Page 59 of Let the Game Begin (Kiss Me Like You Love Me #1)

“And how are you?” he asked tentatively, thrusting his hands into the pockets of his slacks. I didn’t want to talk about me or my problems, so I gestured for Chloe to join us. Only then did Dr. Lively register her presence, and he wrinkled his forehead questioningly.

“I’m here for my sister, not for me. You need to talk with her,” I explained, putting my arm around her slim shoulders.

Chloe was tense and anxious, so I rubbed her arm to calm her down.

My former psychiatrist was an excellent doctor, skilled with both the professional and the personal, and I knew he could put Chloe at ease.

“That’s no problem. It’s a pleasure to meet you, Chloe. I’m Krug Lively. Please don’t call me doctor, just Krug.” He gave her a benevolent smile, and my sister returned the gesture. I could feel her slowly relaxing, and I was pleased with her positive reaction.

“My pleasure,” she murmured.

“Would you care to wait for me in my office?” he suggested, clearly intending to take a moment alone with me. Chloe glanced at me for approval, and I nodded.

“I’ll be right here waiting for you. It’s all going to be okay. You just need to talk a little,” I said softly, planting a kiss on her forehead. She sighed, seeming unconvinced about what she was about to do, but she screwed up her courage and walked toward the doctor’s office.

“I thought you were going to come see me every now and then. Instead, you completely vanished. You changed your phone number, and when I tried to meet with you at your home, you never showed. Do you know what a serious thing it is, stopping treatment without your doctor’s authorization?

” he lectured me, sounding even-tempered yet stern.

“It’s fine, Dr. Lively. The meds your psychiatrist gave me made me numb and apathetic,” I argued, trying not raise my voice.

“They also allowed you to sleep, manage your impulses, and control your mood swings. You didn’t show up for a single one of the follow-up sessions I recommended.

I should have been able to evaluate your course of therapy to determine whether you’d achieved your objectives.

Instead, you refused care and prevented me from helping you.

” I could tell that he was angry and disappointed in me.

He’d always had my back and had been, in many ways, like the father I never had. And this was how I repaid him?

Dr. Lively was the only man—other than Logan—with whom I had ever discussed my history. His presence had been a huge source of support for me during my adolescence, even when I hated the drugs his team prescribed and the often-rigid course of therapy he forced me to follow.

“Like I said, I’m fine. I’ve got a handle on it,” I lied. I couldn’t confess to him how things really were. I didn’t have a handle on my trauma. The nightmares were still there, as was the obsession with washing myself, the angry outbursts, and vague thoughts of ending it all.

“Without adequate medical support all this time? Doubtful.” He didn’t believe me, but he was one of the few people who knew me well enough to tell whether I was lying.

I decided to close that conversation and sat back down on the sofa.

I balanced one ankle on the opposite knee like a smug asshole and gave him a disinterested look.

“My sister’s waiting for you, doctor.” I jerked my chin toward the door of his office, and he shook his head in resignation. He was surely thinking that I was lost cause, a total car crash of a person with little desire to reopen the lines of communication.

He didn’t push me, though, and fortunately just left me alone in the relaxing environment of the waiting room. My eyes fell back on the magazine that Chloe had left open on the coffee table in front of me. I got up and snatched it away, throwing it as far as I could away from the others.

The last thing I wanted to look at was that prick’s face.

“You’re making great progress, Megan, keep it up.” An unfamiliar male voice roused me from my thoughts. I turned to look at the two people slowly approaching. The first was a doctor, or so I presumed, with an unassuming, professional appearance, and the other was woman about my age.

I scrutinized the latter carefully. She had a mane of dark hair that fell past her shoulders, and she was tall and slightly built but with overflowing curves.

Her face was an oval, and she had a pair of full, arresting lips and a dark mole shaped like a coffee bean right above her Cupid’s bow.

Her emerald-green eyes landed on me, and it only took a few seconds to recognize her.

She was Megan Wayne, Alyssa’s older sister.

“Thanks, Dr. Keller. I won’t let you down.” She held out her hand and smiled at him, occasionally darting her eyes my way.

Then, she turned fully in my direction, and I immediately began looking around for an escape hatch. I didn’t want to talk to her. I didn’t want to look at her or even remember she existed. I jumped up from the sofa, in a hurry to flee.

“Hold on, Miller.” She’d reached me before I could even start walking away.

Shit.

I held still and kept my back to her, despite the overpowering scent of orange blossoms that she emitted. “Don’t run off like you always do,” she said in a low, toe-curling voice. I shuddered and not from pleasure.

We were the same age; we’d often been in the same classes, but it was nothing more than that. I avoided her in school just like I would have avoided her here, if she’d let me.

“I don’t want anything to do with you.” I turned and locked my iciest gaze on her. The other man, who I understood to be Dr. Keller, looked at us in confusion.

“Logan’s dating my sister. If they get married someday, we might become family. Have you thought about that?” She laughed.

I was struck by a wave of dizziness. I’d been aware that Logan was dating Alyssa and had slept with her a couple of times, but I was pretty confident he didn’t have any real feelings for her. Logan wasn’t in love with her, just attracted to her.

“What the fuck? Was I in some way unclear just now?” I faced her down, talking in a low, menacing tone and inching closer to her.

Any other man would have found her drop-dead gorgeous, with the kind of pneumatic curves that could get a dead man hard. But not me.

For me, Megan was a piece of the past that needed to be forgotten. To be eliminated entirely, if possible.

“Guess you haven’t dealt with it yet,” she murmured unhappily. She stared intensely into my eyes, and I kept silent. This wasn’t the right time to have a conversation about sensitive topics, and she definitely wasn’t the right person to tell all about my internal torments.

“I don’t think that’s any of your concern.” It was her concern, though, because she was an irrevocable part of the wicked labyrinth that was my mind.

“You should keep going with Dr. Lively. Don’t give up.” She touched my arm, and it was probably nothing more than a gesture of bland consolation, but I went stiff and jerked away from her. She shouldn’t have touched me, and I told her with my eyes just how dismayed I was.

Megan retracted her hand quickly and stepped back. She understood. She turned to Dr. Keller, who had been completely still this whole time, watching us cautiously. She gave him a small smile and then headed for the exit.

As I heard her footsteps get farther and farther away, I finally started breathing again.

I felt an immediate, desperate urge to smoke, but I didn’t want to go too far away from Chloe.

So I rifled in my jacket for my pack of Winstons.

I stuck a cigarette between my lips while I searched my pockets for my lighter.

“You can’t smoke in here,” Keller interjected, standing a few cautious feet away from me.

He looked to be about fifty, with fine-boned yet masculine features and the air of someone well-acquainted with life’s hardships.

His light chestnut eyes dissected me patiently.

He was at least as tall as me with the slim, athletic body of someone who maintained a healthy diet and some sort of physical hobby.

I didn’t say anything but put the lighter back in my pocket, leaving the unlit cigarette to dangle between my lips. Holding it there made me feel calmer.

“Are you a new patient? I’ve never seen you here before.” He moved closer, but I wasn’t there to make friends with my shrink’s new coworker. I gave him a severe look in the hopes that he’d stop saying things to me, but he didn’t.

“I’m Dr. John Keller. I’ve been working with Krug for a while now.”

Did anyone ask him?

I glanced around for any distraction, but all I saw was the receptionist’s saggy ass as she bent over to pick up some fallen papers off the floor. Horrified, I averted my eyes once again and wound up back on the man in front of me.

“I was one of Dr. Lively’s patients,” I said, and all of a sudden, the room became cramped and suffocating.

“Was?” A frown line appeared in the middle of his forehead; he was puzzling something out.

“Yup, that’s right. Right up until one fine day when my psychiatrist told me I was completely cured,” I lied, taking the unlit cig between my middle and index fingers and stretching my arm out along the side of the sofa. I couldn’t wait to get out of there and smoke in peace.

“That’s what he said? That you were ‘cured’?” He gave me a small smile that I couldn’t quite decipher, and I sat up straighter.

“That’s what he said,” I confirmed mockingly.

What the fuck did this guy want?

I didn’t give a shit about his role at the clinic or how he worked with Dr. Lively. He was Megan’s psychiatrist, and that was enough to keep me far away from him.

“Odd. Neither I nor my colleague use the term ‘cure.’” He stressed the last word, still smiling.

“And do you know why?” he asked. Rhetorically, I presumed, because he didn’t wait for me to answer.

“Because we do not consider you to be sick, nor do we think of your disorders as diseases. That term ‘disease’ can be terribly misleading, don’t you think?

We take a different approach. We analyze your behaviors, all the things you say and do, and then we look for a solution together. ”

I kept still as I listened to him, focused on his words and the fact that he had lumped me in with the mental patients in his little speech.

“ My disorder? Don’t include me in that; I don’t have any kind of disorder,” I specified immediately, as though nothing could be more necessary. He gave me that shrink look.

He was analyzing me.

“Denial of a problem is a problem in and of itself.” The confidence and little hint of arrogance that came through in his tone irked me. He thought I was like the rest of them. That I was simple to understand or some lab animal he could use to carry out pharmacological experiments.

“You don’t know me. You know nothing about me.” I took a few steps closer to him, clutching the cigarette between my fingers as I pointed at him.

“ Denial of a problem is often the only thing that’s keeping me alive, but you wouldn’t know about that.

We’re all the same to you shrinks. Just fucking blobs of neurons you can feed the drugs that give your goddamned profession any scientific legitimacy!

” I shouted, not far from his face, but the man remained imperturbable, not remotely upset.

Just then, Dr. Lively opened his office door and started leading Chloe out to me. But he stopped short when he saw what was happening in his waiting room.

“Come on, Chloe. Let’s get out of here,” I ordered her furiously, glancing back and forth between the two psychiatrists who were looking at me like I truly was crazy. I threw my cigarette down and ground it into the freshly waxed floor with the sole of my shoe. Fuck their rules.

Chloe came to me, and I put my arm around her shoulders, guiding her toward the exit. I’d ask her later about how the talk with Dr. Lively went. Just then, I needed to get as far away from that clinic—and those men—as possible.