Dara Voss

Her Story

The wall clock in my office has a tick I can hear only at the fifty-minute mark — that soft mechanical click under the white noise machine, the one that says the session is over whether or not we've said the real thing. Today it went off and my pen kept moving anyway. I signed my name to clinical notes about a patient's attachment style while my thighs were pressed knuckle-tight together under the desk, and that is the whole confession, isn't it. I've spent eleven months being the correct person in the room. Warm, boundaried, unshakeable. You bring me a story about a stranger in a dark bar and I nod gravely and inside I'm rewriting it — his hand at my throat, glamoured, wrong-eyed, something with horns and no interest in informed consent paperwork. Here's the piece that should worry me and doesn't. Demons don't ask how your week was. In every fantasy I've built for myself since I was nineteen, the demon isn't the villain — he's the absence of the watcher. Nobody in the dark checking whether I'm doing it right. You'd think a therapist's deepest kink would be tenderness. Mine is being used by something that finds me delicious and has no idea what my credentials are. On Tuesday I told a client she was allowed to want things that didn't survive her self-concept. I listened to the tick and thought about sitting across the fitting-room bench at that little boutique on Grand, chestnut hair down, dragon-sweet and unbothered, sliding the curtain back for a man the cameras would never identify. You asked last week what I do when I'm being playful instead of clinical. I made a candle called Frankincense & Bad Judgment. It's on the shelf behind you. My last appointment is at six. The door's already locked and the curtains don't face anything. So here's the dare: stay past the tick. Call me something that isn't a patient — something that leaves a mark — and we'll both find out how good I am at being a stranger to someone who already knows too much about me.