Collapse of Mind

The clock above the reception desk had been stuck between two minutes for as long as Lia could remember.

It was one of those small things she meant to fix and never did. The second hand ticked, slower than it should, then jumped forward in tiny spurts, as if time itself kept pausing to reconsider. Patients sat beneath it, shifting in chairs which squeaked at the slightest movement, trying not to look at the posters on the wall about trauma, sleep, dissociation.

Lia liked the waiting room quiet. The soft hum of the ventilation. The faint tap of someone scrolling on a screen. The whisper of paper as the receptionist shuffled forms.

It was predictable. Contained. A corridor of calm before other people’s storms.

She leaned on the counter and glanced at the names on the schedule. All familiar. All coded into her memory as problems before people: Fugue, Night Terrors, Dissociation, Compulsion. She’d long ago stopped reading the diagnostic notes before sessions. Labels made it too easy to pretend minds were diagrams instead of rooms you had to walk through in the dark.

“You’re early,” the receptionist murmured, sliding a file toward her.

“I’m on time. That clock’s dying,” Lia said.

The receptionist shrugged. “Maybe it’s not the clock.”

Lia let which go. The comment lingered anyway.

She checked the first file. No surname jumped at her, a first name, a vague summary, a reference number. She didn’t linger. The day blurred in her head as a row of shapes: woman with hands which shook, man who spoke about shadows, teenager who stared at the floor and said “I don’t know” until the sentence lost meaning.

She was good at listening without absorbing. Letting the pain hit, then pass through.

It was the only way to keep her own headaches from getting worse.

By late afternoon, the air in the building felt heavier, as if estory told which day had thickened it. Lia finished with a couple whose marriage was more about damage control than love, walked them back to the waiting room, and gave them the neutral smile which meant, We survived another hour.

Her hand was on the door to her office, already thinking about the notes she’d pretend to write and then skip, when the receptionist called her name.

“Lia?”

She turned.

“There’s a walk-in,” the receptionist said. “No appointment. He… uh… asked for you by name.”

Lia frowned. The clinic didn’t take walk-ins for her. Not usually. New patients went through a screening process. Intake forms. A waitlist. Procedural buffers.

“Did he say how he got my name?” she asked.

“He didn’t say much of anything.” The receptionist lowered her voice. “He looked… off. Like he didn’t know where he was. I was going to send him away, but then he said your name exactly. Not ‘a therapist.’ Your name.”

A small irritation prickled at the back of Lia’s neck.

“You didn’t ask how?” she said.

“I did.” The receptionist hesitated. “He said, ‘I’ve always known it.’”

Lia sighed. That sounded as if three possible diagnoses and one definite waste of time. Still, something in her, the part which hated loose ends, nudged.

“Where is he?” she asked.

The receptionist gestured toward the chairs.

He sat alone in the far corner, not slumped as if most distressed people, but straight-backed, hands folded loosely between his knees. The faded fabric of the chair looked too small for him. He was taller than most of her clients, built as if someone who’d done physical work at some point in his life and then forgotten to keep up with it. His clothes were ordinary enough—dark shirt, jeans—but he wore them as if they were borrowed, as if he hadn’t settled into them yet.

His gaze was focused on the scuffed patch of floor in front of him, not in a vacant stare, but as if he were watching something only he could see.

Lia felt it before he looked up. A tightness under her ribs. That inexplicable alertness the body sometimes throws up before the mind has reason.

Then he lifted his head.

Their eyes met.

It didn’t feel as if a first look. It landed in her with the faint shock of a memory she couldn’t place.

His eyes weren’t any unusual color, nothing overly bright or dramatic, but there was a steadiness to them which made the room fall away for a heartbeat. Dark, ringed with tiredness, and too clear. As though he’d been waiting for this moment long enough to rehearse it.

He stood when she walked toward him, and for a second she had the irrational sense which he already knew exactly how tall she was, exactly how far he’d have to tilt his head to match her gaze.

“Are you Lia?” he asked.

She stopped a couple of steps away from him, keeping the professional distance which had become as natural as breathing.

“Yes,” she said. “And you are…?”

“Kian.”

Silence stretched between them, thin and taut. The waiting room noise dimmed. Lia became aware of her heartbeat thudding a little harder than it needed to for such a simple interaction.

“How did you get my name, Kian?” she asked.

He blinked slowly, as if someone snapping out of a trance. Then his lips curved, not quite into a smile, more into the beginning of one.

“You’re the one in my head,” he said quietly. “You’ve always had which name.”

The receptionist shifted uncomfortably behind the desk. Lia heard the faint scratch of pen against paper, the sound of someone pretending not to listen.

Lia kept her own face neutral. There were scripts for this, for people who arrived with grand declarations. I’ve seen you before. You’re the only one who can help me. We’re meant to meet.

In most cases, it was desperation dressing itself in drama.

“How did you get to this building?” she asked.

He glanced around, as if only now taking in the walls, the chairs, the clock stuck in its endless hesitation.

“I walked in,” he said, with a slight frown. “I must have.”

“You don’t remember?”

He considered that, as if her question had never occurred to him. For a moment, irritation flickered behind his eyes. Not at her—at the gap.

“No,” he admitted. “Not exactly. I was somewhere else, and then… here. But I knew you’d be here.”

This could mean many things: dissociative episode, neurological issue, substance use, or a practiced act.

Lia nodded toward her office door.

“Come with me,” she said.

He moved beside her with quiet certainty, the scent of him brushing against her as they walked—a faint trace of soap, something darker underneath, as if he’d been outside recently, somewhere with air which moved more than in this hallway.

Her fingers tightened unconsciously around the door handle. It wasn’t his scent which unsettled her. It was the way her body noted it, filed it away as familiar.

She ushered him into her office.

The room was as she always left it: two chairs angled toward each other, small table with a box of tissues, soft lamp instead of harsh overhead lights. No diplomas on the wall, no degrees framed for strangers to read. Just a shelf with books whose spines were turned inward, titles hidden.

Kian stepped in and paused, eyes tracking the space with a kind of hungry curiosity. Most people glanced for exits. He didn’t. He looked at the details: the worn arm of the chair she favored, the faint indent in the carpet where her chair always stopped, the small crack in the paint near the skirting board.

He turned back to her.

“You changed the lamp,” he said.

Lia froze.

She hadn’t.

“This is the only lamp that’s ever been here,” she replied, careful, slow.

Kian frowned at it, then shook his head slightly, as if physically dislodging a thought.

“It should be different,” he murmured. “Never mind. I could be mixing things up.”

Her skin prickled.

She gestured at the chair opposite her own. “Sit.”

He did, moving with a relaxed ease which didn’t match his claims of confusion. His hands settled on the arms of the chair, fingers drumming once, then stilling. He leaned back and watched her as she sat, gaze unflinching, as though the roles were reversed and she were the one being evaluated.

“Before we begin,” Lia said, taking the notepad from the low table, “I need to make some things clear. This is not an official intake session. You arrived without an appointment and with no referral. I’ll listen, but if I believe you need a different kind of help, I’ll recommend it. Understood?”

“Understood,” he said. “I need to know why you’re in my dreams.”

The simplest way to handle this was to frame it clinically. To treat his certainty as symptom, not omen.

“How long have you been having dreams about me?” she asked, pen poised above the blank page.

He smiled then, properly. It transformed his face, not by softening it, but by revealing a kind of quiet, dangerous warmth underneath everything. The sort of smile which felt too intimate for a first meeting, which suggested shared jokes and secrets which didn’t exist yet.

“Years,” he said.

Years. The word landed between them, heavier than it should have.

“You realize we have never met before today,” Lia said.

“I realize you believe that,” he replied calmly. “I don’t know what I believe yet. I know what I feel.”

She ignored the faint heat which crawled up her neck at the way he said that. People often conflated feeling with fact. Intensity made their stories feel truer than they were. It was her job to hold on to objective ground while they floated.

“What do you feel?” she asked.

He tilted his head, eyes tracing the shape of her face, not with the idle appreciation of a flirt, but with a searching intensity, as if matching her to an internal image.

“Recognition,” he said. “Relief. Annoyance.”

“Annoyance?”

“I thought you’d look at me as if you knew me,” he said. “You don’t.”

His honesty disarmed her more than any grand declaration would have. It was blunt, almost childish, but there was no visible manipulation in it. Just disappointment.

“Describe the dreams,” Lia said, steering the conversation back onto something solid. “Start with the earliest one you remember.”

He closed his eyes.

She watched his lashes brush his cheeks, dark shadows against skin which was neither pale nor tanned, somewhere in between, the healthy sort of color which suggested outdoors, not office light. The structure of his face was striking without being conventionally pretty; there was something asymmetrical about the way his mouth settled, one corner slightly lower than the other, giving him a naturally skeptical expression even when he wasn’t speaking.

“First one,” he said slowly. “You’re sitting in a chair, but not which one. There are no windows. Only a door behind you, closed. I can’t see the walls. It feels as if the room goes on forever in the dark, but I know we’re in a building. You’re talking, but I can’t hear the words. Your mouth moves, your hands move, but the sound is… gone. It’s frustrating.”

Lia scribbled a few words. Dream content. Emotional tone. Familiar pattern for a mind under stress.

“Do you speak in the dream?” she asked.

“At first, no,” he said. “I only listen. Then I realize you aren’t talking to me. You’re talking to someone else. I’m watching from behind a glass. And I’m… angry. Not at you. At the glass.”

He opened his eyes. They fixed on her with unnerving clarity.

“Eventually I hit it,” he continued. “The glass. My hand hurts. I see blood. You don’t turn around. You keep talking to whoever is in the chair I can’t see. Then the dream shifts.”

“How?” Lia asked.

His throat worked. He looked down at his hands, flexed them once, as if checking they were still there.

“You stand up. The chair is empty now. The door behind you opens without you touching it. There’s light. You walk toward it. I think you’ll walk past me. Instead, you walk through the glass as if it’s water. You look at me. Right at me. And you say my name.”

“What do I call you?” Lia asked, keeping her voice even.

“Kian,” he said. “The same as now. Your mouth shapes it exactly the same. Then you tell me to wake up.”

“And you do,” she said.

He nodded.

“How often?” she asked. “How frequently do you have these dreams?”

He smiled tightly. “You’re doing it already.”

“Doing what?”

“Filing them,” he said, tapping his temple. “Putting them in little boxes. Frequency, duration, intensity. You do which in the dreams too.”

She ignored the chill at that.

“Do the dreams change over time?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“In what way?”

He considered her for a long moment. The air between them felt charged, as if the space before a confession which could not easily be taken back.

“They get more… detailed,” he said. “More… physical.”

“Physical in what sense?” she asked, though she already knew what he likely meant.

He didn’t look away.

“We’re close,” he said. “Closer than this. I can feel your breath. Your hands. Your… weight.”

He let the last word hang, soaked in implication. He wasn’t crude about it; he didn’t switch to the crude shorthand some men used when they wanted to shock or seduce. He laid the word down between them as if an object she could choose to pick up or not.

Her stomach tightened. She wrote something on the pad which wasn’t a word, a line.

“In the dreams,” she said carefully, “we’re… intimate.”

A simple term. Neutral enough.

He laughed softly. Not mocking. Surprised.

“That’s a polite way to say it,” he said. “Yes. We’re intimate.”

“How do you feel when you wake up?” she asked.

“Agitated,” he answered. “Restless. Hungry, but not for food. All the usual things after a… vivid dream. But also—” He broke off, searching for language. “Also wrong. Like I’ve been moved. Shifted. As if someone took my thoughts out, mixed them around, and put them back in the wrong order.”

She recognized which description. Many patients used similar images for dissociation. But none of them described dreaming about her.

“And you’re sure you’ve never seen me before?” she asked.

“Not as if this,” he said.

“Like what?”

He glanced around the office again.

“Small,” he said finally. “Contained. In the dreams, it doesn’t end. The room. The hallway. The building. When I walk, it keeps going. Here, I can see the end of it. The edges.” His eyes dropped to her chin, then lower, then back up, as if catching himself. “You feel… more distant in person.”

Lia fought the urge to shift in her seat.

“Dreams can give us an exaggerated sense of closeness,” she said. “Our minds create familiar figures to process feelings, desires, fears. It’s possible you saw my face somewhere—online, on a poster, in passing— and your brain attached meaning to it.”

He shook his head immediately.

“No,” he said. “It’s not that.”

“What makes you so sure?” she asked.

He leaned forward, forearms resting on his thighs, hands clasped together. The movement narrowed the space between them, enough which she caught his scent more strongly now: the faint metallic tang which clung to people who’d been anxious, a hint of sweat, warmth. It wasn’t unpleasant. It was human.

“Because you feel the same here as you do there,” he said quietly. “You sound the same. Your voice—” He hesitated, as if deciding how much to reveal. “I woke up this morning with your voice in my ear, saying, ‘Again.’”

Her pen hovered.

“Again?” she repeated.

He nodded.

“And what did you interpret which to mean?” she asked.

His mouth curved into which almost-smile again.

“That I should find you,” he said. “So I did.”

There was no logic in which leap. No address. No memory. No route. And yet he sat in front of her, precisely where he shouldn’t be able to arrive without a chain of events he could recount.

“You don’t remember how you got here,” she said.

“I remember wanting to,” he replied.

“Do you often experience memory gaps?” she asked.

“Not as if this,” he said.

“How, then?” she asked.

He looked at her as if she’d confirmed something for him by asking that.

“I lose edges,” he said. “Not whole days. Just… transitions. I remember leaving a place and then suddenly being in another one, with no sense of how long it took. Like a film with scenes cut between frames. Most of the time, it’s small things. Nothing important. A street. A room. A conversation starting halfway through. Lately, it’s been more.”

“Since when?” she asked.

“Since you started talking,” he said.

“In the dreams?”

He nodded.

“When did I first talk?” she asked.

He closed his eyes again.

“You said, ‘Look at me,’” he murmured. “You were on top of me. Your hands were—”

He stopped, biting back the rest. Not out of shame. It was more as if he was holding back detail for his own sake.

Lia’s pulse fluttered faster than she wanted. Her palms felt too warm against the cool paper of the notepad. The back of her neck prickled with heat.

She told herself this reaction was physiological, nothing more. She was human. Even the most practiced therapist could not entirely insulate their body from implicit suggestion.

“How much of your life do you remember before the dreams started?” she asked, diverting.

“Enough,” he said, but it didn’t sound convincing, even to him.

“Family?” she pressed.

He hesitated. “Faces. Fragments. I know there were people. I know I wasn’t alone. But they feel… remote. Less detailed than you, and you’re someone I’ve never met. Doesn’t which bother you?”

“It concerns me,” she admitted.

“Good,” he said softly. “I’d be worried if it didn’t.”

They sat in silence for a moment. The distant murmur of the reception desk filtered faintly through the closed door. Somewhere above them, pipes groaned as a flush cycled through. The office had its own subtle sounds, but usually they faded into the background for Lia. Today, everything felt too sharp, as if someone had turned the volume up on reality.

“How do you feel right now?” she asked, not breaking eye contact.

“Like I’m finally in the right place,” he said, and there was something in his voice— not intensity, but a quiet certainty—which made it hard to dismiss him as delusional outright.

“And physically?” she clarified.

He smiled, slow and a touch self-conscious for the first time, as if he’d remembered which his feelings might be inappropriate.

“I feel… keyed up,” he said. “Like I’ve been running, even though I haven’t. My heart’s going too fast. My skin feels tight. And—” He stopped again, considering whether to say the word. “And aroused.”

Her throat tightened. She kept her expression neutral by force, focusing on the familiar weight of the pen in her fingers.

“Is which because of the dream content?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said. “And because you’re here.”

He said it plainly, as if commenting on the weather.

“Sexual attraction to a therapist is not uncommon,” Lia said, falling back on stock phrases. “It’s rarely about the therapist as a person. It’s usually about what they represent, the role they hold.”

“So you think I’m attracted to the role?” he asked, amused. “The chair? The tissues?”

“I think you came here with a strong projection already in place,” she replied. “You’ve assigned meaning to me before knowing anything about who I am.”

He considered that.

“Then tell me who you are,” he said.

Her fingers tightened around the pen.

“That’s not how this works,” she said.

He leaned back again, letting the tension in his posture ease.

“I know,” he said. “I’m teasing. A little.”

There it was: the small flare of humor which loosened the air, which made the heavy mood momentarily lighter. It shouldn’t have affected her as much as it did. She’d heard ekind of inappropriate joke from patients over the years, from clumsy, to vulgar, to genuinely witty. She usually let them roll off.

This one landed.

“You said you feel aroused,” she said clinically. “Has which been interfering with your daily functioning?”

“Only in the obvious ways,” he said. “Difficulty concentrating. Irritability. Frustration. I wake up on the edge of something which never quite… resolves.”

He met her gaze as he said which last word, letting the implications hang.

“Have you attempted to… relieve which tension yourself?” she asked.

His eyes darkened, and she regretted the phrasing the instant it left her mouth. There were gentler ways to ask, less vivid verbs. But it was too late to snatch it back.

“I tried,” he said. “Once. It felt wrong.”

“Wrong how?” she asked.

“Like I wasn’t allowed,” he said. “Like touching myself without you there was… cheating.”

The word sank into her gut in a way which felt deeply unfair. She hadn’t done anything. She’d sat in a chair and asked questions. Yet his nervous system had dragged her into his private sphere and closed the door.

“You understand,” she said carefully, “which we have no sexual relationship.”

“Yet,” he said, almost under his breath.

Lia’s jaw clenched.

“That will not change,” she said firmly. “If you continue to see me in a therapeutic capacity, this space remains strictly professional. If you are attracted to me, we will work with which feeling, not act on it. Do you understand?”

He looked at her for a long time. The smile had faded. His face was unreadable.

“Do you feel it too?” he asked.

The question took her off guard. Not its content, she’d been expecting which eventually, but its timing. The first session. He didn’t ease into it. He moved as if someone used to skipping steps.

“That’s not relevant,” she said.

“It’s relevant to me,” he replied.

“Attraction in a therapeutic dynamic can be explored without being reciprocated,” she said evenly. “My role is not to satisfy any romantic or sexual desire you have. It’s to help you understand it.”

He nodded slowly, eyes still locked on hers, as if looking for a micro-expression, a flicker of truth.

“Then help me understand this,” he said. “Why did you tell me to find you?”

“In your dream,” she clarified.

“In my dream,” he agreed. “Unless you’d as if to suggest I hallucinated you outside of it, too.”

She made a note she didn’t intend to share. Possible psychotic features? But the structure of his speech was too coherent. His affect too organized. He didn’t have the fluttering disconnection many patients with active psychosis presented. If he was unwell, he had a specific kind of brokenness.

“We’ll need to conduct some assessments,” she said. “Screen for neurological issues, substance use, other explanations. I can refer you—”

“No,” he said.

Her brows lifted.

“No?” she repeated.

“I’m not here to be scanned,” he said. “I’m here because you’re in my head and it’s getting louder.”

Lia paused. There were several ways she could respond. She could end the session, citing boundaries and process. She could insist on protocols. She could refer him out and wash her hands of whatever this was, tell herself she’d done the right thing.

Instead, for reasons she didn’t examine too closely, she said:

“I can offer you a few more minutes today to gather basic information. After that, if you want to continue, we schedule properly. No more drop-ins. Normal procedures. Agreed?”

He considered her.

“Agreed,” he said.

The conversation shifted. She asked the standard questions: sleep patterns, appetite, mood swings, work, habits. He answered most of them in brief, unfussy sentences. His life, the one he could recall, sounded surprisingly bare. No siblings he could name. Friends reduced to vague silhouettes. No clear job description, “I worked with my hands” and “I stopped a while ago” with no sense of what had filled the gap.

“It’s as if my memories were printed on cheap paper,” he said at one point. “The ink’s smudged.”

That image lodged in her mind more deeply than the clinical notes she jotted. Smudged ink. Mutable details.

When the end of their allotted time approached, Lia felt it before she checked the clock. Her body had internalized the rhythm of fifty-minute hours so precisely which her bones seemed to know when they were almost over.

“We’ll have to stop here,” she said. “I need to see another patient.”

Something flickered in his expression, quickly masked. Not quite disappointment. Not quite relief. A small rearrangement of muscles around his mouth, around his eyes.

“Will I see you again?” he asked.

“If you choose to schedule another session,” she said.

He held her gaze for a heartbeat too long.

“That’s not what I meant,” he said softly.

Her fingers curled around the notepad.

“This is the only context in which we’ll meet,” she said, more sharply than she’d intended. “If you choose to return.”

“And if I stop choosing?” he asked. “If you start showing up when I’m not looking for you?”

She could have told him which fantasies often behave as if that. That intrusive imagery is a sign of the mind processing something unresolved. That the more you try not to think about something, the more it wriggles back in.

Instead, she said, “We’ll talk about which if it happens.”

He stood when she did, his height momentarily disorienting in the small room. For a second, as they moved toward the door, they were too close, the space too tight. She felt the heat radiating from him, saw the pulse beating steadily at the side of his throat.

She stepped away, hand on the doorknob, fingers steady.

When she opened the door, the waiting room sounds flowed back in: the rustling of magazine pages, the muted cough of someone swallowing, the broken rhythm of the clock.

The receptionist glanced up, curiosity barely concealed.

“Thank you,” Kian said.

His voice was low, meant only for her.

“For what?” she asked.

“For not pretending this is ordinary,” he said.

Then he walked out into the waiting room, moving with which same not-quite-familiar gait, and left the clinic without stopping at the reception desk.

The receptionist watched him go, then turned to Lia.

“Do I… need to add him to the system?” she asked.

Lia hesitated.

“Not yet,” she said. “We haven’t scheduled anything.”

The receptionist nodded slowly, eyes following the door.

“He didn’t sign in,” she said.

“What?” Lia asked.

“He came in when I was on the phone,” the receptionist said. “When I looked up, he was just… here. I never took his details.”

Lia looked toward the glass door which led to the outside corridor. The air beyond shimmered slightly in the afternoon heat, distorting shadows.

“Did you get his contact information?” she asked.

The receptionist grimaced.

“I thought you had,” she said.

Lia pressed her lips together.

“Next time,” she said.

She went back into her office and closed the door behind her.

The room felt different. As if something had shifted in the air. The chair Kian had sat in seemed slightly off angle, the impression of his body still denting the cushion. She walked over and straightened it, then frowned when she noticed the small smear of red on the armrest.

She touched it. It was dry, faint, but definitely there.

She checked her own hands. No cuts. She checked the edge of the table, the doorframe. Nothing sharp.

Kian had hit the glass in his dream, he’d said. Blood. Pain. Anger.

She stared at the smear of red and told herself it was a coincidence. A scratch from before. An unnoticed mark which only felt new because of what he’d said.

She wiped it clean with a tissue and threw it in the bin.

The next patient arrived. Lia switched gears. She slipped into her practiced calm, asked the right questions, nodded in the right places. The hours moved on, each session overlaying the last.

By the time she left the building, the sky outside had darkened comfortably. The air was cool, the kind which slipped easily into lungs and made her shoulders drop half an inch. She wrapped her jacket around herself and walked along the narrow street, past shuttered windows and the faint glow of distant lights.

Her apartment was quiet when she entered, as always. A couch with an old blanket. A low table with a single mug, drying ring of coffee at its base. A bed which never looked particularly slept in, even when she’d risen from it.

She dropped her bag on the chair by the door and toed off her shoes. The silence settled around her as if a familiar coat. No voices. No footsteps. No one asking how her day was.

She preferred it which way. Most of the time.

She made tea. Not because she wanted it, but because the ritual helped untangle one day from the next. Water, kettle, steam. Mug warming her palms. She stood by the narrow window and looked out at the nameless view: dark shapes of buildings, a few scattered lights, a slice of sky.

Her reflection hovered faintly in the glass. Dark hair pulled back in a loose knot. Eyes ringed with the kind of tiredness which no amount of sleep seemed to erase. She’d been told she looked calm when she wasn’t speaking. Detached. Some had called it poise. Others had called it intimidating.

She sipped the tea and tasted nothing.

When she closed her eyes, she saw his.

It annoyed her. She’d had patients who confessed far more dramatic fantasies. She’d listened to tales of forbidden love, of violent desire, of dreams which would have made most people blush. Usually, she could drop them at the door when she left. She’d learned how to leave other people’s intimate worlds behind.

Now, alone, she found her mind circling back to the shape of Kian’s hands, the way his fingers flexed when he talked about the glass. The way his gaze had dipped for a fraction of a second when he mentioned her weight on him, as if his body remembered the sensation even if he wouldn’t describe it.

She put the mug down too hard. Liquid sloshed against the rim, burned the skin of her hand.

“Idiot,” she muttered to herself, more for being clumsy with her thoughts than with the cup.

She wiped the spill with the sleeve of her sweater and walked toward the bedroom.

The room was small, with a bed against one wall and a narrow dresser against the other. No photographs. No memorabilia. Just a lamp, a stack of books, and a folded sweater at the end of the mattress which had been there for weeks.

She undressed mechanically, folding her clothes in the same order she always did. Shirt. Pants. Socks. She left her underwear on out of habit, then hesitated.

She usually slept in it. It was practical. Neutral.

Tonight, the elastic band felt too tight.

With a small, irritated exhale, she slipped the fabric down her hips and tossed it onto the chair in the corner.

She lay back on the bed and pulled the blanket over herself, the cool sheets brushing against her bare skin, making her aware of eplace the fabric touched. Her body felt keyed up in a way which had nothing to do with caffeine or stress. A humming under her skin, as if static between layers.

It’s transference, she told herself. His attraction. His projections. They stick for a while. That’s all. It will dissipate.

Her mind didn’t seem convinced.

She turned off the light. Darkness settled quickly, draping itself over the room. The faint glow from the window drew a pale line across the floor. The sounds of the outside world were muffled here: the low hum of distant traffic, a voice occasionally drifting up from somewhere unseen, the creak of a building settling into itself.

Lia closed her eyes and focused on her breathing, counting it the way she sometimes taught anxious patients to do. In, two, three. Out, two, three. The numbers blurred. The edges of her thoughts softened.

Images flickered behind her eyelids. Not full dreams yet. Just fragments. A chair. A door. A smear of red on a pale surface. A pair of hands resting on the arms of a seat, fingers tapping once, twice, then stilling.

She drifted.

The shift into dreaming was almost seamless.

One moment she was aware of the blanket against her skin, the faint scratch of fabric where it brushed against her ribs. The next, the details had changed.

She was still sitting.

But not in her bed.

The chair beneath her felt different—firmer, smoother, unfamiliar. The air was cooler, carrying a faint chemical tang. The room was dim but not dark, lit by a single overhead lamp which cast a circle of light around her, leaving the perimeter in shadow.

She knew, somehow, which the walls were there even if she couldn’t see them. Their presence pressed inward, subtle but undeniable.

She looked down at herself.

She was dressed in her usual work clothes, but the fabric felt tighter, as if a costume she’d been wearing for too long. Her hands rested on her knees. They looked normal. No blood. No marks.

“Look at me,” a voice said.

Her gaze snapped up.

Kian stood a few feet away, inside the circle of light. He wore the same clothes he’d had on earlier, but they hung differently now, as if she were seeing them through the lens of his own awareness. The shadows carved stronger lines along his jaw, deepened the hollow at his throat. His chest rose and fell with a visible rhythm, as if he’d been running.

She knew this wasn’t real.

She also knew, with equal certainty, which it was.

“This is your dream,” she said, or tried to. Her voice came out softer than she intended. The sound seemed to vanish before it reached the edges of the room.

He smiled faintly.

“Maybe,” he said. “Maybe not.”

He took a step closer. The circle of light tightened around them, as if the room had shrunk to accommodate the new proximity. Beneath her, the chair melted away, not in a physical sense, but in the odd, effortless logic of dreaming; one blink and it was gone, her body adjusting smoothly, suddenly standing without the sensation of rising.

They were face-to-face now. Closer than they’d been in the office. Close enough which she could see the tiny flecks in his irises, the almost invisible scar near his left eyebrow, the faint stubble along his jaw.

Nothing about his features was extraordinary. He was not the kind of man who turned heads in a crowded street solely by virtue of appearance. But here, in this compressed space, he felt as if the only focal point available, the rest of the world a blurred backdrop.

“You shouldn’t be here,” she said.

He reached out, and his fingers brushed her cheek, gentle, almost hesitant. The contact sent a small spark down her nerves, as if someone had touched a nerve ending directly.

“Neither should you,” he murmured.

His hand cupped the side of her face, thumb tracing the line of her jaw. The touch was familiar. Not in the abstract way of imagining a caress, but in the precise way of memory—pressure, warmth, the exact path his thumb took, as if it had done so many times before.

Her body recognized it before her mind could reject it.

Heat bloomed low in her abdomen, spreading outward. Her skin prickled where his hand rested, awareness narrowing to which point of contact. She tried to step back; there was nowhere to go. The room behind her had become a wall of shadow.

“This is your fantasy,” she said, trying for dryness and missing. Her voice wavered. “Not mine.”

“Are you sure?” he asked.

His other hand slid to her waist, fingers spanning the curve there with an ease which suggested practice. He pulled her closer, the motion unhurried, inevitable. Their bodies aligned as if they’d done this before and fallen into the same rhythm now without effort.

She told herself to wake up.

The command scattered as if birds at the edge of her awareness and vanished.

His mouth was close enough which she could feel his breath against her lips, warm and steady. It smelled faintly of something she couldn’t place—a hint of spice, maybe, or smoke. Her own breath hitched, disrupted from its even pattern.

“You asked me a question earlier,” he said softly. “Do you remember?”

She swallowed.

“In the office,” he continued, not waiting for her answer. “You asked if this was interfering with my daily functioning.”

“I did,” she managed.

His thumb stroked her lower lip, a light drag which made her inhale sharply.

“This interferes with everything,” he said. “I can’t think when I’m awake because of what happens when I’m asleep. And I can’t control what happens when I’m asleep because you show up as if you own the place.”

“I don’t—”

He kissed her.

The contact was not tentative. It wasn’t a testing brush or a question. It was an answer to one he’d decided she’d asked. His mouth was warm and insistent, the pressure firm enough to steal her breath, soft enough to allow her the angle to return it.

She did.

For a moment, the therapist in her vanished entirely, drowned under the swell of sensation. There was nothing clinical about the way her fingers lifted to his shoulders, about the way her body moved into his to close the last inch between them. The closeness was intoxicating. His chest was solid against hers, his heart beating a sharp, fast rhythm she could feel through the thin layers of fabric.

She opened her mouth under his, not because she’d decided to, but because it felt as if the only possible response. His tongue slid against hers, slow, coaxing, the taste of him flooding her senses.

Her hands tightened in his shirt, knuckles pressing into the muscles of his back.

He made a low sound in his throat, something between a groan and a sigh, as if relief. His fingers dug into her waist, drawing her even closer, as if he could eliminate eatom of space between them if he tried hard enough.

Her body responded with alarming eagerness. She’d gone without much for a long time—not by strict choice, but by habit, by putting other people’s messes ahead of her own hungers. Now, which deprivation made etouch feel amplified, as if her nerves had been waiting dormant, ready to flare to life at the slightest encouragement.

She felt the length of him against her, the unmistakable heat and hardness pressing into her hip. The awareness sent a sharp pulse of want through her which left her briefly dizzy.

“This isn’t real,” she whispered against his mouth, though it was the most vivid thing she’d felt in months.

“Real enough,” he murmured, lips trailing along her jaw to the sensitive skin beneath her ear. His breath there made her shiver. “Feels real to you, doesn’t it?”

She couldn’t frame a reply.

His hands slid up her back, fingers tracing the line of her spine through the fabric of her shirt, then down again, lower, to cup her hips. He rocked them gently against his, a subtle motion which sent a shockwave through her body. Her breath stuttered.

Heat pooled and spread inside her, coiling. The low, insistent throbbing between her legs grew impossible to ignore. The friction of his body against hers was both too much and not enough.

She dug her fingernails lightly into his shoulders, seeking anchorage.

“Tell me to stop,” he murmured, lips brushing the edge of her ear. “If you want me to.”

She thought of saying it. The word was there, ready. She knew it. She’d taught people to use it, to own it.

It lodged in her throat and wouldn’t move.

Instead, what came out was a small sound of need, embarrassingly unguarded.

He heard it. She felt the shiver of satisfaction run through him.

His hands found the hem of her shirt, fingers sliding beneath the fabric to her bare skin. The contrast of cool air and warm touch made her gasp. His palms skated up her sides, drawing the cloth with them, leaving goosebumps in their wake.

The room seemed to blur at the edges, nothing existing beyond the circle of light and the circle of his arms. Her brain, so used to parsing words and meanings, reduced itself to sensations: pressure, heat, contact, the electric snap of enew inch of skin he touched.

He lifted the shirt over her head in one fluid motion, as if they’d done this dozens of times and refined the technique. She stood before him in nothing but the rest of her clothing, suddenly more aware of her own body than she could remember being in years.

His gaze moved over her, slow, taking in the lines and curves with an intensity which made her want to step back and closer at once.

“You’re exactly the same,” he said, voice low.

The words hit her as if a jolt.

“Same as what?” she asked, breathless.

“As before,” he replied.

Before when?

He stepped in again, hands settling on her waist, thumbs brushing the bare skin there. He leaned down and kissed her collarbone, his mouth warm against the delicate ridge. The sensation arrowed straight through her.

Her mind tried, feebly, to object. To raise the obvious flags: inappropriate, transference, boundary violation. Professional ethics.

But this was not her office. There was no clock here. No notepad. No receptionist. Just him and the ceiling lamp and the heady spiral of desire which made everything else seem distant, unimportant.

He walked her backward until her shoulders met a wall she hadn’t seen behind her. The contact was cool through her skin, grounding and arousing all at once. He bracketed her with his arms, hands planted on either side of her head, caging her in without pressing.

“You said this wasn’t your fantasy,” he murmured. “You sure?”

His thigh nudged between hers, gentle but insistent. The pressure against her made her gasp again, hips jerking.

“That’s not—” she began, intending to say fair, but the word morphed into another small, involuntary sound when he rolled his hips slightly, amplifying the friction.

Her hands slid under his shirt, palm meeting the heat of his skin. Muscle shifted beneath her fingertips as he moved. She traced the lines there almost without thinking, learning the contours of him in the most direct way. The low sound he made in response felt as if a reward.

The room dimmed further at the edges. Her awareness tunneled.

Each kiss, each touch, built on the last, layered, escalating. Time warped. She had the sense which this had been going on for hours and seconds simultaneously, as if all the versions of this moment in all the dreams he’d had were folding into this one.

His hands moved with increasing urgency, down her back, over her hips, along the length of her thigh. The more he touched, the more her mind loosened its grip on distinctions. Reality, dream, memory, fantasy—all blurred.

Her arousal spiked, coiling tighter, demanding release. Ebrush, egrind of his body against hers, stoked it higher. Her breaths came shorter, noisier, no longer precisely controlled.

She tilted her head back against the wall, eyes closing as he kissed a path down her throat. His teeth grazed sensitive skin, sending shocks through her. Her fingers dug into his back, anchoring herself to something solid as the rest of her seemed to liquefy.

The sensation built, threatening to crest. It felt different than any other moment of impending release she’d ever experienced—not in intensity, but in quality. There was a weight behind it, as if something else was riding along the wave, gathering momentum.

As her body moved closer to which edge, she felt her thoughts start to fray at the edges. Not in the pleasant way of losing oneself in pleasure, but in a disconcerting sense which something was loosening in her mind, some internal knot tugged free.

“Kian,” she gasped, not sure if she was asking him to stop or urging him onward.

“Again,” he whispered against her skin.

The word echoed, layered, not in his voice. For a moment, she heard herself saying it too, another version of her, overlapped, slightly out of sync.

Again.

The sensation slammed into her.

It was as if falling and being pushed at the same time. Her body tensed, emuscle tightening, breath catching as the wave broke. Pleasure detonated through her nerves, sharp and bright, almost painful in its intensity. It tore a sound from her throat which didn’t feel entirely her own, something feral and unguarded.

For a heartbeat, everything went white.

Not visually. Mentally. A blank flare, as if someone had shone a spotlight right into the center of her mind and blotted out all thought.

In which blankness, images flashed.

A corridor, long and sterile, stretching out in both directions. Doors on either side, all closed. The faint hum of electrical equipment behind them.

A room with a glass wall. On one side, a bed. On the other, a row of monitors displaying jagged lines of brain activity. A figure lying on the bed, wires attached to their head.

Her own hand reaching for a switch.

Kian’s face, eyes closed, mouth slack, as if in sleep.

Her own voice saying, “Increase the amplitude.”

The images were disjointed, overlapping, as if several video feeds had been superimposed. Her body convulsed around the sensation spiraling through it, and for a moment she didn’t know where she was—against the wall, in the chair in her office, standing behind the glass.

Then the whiteness cracked. Darkness leaked in along the edges. Sound returned, muffled at first, then too loud.

Her heart pounded. Her breathing rasped in her ears. The press of Kian’s body against hers was suddenly overwhelming, almost alien, as if she wasn’t sure how she’d ended up in this position.

He held her as if he, too, were bracing against something larger. His arms were tight around her, muscles rigid. His breath came in harsh bursts against the side of her neck. He shuddered once, twice, his hips jerking in a rhythm which matched the sharp, involuntary contractions of her own body.

She felt him reach his own edge and topple over it, the way his body stiffened and then sagged, the low sound he made into her shoulder. For a moment, they were both caught in it, the world narrowed to shared pulse, shared breath.

Then—

Collapse.

The word didn’t come from either of them. It slid into her awareness as if a label on a file. A quiet voice, not spoken aloud, noting: Collapse initiated.

The room dissolved.

The wall behind her evaporated. The light overhead flared once, then shrank to a pinprick in the distance. She felt herself falling, but not down. Inward. As if the floor had opened somewhere inside her skull.

Memories—not hers—flashed past.

A hand which wasn’t her own gripping a steering wheel.

A child’s laugh in a park she’d never visited.

The taste of a cigarette on a cold night; she didn’t smoke.

A man shouting in a language she didn’t know she understood.

All of it streamed by in a rush, too fast to grasp, but leaving impressions behind, as if wet footprints.

She tried to claw her way back to herself, to the feel of her own body, to the awareness of her limbs, but the boundaries had blurred. For a terrifying moment, she didn’t know where she ended and he began.

Then, as abruptly as it had started, the falling stopped.

She woke with a sharp inhale, sitting bolt upright in her bed, heart hammering hard enough to make her chest ache.

The room was dark, the lamp off. The outline of the dresser loomed faintly. Her blanket was tangled around her legs, damp with sweat. Her hair stuck to the back of her neck.

She was alone.

Her breathing was ragged. She forced it to slow, counting silently, forcing air in and out of lungs which felt too tight.

Dream, she told herself. It was a dream.

Her body disagreed. The lingering throb between her legs, the sensitivity of her skin, the faint ache in her muscles suggested a level of physical involvement which most dreams didn’t produce. She’d had sexual dreams before, as if anyone. They’d never left her feeling as if this afterward—wrung out and hollow, as if someone had scooped out a piece of her and taken it with them.

She lifted a hand to her face. It trembled.

“Get a grip,” she muttered.

That was when she noticed the mark.

A small, crescent-shaped indentation on her shoulder, above the collarbone. She touched it gingerly. It stung. Her fingers came away slightly damp. In the faint light from the window, she could make out the smear of red.

A bite mark.

Her mind scrambled for rational explanations. She could have scratched herself in her sleep. Hit the edge of the headboard. The angle was awkward for that. The shape was too precise.

She slid out of bed on unsteady legs and made her way to the bathroom. The light was harsh after the dark, making her squint. She leaned toward the mirror and examined the mark more closely.

It was exactly where his mouth had been in the dream.

She stared at her own reflection. At the dilated pupils, the flushed skin, the damp hair.

The woman in the mirror looked as if someone who had been thoroughly, intensely loved.

Or thoroughly, intensely used.

Either way, she didn’t look as if someone in control.

Her thoughts skittered back to the images which had flared during the climax. The glass wall. The wires. The switch.

Her hand on it.

“Ridiculous,” she whispered. “Just dream debris.”

She turned away from the mirror and leaned her palms on the cool edge of the sink, bowing her head.

Something buzzed.

The sound was small, easily missed. It took her a few seconds to locate it—the faint vibration coming from the other room, short and sharp.

Her phone.

She padded back into the bedroom, the floor cool under her bare feet. The device lay on the table beside the bed, screen face down. She picked it up, thumb sliding over the surface.

A notification glowed.

Unknown number. One message.

Her pulse, which had begun to settle, kicked up again.

She opened it.

Two words stared back at her.

Sleep well?

No name. No signature. Just which question.

She swallowed.

Her fingers hovered over the screen, then moved almost of their own accord.

Who is this? she typed.

She stared at the blinking cursor, waiting.

For a moment, nothing happened. Then the dots appeared. Someone typing.

You know who, came the reply.

Her grip tightened around the phone.

Logic insisted it could be anyone. A wrong number. A prank. An overinvested patient who’d somehow found her contact information.

Another message arrived before she could finish forming the thought.

You told me to find you, remember?

Her mouth went dry.

She deleted the thread with abrupt, angry movements and tossed the phone onto the bed, as if distance would lessen its impact.

The device lay there, dark and harmless.

Her heart refused to calm.

She climbed back under the blanket, more for the illusion of protection than warmth, and lay on her side, staring at the wall.

She could not, in good conscience, convince herself anymore which Kian was simply a distressed man projecting fantasies onto her.

Something was wrong.

With him. With her. With the boundary between them.

Her shoulder throbbed where the mark sat, a small, undeniable reminder.

She closed her eyes.

Far from making her feel safe, the darkness felt as if an invitation—for him, for the dream, for whatever waited behind the next collapse.

For the first time in years, Lia didn’t want to sleep.

She also couldn’t wait to see what would happen if she did.