Page 46 of Reckless Obsession

She shifts slightly, letting her hands rest on her knees, her eyes piercing through the bullshit.

“You tell me you think he views you as a child,” she says gently. “So I ask you: would a man who genuinely views you as a child pin you to his office floor and let you take him into your mouth? Absolutely not. That was not the behavior of someone managing a child, Maksim. Tristan wouldn’t do that.”

Heat rushes up my neck, hot and prickly.

“However,” Joanna adds, her tone sharpening with clinical clarity, “your worth is not dictated by what Tristan gives you or withholds from you. We’ve discussed at length how your nervous system processes physical sensation. It is all too easy to confuse pain delivered in a consensual, controlled environment with emotional abuse and rejection. When those wires get crossed, your brain starts craving self-destruction just to feel grounded. That is a pattern we need to interrupt.”

She leans back, letting the weight of the session soften, though her eyes never leave mine.

“I know everything inside you feels like a tangled, burning mess right now, especially when navigating the crash that follows a manic spike.” She goes on. “So do not try to solve your entire life today. Give yourself permission to breathe. In the meantime, I want you to try an exercise: reflect on who you are outside Tristan’s gaze. What parts of your worth belong entirely to Maksim, that no one—not Tristan, not Jake, not your father—can ever take from you?”

I sit there for a while, staring at the thin strip of sunlight that stretches across Joanna’s carpet.

Who am I outside of Tristan’s gaze?

The question is almost offensive.

It sounds simple when she says it. Clean. Reasonable. Like there is a version of me that exists untouched by the people I love. Like Tristan has not spent years living in the center of my chest, taking up space I should probably have reserved for lungs.

“I don’t know,” I say at last.

Joanna nods as though I have given her a perfectly acceptable answer.

“You do not have to know today.”

“Convenient.”

“It is realistic.”

I press my tongue against the inside of my cheek. “You always make everything sound so calm.”

“That is because one of us has to be calm.”

My eyes narrow and her mouth twitches. For a second, I almost smile. Almost.

“What do you think would help you feel less trapped tonight?” she asks. “Not fix everything. Not erase the pain. Just make the next few hours safer and more bearable.”

The question catches me off guard.

My mind immediately runs through a list of possibilities—not the good ones. Not sleep, food, calling Alex, taking my medication, or sitting in a warm bath like Joanna probably wants me to say.

No.

Something hotter comes to mind.

A flash of orange. The smell of smoke. Watching something expensive and polished become ruined with fire. A clean, violent little answer to the fact that Tristan has been allowed to keep walking around untouched while I am barely holding myself together.

I do not say any of that.

Of course I do not.

I only look down, and a smile tugs at the corner of my mouth.

It is small, but Joanna notices immediately.

“Maksim.”

“What?”