Seduction of the Mind

The Session

Vivienne’s request came in the thin, muzzy register of a head cold: could they do the session at her house—just this once—because she felt awful and also because, somehow, not talking would feel worse. Ethan hesitated long enough to hear his own caution, then agreed on a condition he said aloud for both their sakes: her mother had to be home and remain within earshot. Lillian’s voice arrived on the line a breath later, composed and faintly worried—yes, of course, she would be there.

The house was old enough to wear its money lightly. It didn’t gleam; it breathed. Floors with a silvery polish; crown molding that caught daylight like a shy smile; frames hung level in measured arrangements. Lillian opened the door before Ethan could knock twice. She had the posture of a woman who had spent years making sure other people did not fall apart on her watch.

“Doctor Hale,” she said, warmth and apology braided together. “Thank you for coming. She’s miserable, but insistent.”

“I understand.” He meant it. Insistence had been Vivienne’s first language since she’d crossed his threshold. “Could we use a room with space and a door that stays open?”

Lillian’s mouth pressed into approval. “The study at the back,” she said. “The window there sticks. I’ll be in the kitchen. Please call if you need anything.”

The study felt like someone’s favorite refuge: leather and cedar, shelves that had been dusted but also touched, the reliable gravity of a wide old desk. A massive couch—dark, softened by years—anchored the room. A throw lay there, folded in the crisp square of a person who did not tolerate crumbs or chaos. Ethan set his case on the desk and rested his notebook on his knee. The door stayed open, by design. Down the corridor, he could hear Lillian’s practical music: kettle, spoon, cupboard, the rhythms of a home that did not permit dramas to swallow it whole.

Vivienne padded in wearing soft gray pajama pants and a loose white top that had given up and slid off one shoulder. No makeup. Her hair, unarranged, was a cloud of dark that made her look both younger and less defended. Her nose was pink. She carried a mug like a talisman and sneezed into the crook of her arm before she could say hello.

“You should be in bed,” Ethan said, not unkindly.

She made a face, one corner of her mouth tipping. “I will be… after.”

She folded into the couch with the boneless surrender of a body that has renegotiated a temporary peace with gravity. The throw went across her lap. She tucked her feet under, pressed the mug to her sternum like warmth could travel through bone.

“If you start to feel worse, we reschedule,” he said.

“I’ll be fine,” she murmured, voice hoarse with scraps of sleep. “Ask me easy things first.”

He began with a tone he used for the flu-frayed and the grief-thin—soft but without the condescension of softness. He asked about last time, about the moment between intent and collapse. Why did the last relationship fall apart? Where, precisely, did the ground vanish?

Vivienne spoke slowly, like someone feeling for a door in the dark. Her sentences drifted, doubled back, took the scenic route to land on a truth she had already rehearsed. “I can’t seem to decide,” she said, looking at the ceiling as if the answer were written there in faint chalk. “Men and women. It’s not that I like one more. It’s that whichever I have, I miss what the other gives. I feel… half-fed.” She sniffled and rubbed at her nose with the back of her wrist like a child too tired to locate a tissue. “So I choose, and then I starve for the other half.”

“Describe the halves,” Ethan said, pen quiet against his thumb. “In plain terms.”

She did. Not names—textures. Weight and angle. Calm and heat. The feeling of being matched; the feeling of being contained. It was not pornographic. It was precise, and somehow more dangerous for that. He tracked her language to make sure she wasn’t just building an alibi out of metaphors. She wasn’t. She was telling him where hunger lived.

“And when you try to hold both?” he asked.

Her eyes slid to him, then away. The faintest smile bent her mouth, not coy so much as exhausted. “I think about it,” she whispered, so softly the word carried on the steam rising from her mug. “Three.” The syllable lingered like heat.

The thought struck him with the speed of reflex. Julia’s hair dark on a pillow. Vivienne’s pale shoulder like a blade of light. Geometry as intention. He heard his own breath once, too loud. Then he did the thing he taught people to do when their minds bolted—he planted himself in the room with the facts of it: cedar, leather, paper, the faint scrim of dust on a frame’s top edge, the door ajar, a kettle down the hall giving two small pops as it cooled.

Vivienne noticed. Even fever-dulled, she noticed everything. She didn’t smile triumph. She smiled fatigue. The expression landed in him like an ache he did not want. Then her head rolled to the side, lashes lowering. For twenty seconds, maybe thirty, she slept. Breath shallow, mouth slightly open, mug clutched but steady.

He let her. He tasted the quiet like a possible future.

When she surfaced, her voice was scratchy, her eyes glassy. “Not very good company,” she murmured.

“You’re sick,” he said gently. “The body vetoes all kinds of ambitions.”

“Mmm.” A ghost of a smile. “Then ask me something easy.”

He did. He shifted to small questions, safe ground: favorite season, a place that made her nervous system slow down, a sound she hated (keys in a pocket), a book she reread because it made her feel less breakable. The answers came hushed, coiled, like thread.

Then: “How long were you with her?” Eyes open now, sharper than fever should allow.

“Seventeen years,” he said. The number landed heavy between them. “Divorced now.”

Vivienne blinked. Something flickered—surprise, then something harder to name. Then her lips curved into that slow, slanted smile he’d learned to distrust.

“Well,” she said softly, voice dipping into velvet, “I suppose that means I don’t have to feel guilty about starting to hit on you.”

Ethan stilled. The sentence slid into the room like a knife without a sound.

He didn’t smile. Didn’t flinch. Just said her name, quietly, like a door closing. “Vivienne.”

That was all. Not a sermon, not a threat—just her name and the weight of the rules inside it.

Her mouth curved again, almost a laugh, almost something sharper. Fever blurred the edges of her defiance; for the first time all session, she looked… young. Then she sank deeper into the cushions, lashes lowering like curtains.

“Do you want to stop here?” he asked after a beat.

She shook her head once, slow. “No. Keep going.”

So he did, trimming the hour to its safest spine: simple grounding, a plan for the week. When they were done, she whispered, “Office next time. Unless… the house makes me honest.”

He didn’t answer. He just packed his notes, snapped his case shut, and let the sound of Lillian’s footsteps in the hall remind him why the floor under his feet still existed.