I didn’t know who to be more angry with: Mitch Buchannon, argh, Derek Reynolds (What kind of dumb, metrosexual-sounding name was that anyway?), for deceiving me, or myself, for being such a gullible twit. I frittered away the majority of the next day going back and forth on the issue, and the more I thought about it, the more incensed I became. How dare he dupe me! Was nothing sacred? A psychologist’s office was supposed to be like a confessional - lies were never to be told there. And it’s not like Mitch, ack, Derek, had just lied about his name and occupation. Oh no, he’d lied about everything from his place of birth (some rural town in North Georgia - Why hadn’t I questioned that telltale drawl he’d let slip several times? - not Tampa) to his lack of family (He had four siblings and parents that were not only alive, but still married after 39 years of presumably wedded bliss.) In all the hours we’d spent together discussing his thoughts, feelings, hopes, and fears, I don’t think that one honest word had come out of that man’s mouth.
And the worst part of it was that I didn’t know why. Why had he lied? What had he hoped to gain by presenting me with such a colorful patchwork of falsehoods? It just didn’t make any sense. But I would find out the truth, so help me, Freud. When Mitch, dammit!, Derek showed up for his appointment at 4:00, I planned to confront him and demand an explanation. I deserved that much. Actually, I deserved an apology and I wouldn’t be satisfied until I got one.
I didn’t have a patient at 3:00, so I had an hour to kill before Mi—, the big, fat phony, arrived. I’d let Margo leave early and I couldn’t concentrate on work, which left me with no source of entertainment or distraction. I decided to call Sara and see how preparations were going for the fashion show.
“T-minus 21 hours and counting,” my best friend said when she answered her cell.
“Are you excited? Nervous?”
“Both. Plus, anxiety-ridden, nauseous, and borderline suicidal. Michelle! What are you doing? You’re supposed to be slinking down the runway like a sleek, sexy panther, but you’re stomping around like a constipated elephant! Jesus!”
“Where are you?” I wondered.
“At the Fontainebleau. We’re doing a dress rehearsal. Beautiful, Nicola, beautiful. But I want you to wear your hair down with that suit. It’ll draw more attention to the bustline.”
“I can’t wait to see the show tomorrow.”
“I’ll need all the handholding and alcoholic beverages you can provide. You’ll be here at 11:00, right?”
“Right, and I thought I’d bring Izzy.”
“The more, the merrier. Just don’t let her drive you here in a stolen car,” Sara teased.
“Ha, ha.”
“No, no, STOP! Lighting people!” she screamed. “This is where I wanted you to switch from pink to amber. Not yellow, AMBER! Honestly, it’s like amateur hour here. That yellow light was way too harsh. It was making my models look like drag queens.”
“You’re obviously busy, so I’ll just let you—”
“I can critique the show and talk to you at the same time. Hold on a minute . . . Where’s the freakin’ music? Alfonso, find out what’s going on with the music. There’s no point in having the girls come down the runway without it. They need to time their steps to a beat for Christ’s sake. Okay, I’m back. Tell me what’s wrong.”
“I didn’t say that anything was wrong.”
“You didn’t have to. I could hear it in your voice. You sound mopey with a side of pissed off.”
Even though I had the degree in psychology, Sara was the one who was often shockingly astute.
I heaved a pitiful sigh. “I found out that a patient misrepresented himself to me.”
“How?”
“He gave me a fake name and made up a whole history, including a miserable childhood and relationship issues.”
“So, he’s a pathological liar?”
I hadn’t considered that possibility.
“Mmmmm, I don’t think so,” I dismissed it. “Pathological liars have no control over their dishonesty. They have a compulsion to deceive, and they get a thrill out of it. Mitch, I mean Derek, ugh, this patient planned all of this. He had a reason for concocting a faux persona.”
“Do you want me to come over there and bitchslap this reason out of him?” Sara queried, and I laughed for the first time since I’d seen that wretched movie, Bayou Beast.
“Thanks for the offer, but I don’t think that’ll be necessary.”
“Just remember that it’s an op—” Music started to play in the background. It was muffled, so I couldn’t tell what the song was, just that it sounded like pop and had breathy, female vocals.
“BRITNEY SPEARS???? Come on! Alfonso, did you give the guys in the sound booth the right CD? You think you might have given them one from your personal collection? Uh huh, that’s what I thought. FIX IT or I’ll fix you!”
“Wow, you’re scary.”
“Fear is the only thing that motivates these—”
I didn’t hear the rest of what Sara said because the door of my waiting area opened and in strolled Mitch, NO! - Derek, wearing baggy drawstring shorts, a wifebeater, and flip-flops. Apparently, he’d decided to go all the way with his lifeguard costume for this session. Seeing that I was on the phone at Margo’s desk, he flashed me one of his rascally, dimpled smiles, which seemed a lot less charming now that I knew what a poser he was.
“Sara, I have to go. My patient just arrived.”
He jerked a thumb towards my office to let me know that he was headed that way.
“Is it the lying creep?”
“Yep.”
“Oh, good, lay the phone down so that I can hear you rip him a new one.”
“You’re developing a real bloodthirsty streak,” I murmured into the phone before hanging it up.
“Hold on a second . . . Derek,” I said to my patient’s retreating back, and he froze in the doorway of my office. I relished the feeling of having blindsided him, but my triumph was short-lived.
With an amused chortle, he turned back towards me, not looking the least bit contrite or distressed. “So, you busted me. You must be pleased with yourself.”
“On the contrary, nothing about this situation pleases me,” I assured him as I pushed myself up into a standing position. “You lied to me. You abused my trust. You wasted my valuable time.”
“I paid you for your time.”
“That is beside the point!” I slammed the palm of my hand down on the desk for emphasis, then walked out from behind it so that I could yell at him without any furniture separating us. “All those hours I spent with you could have been given to someone who really needed my help.”
“I needed your help.”
“Oh, right. ‘I’m so emotionally damaged that I can’t commit,’” I imitated Derek in a whiny, high-pitched voice that sounded nothing like him. “You’ve been married THREE times, so obviously commitment’s never really been a problem for you.”
“Well, technically, I’ve only been married twice,” he corrected me. “I had that thing with Tara Reid annulled after I sobered up. The rum down in Martinique has a real kick to it. I don’t even remember—”
Derek’s talk of being hammered made me flash back to the night I’d dragged him home from that sleazy bar down on Washington.
“Oh, my God,” I groaned. “You weren’t really drunk when you called me from Hal’s, were you?”
He smirked. “Pretty good act, huh? I played Grissom’s alcoholic nephew on an episode of CSI a couple of years ago. The secret to playing a convincing drunk is not to oversell it. A slight slurring of your speech, a little disorientation and clumsiness . . .”
If he wanted me to compliment him on his performance, he was going to have a long wait.
“Why? Why would you pull me out of bed in the middle of the night and have me come to a dangerous part of town when there was nothing wrong with you?”
“I had to play drunk so that I could confess my ‘love,’” he actually made air quotes with his fingers when he said the word, “for you. I’d tried flirting with you during our sessions, but that wasn’t getting me anywhere. So, I figured you were one of those chicks who only slept with guys you thought you had some sort of emotional connection to.”
“And that was the purpose of this whole charade? You wanted to get me into bed?” I gaped in disbelief.
“Mitch wanted to get you into bed. He’s the one who was lusting after you.”
“But you ARE Mitch!” I screeched, losing my professional cool.
Derek shook his head. “Mitch is a character, a role that I immersed myself in. He’s got nothing to do with me. No offense, Doc, but you’re not even my type. I like blondes.”
“I’m so confused,” I lamented.
“The reason I came to see you in the first place was because I got this part in a Lifetime movie that starts filming here in Miami next month. My character is this troubled guy who finds himself attracted to his beautiful, female psychologist. She’s drawn to him, too, so they start having this hot love affair. When she ends up dead . . . well, I don’t want to spoil the movie for you, but there’s a great twist at the end.”
I only cared about the plot of his lame cable movie insofar as it involved me. “So, you pretended to need psychological help because—”
“I needed to understand the complicated dynamic between patient and therapist in order to do justice to this horny, emotionally stunted character.”
“You could have just asked me,” I snapped peevishly. “This whole Mitch ruse was totally unnecessary.”
“Interviewing you wouldn’t have done me any good. I’m a Method actor. I needed to experience the patient/therapist relationship firsthand.”
“And to that end, you manipulated me.”
He shrugged. “It was research.”
“It was a head game and the fact that you don’t see the difference—”
“I really don’t know why you’re getting so het up about this, Doc. I’ve created characters and used them as research tools before. It’s no big deal.”
“It is to me.” I thumped myself on the chest dramatically. “I care about my patients, I care about helping them. So, when I discover that one of them has lied to me and used me to further his own interests, naturally, I feel betrayed,” my voice quivered, and I struggled not to let my emotions get the best of me.
“It’s not like you didn’t get anything out of our sessions.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I placed my hands on my hips and narrowed my eyes at him.
“Mitch came to you a shallow, self-involved player, and you jumped at the chance to make him over. He was your pet project, a man you could refine and improve, then send back out into the world a better person.”
That had pretty much been my strategy with Mitch. But when he put it like that, it made me sound like Professor Henry Higgins gone wild.
“There’s nothing wrong with trying to help people improve themselves,” I said huffily. “It’s my job to counsel and guide—”
“You’re a control freak,” he diagnosed.
“What?????? I am n-n-n-not!” I was so outraged that I started to stutter.
“Oh, no?” Derek shoved his hands into the deep pockets of his shorts and rocked back on his heels. “Look at how you reacted when Mitch told you he loved you. You freaked out.”
“I-I-I was t-t-taken aback.” Still with the stuttering. Had the stress of this encounter caused a permanent speech impediment?
“You couldn’t deal because you lost control of the situation - of Mitch. The next time we saw each other, you were so desperate to get me back in line it was comical. The look on your face when I asked you out on a date!” The memory made him guffaw.
I wanted to say something cutting in return, but I was too busy fighting back tears. This jerk had committed the worst kind of treachery (in my eyes anyway), and now he was laughing at me and impugning my abilities as a therapist?
“You need to leave,” a calm, but nonetheless steely, voice instructed.
I glanced over my shoulder and saw Ford standing behind me with a clenched jaw and a fierce look in his blue eyes. I imagined that it was the same expression he’d had on his face all those years ago when his brother had called him “Brainiac.” If Derek got force-fed one of Ford’s knuckle sandwiches, he had nobody to blame but himself.
“Look, pal,” Derek stepped towards him, “I don’t know who you are, but you’re interrupting a private conversation between me and the doc here.”
“Yeah, I heard most of it,” Ford admitted to eavesdropping.
When I frowned at him, he explained, “I happened to be passing by, the door was ajar, and I heard shouting.”
A likely story. He’d probably been lurking in the hallway ever since Derek had gotten there.
“You,” he pointed at my patient, “should get out of here before I advise my colleague to sue you for Fraud.”
The color drained out of Derek’s tanned face. “She can’t do that!”
He was right; I couldn’t since he’d only cheated me out of my pride and self-esteem, not anything that had monetary value. But it was a good bluff, and the sadist in me enjoyed seeing Derek sweat.
“Just leave,” I said a few seconds later when I grew weary of tormenting him.
“Fine, but if I win an Emmy for my performance in Loving You Can’t Be Wrong, don’t expect me to thank you in my acceptance speech. And you won’t be getting any kind of Technical Advisor credit either.”
Having delivered what he probably thought was a great exit line, Derek strode out of my office with his vanity intact.
Since I wasn’t about to let that two-bit actor have the last word, I scurried after him and yelled out into the hallway, “Oh, yeah. Well, I’m billing you for a full hour even though you only used fifteen minutes!”
And with that, I slammed the door shut and spun back around towards Ford.
“I am the worst psychologist EVER!” I wailed, then burst into tears, which completely mortified me. I wasn’t the Alvarez who lost control of her emotions and had messy, public breakdowns. That was my mother or Isidora. I was the one who always held it together, the one who never screwed up, or made a fool out of herself. What had happened to me? In an effort to hide my shame, I buried my face in my hands.
The next thing I knew, Ford’s arms were wrapped around me, and I was sobbing pathetically up against his chest.
“You are not a bad psychologist,” he said in the quiet, soothing tone that shrinks usually reserved for their most overwrought patients, the ones who were balanced precariously on 12th Floor ledges threatening to end it all.
“Yes . . . yes, I am.” I pulled myself together long enough to speak, although I did so haltingly. “I never . . . even questioned . . . I believed everything that Mitch, ohhhhh—,” realizing I’d just messed up that deceitful bastard’s name for the umpteenth time, I took off on another crying jag.
Ford rubbed my back comfortingly. “You had no way of knowing what he was up to. You had no reason to suspect that he was being untruthful.”
“But I did!” I insisted in a tear-choked voice. “There were so many signs . . . they were all there, right in front of me, but I just ignored them.”
Most men would have seized the opportunity to say, ‘I told you so,’ or, ‘You really should have listened to me,’ but Ford took the high road.
“You’re just trusting by nature.”
“No.” I shook my head from side-to-side, leaving streaks of wet mascara across the front of his royal blue dress shirt. “I’m stupid and obtuse and I have no business being a psychologist.”
“Hey!” Ford cupped my face in his hands and forced me to look up at him. I must have been a charming sight with my red, watery eyes and leaky nose. I really needed a tissue.
“Don’t get down on yourself just because things went wrong with one patient.”
“It’s just so awful being lied to and feeling like I have only myself to blame because I wasn’t smart or observant enough . . .” Fresh tears spilled from my eyes and streamed down my cheeks.
Ford gently wiped them away with the pads of his thumbs. “You are smart. You just let that compassionate heart of yours override your brain sometimes.”
I gazed up into Ford’s kind eyes and was reminded of our first encounter on the staircase outside. I’d crashed into him and made him drop his plant, but instead of being irritated, he’d worried about me hitting my head and once he’d determined that I didn’t have a concussion, he’d fixed my broken cell phone. It seemed like Ford had been fixing things for me (or, at least, trying to) since the day we’d met.
“Why are you always so nice to me?” I wondered.
A smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. “Because you’re easy to be nice to,” was his simple reply.
Then, his eyes softened and dropped slowly to my lips. He lifted my chin up, and I knew he was going to kiss me. I could have said “no,” I could have shoved him away, but I didn’t. When his lips met mine, I kissed him back without hesitation, without a thought for anyone but myself. In my defense . . . oh, why bother? There is no defense. I acted selfishly and impetuously. I kissed Ford because I wanted to, because it felt good and, somehow, natural, like his mouth was meant for mine. And it was a great kiss, an amazing kiss, a kiss that should have had a poem written about it, a kiss that started out sweet and tender, then quickly morphed into something so hot and passionate that it was almost primal. Izzy’s prediction about our clothes flying off probably would have come to pass if an image of Nate’s adorable little face hadn’t popped unbidden into my head just as my fingers were fumbling with the buttons on Ford’s shirt.
‘Oh, God, you’re a horrible person,’ I rebuked myself. ‘You’re one of those women everyone at church whispers about, a woman with loose morals who doesn’t respect other people’s marriages, a no-good, homewrecking hussy!’
Appalled by this epiphany, I pushed myself away from a very disheveled and confused-looking Ford and backed up several steps.
“I-I-I shouldn’t have . . . That was a mistake.” I pressed a trembling hand up against my lips, which were now throbbing. “You have a wife, a child—”
“We didn’t do anything wrong. Pilar—” He reached out for me, and I panicked, knowing that if he touched me again, I was done for.
So, I bolted. I didn’t even get my purse or worry about locking up my office for the weekend. I just threw open the door that led out to the hallway and I ran.