“Of course not,” he said softly. “I want for you to be someone I can comfort…someone to hold in my arms and cherish as I did last night, my little mishka.”
I stared at him, unable to take in what he was saying. Salt had never expressed any feelings like this towards me before. One of the things I valued about my partner was that, despite my diminutive size, he had never tried to pick me up or treat me like a doll as other big guys I had known sometimes had.
There’s a certain kind of man who finds a pocket-sized girl like me irresistible but I had always strenuously avoided them. It’s hard enough to be respected when you’re no bigger than a large child, as Salt had put it the night before. If you start acting like a child or letting people treat you like a child, you’re going to get nowhere professionally.
And now here was my partner, admitting that he wanted to treat me like that. That he wanted to pick me up and hold me, just as he had the night before when I cried my eyes out against his broad chest.
Was that really so bad though? whispered a little voice in my head. It was kind of nice to be held in his arms and comforted, don’t you think?
I pushed the idea away. That way lay weakness…vulnerability…and eventually abandonment and pain. I knew that—knew it to my bones. Which meant I had to steer clear of this kind of feeling…the feeling that made me want to climb in Salt’s lap and cuddle up against him, trusting him to keep me safe and secure instead of standing on my own two feet and acting like an adult.
“Andi? Mishka?” Salt looked at me with a hint of pleading in his pale blue eyes. “Please, do not misunderstand me. I am not trying to make you weak, you are one of the strongest people I know. I just—”
“Save it.” I put up a hand to stop him. “I don’t care why you said what you said—I can’t go there with you. I can’t even think about—”
“Well, well—it seems the therapy session has already started out here without me.”
The new voice brought me up short. Salt and I had been leaning towards each other, talking intently. Now we both jumped and looked up to see a blonde woman in an expensive looking gray twill business suit. Her hair was pulled into a loose but pretty chignon at the back of her neck and her heels were sensibly low, though still stylish. She was holding a tablet in one hand.
“Hello,” she said, smiling at my partner and me. “I’m Doctor Lucy Newhouse but you can just call me Doctor Lucy. Please, come in.”
She stepped to one side and held out a hand, indicating that we should go into her office. I have to confess that I dragged my feet—I really wasn’t looking forward to this at all.
Dr. Lucy seemed to sense that I wasn’t happy to be there. She shut her office door and followed us into a room that held a loveseat, two arm chairs, and one straight backed wooden chair with a plump red cushion on it. Dr. Lucy took this last chair for herself and then motioned to us.
“Please, have a seat.”
Salt settled himself on the loveseat and I took one of the armchairs. Then we looked at the doctor and waited.
“Hmm…” She was looking at something on her tablet—apparently reading through some notes. Finally, she looked up at me. “So, niska, is it?”
“Mishka,” Salt corrected her at once. “Is pet nickname which means ‘little mouse.’”
“I see.” She made a note on her tablet with a jeweled stylus. “All right then, mishka. So it seems you had a problem when you witnessed a plug insertion yesterday when you first came here.”
Plug insertion—ugh! I shivered involuntarily.
“If by ‘had a problem’ you mean was horrified and traumatized, then yes, I had a problem,” I said blandly.
“Traumatized,” she mused. “Now there’s an interesting word choice. Tell me, mishka, what was it about what you witnessed that made you feel like that?”
“Well he…she…” I groped for words for a minute. There was so much, where did I even begin? “She was letting him—her master—”