Coffee and Confessions
1148 Words
The café was crowded, the kind of lunch-hour chaos that made every word swim under a current of noise—forks against porcelain, chairs scraping tile, the hiss of milk steaming under a barista’s impatient hand. Ethan sat in a booth against the wall, coat still on, the folder in his bag feeling heavier than paper had any right to be.
Across from him, John was already halfway through his first coffee and stirring in his third sugar like a man digging for gold.
“You look like hell,” John said, not looking up at first. Then he did—and grinned. “Or like a man who’s been grading too many term papers.”
“I didn’t sleep,” Ethan said. His voice came out flatter than he intended.
“Work?”
Ethan shrugged, rolling the spoon between his fingers. Not work. Not the kind you can file in a chart and talk about at conferences.
John leaned back, taking in Ethan’s expression. “That bad, huh? You’re giving me the ‘about to confess something’ face. Which is rare. And slightly alarming.”
Ethan looked down at his coffee, black and cooling fast. Then he asked it: “Tell me something. Has it ever happened to you… a patient shares details—s****l, explicit—and you…” He stopped, jaw tightening. “You feel affected.”
For a heartbeat, John blinked. Then he let out a laugh loud enough to turn two heads and earn a glare from a man in a suit.
“Jesus Christ, Ethan,” John said, leaning in. “You make it sound like you murdered someone. Affected how?”
“You know how,” Ethan muttered.
“Ohhh,” John said, dragging out the sound like he’d just been told the ending of a bad soap opera. “So, the bishop of boundaries gets hard-ons now. History in the making.”
“Keep your voice down,” Ethan snapped, heat prickling the back of his neck.
John grinned, wolfish. “Relax. Half the café’s too busy pretending to like their salads.” He leaned closer, lowering his tone but not the humor. “Buddy, we’re not monks. We’re psychotherapists. People put us in this sainted box—clean white walls, perfect ethics, nothing but insight and restraint. News flash: we’re just men. Same wiring. Same blood. Same goddamn dopamine system. People forget that.”
Ethan said nothing.
John wasn’t done. “You know what kills me? Half my female patients probably think I’m gay just because I don’t flirt. Like it’s some unwritten law: If he listens and doesn’t hit on me, he must not like women.” He rolled his eyes. “One even told me, straight-faced: ‘You’re safe. You remind me of my hairdresser.’”
Ethan’s mouth twitched despite the iron clamp on his nerves.
“Hell,” John continued, warming to his own confessional streak, “I had this lingerie model once. Walked in every Thursday, sat down like she owned gravity, and started in about how she could only climax in this one position—graphic, anatomical, like she was reading out of a Kama Sutra for poets. After those sessions…” He lifted his coffee in salute, grin sharp as a blade. “I’d lock my office door for twenty minutes. Minimum.”
Ethan huffed out something halfway to a laugh.
John smirked. “So, who’s got you checking your pulse?”
Ethan hesitated. Every warning in his head told him to steer the car off this road. Instead, he reached into his briefcase, pulled the folded sheet, and slid it across the table like contraband.
John opened it, and for a moment the world muted—the clang of plates dulled, voices blurred. “Holy—” He cut himself short, whistling low instead. “Damn. She’s good. Look at these lines—clean, confident. That’s not idle sketching. That’s a manifesto with shading.”
Ethan stared at his cup, throat locked tight.
John angled the paper toward the light, studying. “She drew this during a session?”
“Yes.”
“Jesus, Ethan.” Another whistle. “That’s… bold. And hell, if she quits therapy, she could open an art studio.” He folded the page back with almost reverent care and handed it across.
Ethan slipped it back into his briefcase, fingers brushing the edge like it might bite.
John leaned forward, forearms braced on the table. “Look, we signed up to deal with broken people. That means sometimes we step into the blast radius. You can’t just flip a switch and erase biology. You’ve got a body. It reacts. It means you’re human, not defective.”
Ethan exhaled slowly, tension unspooling a fraction.
John wasn’t finished. “The rest of the world doesn’t get it. They think we’re brain surgeons for feelings—cold, surgical, stainless steel upstairs. They forget we walk out of those sessions with everything they just poured in our ears. And sometimes—” He tapped the table with two fingers. “—sometimes the weight has teeth.”
“Yeah,” Ethan said quietly.
“What matters is what you do with it,” John added, voice dropping. “Lines exist for a reason. Stay behind them, you’re fine.”
Ethan nodded, but the words slid off like rain on glass.
John smirked, tilting his head. “Speaking of lines… what’s going on with Helena? Or should I not ask?”
Ethan gave a laugh so dry it could’ve cracked. “Let’s just say, between the two of us, someone’s having s*x. Spoiler—it’s not me.”
John’s grin faltered into something closer to sympathy. “That bad?”
“Worse,” Ethan said, eyes on the street where cars idled at a light like patient cattle.
John drummed his fingers once, twice. Then he flashed a grin, shaking off the weight like he always did. “If this drawing thing is too much, pass her my way. I’ll take her. Purely professional, of course.”
The joke landed wrong. Or maybe it landed too well. Heat lashed through Ethan’s gut, sharp and territorial, shocking in its speed. The image of Vivienne sitting across from John—eyes lit with that feral amusement, mouth curving around words meant to sting—hit him like a strike to the ribs.
“No,” Ethan said. Too fast, too hard. He tried to sand it down with a laugh. “Not possible. I promised her mother I’d handle it personally.”
John raised a brow, the grin sliding back into place. “Ah. Ethics. God bless ’em.” He lifted his cup in salute. “To self-control, the most overrated virtue in the book.”
Ethan clinked his own cup against John’s, forcing a smile. But his mind wasn’t in the café anymore.
- Writer
