It wasn't the result of a conscious decision to not let it matter even though he really felt like he had been kicked in the balls. No, it was none of that. He was simply...

Unconcerned.

Naturally part of it was because she said she'd call him right back, but that wasn't all of it. Sean couldn't remember the last time he had planned something, even if it was on the spur of the moment, when he hadn't freaked out when it fell apart. His plans always seemed to fall apart so he was well practiced in the freak out stage.