Seduction of the Mind

The Swing and the Shadow

The session room was drenched in late-morning light, pale gold filtering through the blinds, striping the walls like a cage of warmth. The air smelled faintly of paper and pencil graphite, a ghost of yesterday’s rain still clinging to the city outside. Ethan had placed a fresh sheet of heavy drawing paper on the table, along with a soft graphite pencil and a kneaded eraser.

Vivienne sat across from him, posture loose, easy, legs crossed at the ankle. Today she wore simple things: dark jeans, an oatmeal-colored sweater with threads loose at the cuff, hair swept back into a low twist that made her face look sharper somehow. She had come in smiling—soft, almost polite—and she had kept that calm smile through the opening exchanges: greetings, a comment about the weather, the hum of the elevator.

If the last session had carried a flicker of electricity under its skin, today was steady as a metronome. Or so it appeared.

“You like this part, don’t you?” Vivienne asked now, touching the pencil to paper, letting it rest without a mark.

“What part?” Ethan adjusted the spine of his notebook, though he’d barely written a word.

“This.” She circled her wrist slightly, indicating the page. “Making me draw while we talk. It’s very… therapist-chic.”

A corner of his mouth twitched. “It’s a technique. Keeps part of your mind occupied so another part can loosen up.”

“Distracted honesty,” she said, smiling faintly as she began to sketch a horizon line. “Smart. You’d make a good card shark.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“You should.” Her tone was dry but not biting. The pencil whispered as she moved, lines unfurling in deliberate arcs. “So. What’s the theme today?”

“College,” Ethan said, settling deeper into the chair. “You mentioned before that high school wasn’t… easy.”

Her smile tilted but didn’t crack. “No. High school was theater. Everyone auditioning for parts they didn’t want to live in. But college—” She exhaled, a soft sound, like an old window easing open. “College was better. Bigger stage. Fewer walls.”

He noted the phrasing. Bigger stage. Fewer walls. She always framed life like performance—roles, scenery, curated light.

“What changed for you there?” he asked.

“Everything.” The pencil paused mid-stroke, then continued, darker now, digging into the paper. “I met people who didn’t know my scripts. Didn’t know what I was supposed to be.”

“That felt good?”

She hummed, a low note in her throat. “It felt like air after a long dive. You don’t realize you’re drowning until you breathe again.”

The words landed heavier than her tone. Ethan logged them silently. Drowning. Air.

“Tell me about those people,” he said. “Friends? Someone special?”

The pencil slowed. A faint smile curved her mouth—different from her usual one, smaller, with something old glinting underneath. “There was someone.”

Ethan waited, still, the way he had been trained: no push, no weight, just space stretched wide enough for truth to wander in.

“His name was Frank,” Vivienne said after a long moment. Her voice carried the name like it was lined in velvet. “Frank Davis.”

“Frank,” Ethan repeated, jotting the name with neat precision. “Tell me about him.”

She leaned back slightly, eyes drifting—not evasive, more like watching a reel flicker on some internal screen. “He was… ordinary in the way only boys who know they’re handsome can be. Tall. Brown hair. A smile that made girls rearrange themselves.” A tiny laugh, brittle at the edges. “I didn’t rearrange. Maybe that’s why he saw me.”

Ethan found his pen motionless against the page. “What drew you to him?”

“He made me feel… easy. Not small. Not loud. Just… seen.” The pencil pressed harder; he could hear the graphite grinding faintly. “That’s rarer than people think.”

“Sounds like you cared for him deeply.”

“I did.” Her gaze stayed on the paper, but her voice shifted—lower now, threaded with something Ethan couldn’t name. “First real love. The kind that writes its name on your bones.”

“And what happened?”

She paused. Looked up. Held his eyes in a stillness that hummed like a wire. “He disappeared.”

Ethan felt his breath hitch. He kept his voice level. “Disappeared?”

“Second semester of sophomore year. One day he was there, walking across the quad with coffee and that stupid grin, and the next…” She shrugged slowly, though the movement looked practiced. “Gone.”

“No contact? No goodbye?”

“No.” Her lips shaped the word like it tasted bitter. “Campus went feral with rumors. Drugs, debt, some professor’s wife. But none of them were true. Frank just… evaporated.”

Ethan made a note, though the pen felt heavy in his fingers. “That must have been difficult.”

“Difficult.” She repeated the word as if testing its temperature. Then she laughed—not loud, not bright, but short and curved like a blade. “That’s a neat word for something that carves holes in you.”

He let the silence hold for a beat, then asked softly, “Was he ever found?”

“Yes.” The pencil moved again, calm now, looping into curves that seemed almost gentle. “Five years later. After I’d graduated. Grounds crew dug up the old garden to put in a fountain. Found him under the roses.”

The hum of the HVAC filled the gap her words left. Ethan’s pen stopped mid-letter. “Under the roses,” he said, because it was the only phrase that made it out of the choke in his throat.

“Under the roses,” Vivienne echoed, like a refrain. Her tone was neither mournful nor cold—just factual, the way people read news about strangers.

“Do they know what happened?” His voice came quieter now.

“They ruled it homicide. No suspects. Case iced before it even thawed.” She blew lightly on the page as if to scatter dust, though none was there. “Frank became a ghost story. Boys in my dorm used to tell it to scare new girls at mixers.” A shrug. “Everyone loves a tragedy when it isn’t theirs.”

Ethan wanted to ask a thousand things. Where were you that night? Did they question you? What did you say? But the questions stacked like knives and something in him—a coil of instinct—kept them sheathed.

Instead, he said, “And how did that… change you?”

Vivienne lifted her gaze, and the look in her eyes was soft enough to bruise. “It taught me the only honest promise in life is that everything you love will rot or run.”

Ethan felt that settle into his ribs like a slow nail. He let a breath out through his nose, steadying himself on the cool grain of the table.

The rest of the session unfolded like a paper boat on still water. They drifted through safer currents: art, music, the books she claimed to love in college. He asked about her classes; she teased him about being “the guy who sat front row and asked about extra credit.” She smiled easily, answered smoothly, no jagged edges—yet every syllable wore the echo of what she’d dropped in the middle like a stone: Frank Davis. Under the roses.

When the clock’s hands slid toward the hour, Ethan closed his notebook with a muted click. “Time’s up for today,” he said, his voice almost even.

Vivienne capped the pencil, smoothing the page with her palm before sliding it across the table. “For you.” Her smile was faint, nearly sweet. “For me, it’s just warming up.”

Ethan looked down at the drawing.

Sunlight. A tree leaning with the grace of old things. A girl on a swing, hair streaming like ribbons, legs flung forward into forever. The whole thing hummed with innocence, with quiet joy.

Except.

His eyes snagged on the lines nested in her hand—the girl on the swing. Subtle. Suggestive. Curves too straight to be random, pressed just a shade darker than the rest. Shapes that could be nothing. Or a blade. A long, lean knife, ghosted into the page like a secret trying not to breathe.

He looked up fast, but Vivienne was already at the door, sweater draped soft against her shoulder, humming a tune too low to catch.

“Same time next week?” she asked, hand on the knob.

“Yes,” Ethan said, and hated how his voice frayed on the edge.

She smiled—not sly, not sharp. Just soft. Like sunlight.

And then she was gone.

Ethan sat there a full minute before touching the page again, fingers tracing the faint graphite shimmer, the almost-image. His throat felt tight, his pulse a drum he couldn’t quiet.

The swing, the tree, the girl—and in her fist, a whisper of steel.

Maybe it was nothing.

Maybe it was everything.