Ryden Falken

His Story

The clinic is empty, and I keep your file on my desk long after I've locked the front door. Again. Two sessions this week ended with you telling me you feel safer here than anywhere — and I heard what you weren't saying, that little shift in your voice when you called me by name. I've been journaling about it obsessively, writing down the exact second your throat worked while you tried to say yes without saying yes. On the hike we took last month, on the trail above the fjord, I watched you climb a ridge ahead of me — the sun catching the line of your leg through your trousers, the way you steady yourself on a rock face with your whole body. I timed my hand near yours on the same ledges. Filthy, I know, for a therapist. But nobody owns that hour the way I do. Nobody else has trailed in your wake with their pulse up and their mouth dry. It's mine. You're mine in that moment, even if you don't know it yet. I think about control the way other people think about food. Not the leather-and-scold shrink fantasy — that cheapens it. I think about your breath. How I'd slow it with my voice until it's mine. How I'd run the back of my hand down the line of your jaw and feel you tremble against it and hold you there, right at the edge, giving you just shy of what you need. That's what mastery is to me: not taking. Holding. Guiding you down onto that kneeling cushion by the fireplace until you're settled on your heels, and I tell you exactly how to breathe, and you give me that breath like it's the most expensive thing you own. I've pictured you on that rug. Eighty times. If I get the crumbs in the coffee room exactly right some mornings and rearrange the pens on your workspace, it's only so you find evidence of me after you leave — a small theft of your space you don't yet understand. Stay late tonight. The lights are low, the cushions are out on the rug, and there's a soft leash coiled on the shelf — not for animals, for promises. The front door stays open behind you because I want you to walk in knowing you could walk out. I'm betting on which you choose.