Helen fidgeted with her fingernails, picked the chipped burgundy polish she hadn’t had the time or energy to update. “It’s easy to push people away when we’re hurt, to shut down. We may want to let someone in, but it’s hard. There are barriers, and they don’t go away on their own.”
He caught her chin with the pads of two of his fingers and tilted her face upward, bringing her eye to eye with him. His gaze burned through the aforementioned barriers. “Are we talking about you and me right now? This thing between us?”
A sense of covering her eyes and backing away from a gory crime scene swooped in. Nothing to see here, do not register or engage. “Which thing between us do you mean? Because there are several. The curse? The clone?”
His stare didn’t waver. “You’re doing it again.”
“What?” She knew what, but “it” didn’t yet have form. Now and then, an impulse, swift and reactionary, swept through Helen and stole her center.
The thieving invasion replaced her integrity, some precious gem nestled in the deepest point in her core, with a corrupt blob of cynicism. An inhabitant fit for the rotten pit.
Said inhabitant had served a purpose in the past, a vicious attack snake poised to snap its fangs at anyone who dared to advance.
Helen dissociated, spaced out hardcore, and fell down the rabbit hole of the snake metaphor. She lost her mind to a wicked, heady version of déjà vu. Nerissa appeared as a snake, a symbolic serpent. Had this been the elder’s motive, to plant a seed, to use the power of suggestion to prompt Helen to examine and analyze the deepest, nastiest aspects of her subconscious?
Brian spoke. “You retreat. Not all of the time, but it’s enough of a pattern to where it’s noticeable. I get close, and right as it seems like a breakthrough is coming, you go away. Then this other version of you comes out, the one that’s prickly and quick with the comebacks.”
Though two halves of Helen fought to join, she stayed detached and disintegrated, one part watching the other as if observing a play. In the crack between two selves, a eureka sprang.
“Oh, my God. This is it. This is why Nerissa thought I wasn’t suited to the Left Hand path.”
Disappointment registered in Brian’s face, testimony given in deepening wrinkles, lips rubbed together. “I thought we were talking about us.”
“We were, we are. But it’s connected. It’s all connected. The reason I haven’t been able to do Left Hand work without blowback is because I’m split, fractured, not at peace with myself yet. So like you said, there are two versions of me, and they don’t line up into a harmonious whole. When I try stuff like psyche splitting magic, it doesn’t work right, the results come out weird, because I, myself, am fundamentally split.” Her blood pounded. Pulse drummed. Mind raced, struggling to keep up with revelations.
She’d cracked a code, figured out something huge. Helen wasn’t unsuited to Left Hand spells, but she hadn’t been doing them in the optimal mindset.
“Sounds like you have all of the answers.” He pulled his fingers away and tapped the gear shift twice, a terse gesture devoid of whimsy.
“Don’t tell me you’re upset at me. This is important. For the work we’re doing.”
“Of course.” A false smile, half-formed and watery. Brian opened his door. “Ready?”
“Brian, come on. The stakes of this are massive. I didn’t mean to shut you down. I do want to have heart-to-hearts, but in that exact instant it felt like I needed to work through an insight having to do with my magic. This affects you.”
“I know, I know. It’s your process. I honor and respect that, and I’m aware that the supernatural project needs to take priority. But there’s something more, yes? Something between us that isn’t strictly business?”
Seeking cheap safety, Helen built a wall between her and Brian. “Do you mean the sex?”
“In part, sure.”
“Don’t you do that kind of thing all of the time, though? Bang groupies in your hotel rooms? Be real.” On the heels of the disingenuous question tailored to alienate came a burst of lava, incendiary secretions that cooled into an unpleasant, familiar plaque.
Brian scoffed. “I get it now. You construct a story in your head in which I’m a pig and a user, some caricature it’s easy to judge and disdain, thereby absolving yourself of having to face your own struggles with intimacy.”
Tears assailed her ducts in quick and savage stabs. She’d been exposed. “You have no right to analyze me.”
“Why not? Because holding a mirror to you frightens you too much and reveals too many deep flaws? Forces you to confront the fact that you might need to do more work on yourself before you can be okay, forces you to accept that yoga didn’t cure everything?”
Naked, she drew her cruelest weapons. “Good job. Bravo, Dr. Shepherd, what an enriching therapy session. Did you earn that psychology degree of yours while partying backstage after opening for Def Leppard approximately a hundred years ago?”
The arrow boomeranged, impaling Helen with a gut shot. What the fuck was wrong with her? Regret was immediate and stark. “Brian—”
He silenced her with a pointer finger in the air, swung his door wide, and leapt out of the car. The soft way in which he shut it was worse than the angriest slam.
She sat alone in
