of my twenties in college. While my buddies were out getting drunk and chasing girls, I was holed up in the university library. I took every unpaid practicum, internship, and residency I could get my hands on for additional experience. And within five years of earning my doctorate in psychology, I became one of the most sought-after, well-respected cognitive behavioral therapists in the metro Atlanta area.
There isn’t a single disorder in the DSM-5 that I can’t treat.
Except hers.
The doors open on the fifth floor, and my hard-soled shoes make a satisfying racket as I stomp across the polished tiled floor and down a hallway painted a color we in the mental health world refer to as “agreeable gray.” At the end of the hall, I yank open a metal door marked EMERGENCY EXIT. The concrete stairwell is meant to take people down to the street in case of a fire, but it will also lead you up to the roof in the event that you’ve been playing with fire—or in my case, a certain fiery redhead who is now making a spectacle of herself and forcing me to dance for her like a marionette.
When I get to the top of the stairs, I take a steadying breath and choose my thoughts carefully.
She is not going to jump. Therefore, she has no power over you. You are calm. You are concerned. You are in control.
With a deep breath, I assume my neutral therapist expression and push the roof access door wide open. It’s overcast today, and windy, but the threat of rain has done nothing to cool the humid spring air swirling across the hot black roof.
Avery is standing on the raised ledge directly in front of me with a triumphant smirk on her full pink lips. She’s dressed in her usual “oversexualized lawyer” attire—as I’ve come to conceptualize it. Her crisp navy-blue dress clings to every curve of her hourglass figure and ends a few inches higher than any judge would consider appropriate. The three-inch heels on her nude pumps make the legs she’s showing off look an extra mile long. Her coppery auburn hair, which usually falls around her shoulders in salon-perfect waves, now ripples in the breeze behind her like a villainous cape. She is cunning, confident, manipulative, and remorseless.
A classic psychopath.
I didn’t see it right away, simply because Avery didn’t want me to see it. She came in claiming to have symptoms of borderline personality disorder, and insisted that she was ready to do the deep work needed to make progress. She said she sought me out after seeing my interview on 60 Minutes about the disorder. She came in every week, right on time. She flattered me. She flirted with me. She pretended to have the disorder, pretended to be improving when, really, all she was doing was seducing me.
That’s what psychopaths do. Their brains are completely incapable of feeling empathy, and thus, the only thing they learn through therapy is how to be better psychopaths. Avery sees people as objects that will give her what she wants if she plays them the right way, pushes the right buttons. And what she wants, what she’s wanted since the moment she saw my piece on 60 Minutes, is me.
I wish I could say the feeling wasn’t mutual. But I am a man, after all. And Avery is…Avery is a goddamn bombshell. And I’m not just referring to her body, which she takes great pride in dangling in front of me like a juicy steak, but also her razor-sharp mind. Her megawatt smile. Her self-confident charisma. Her sexy, throaty laugh.
I knew by our second session that she was malingering as something she wasn’t, but I kept seeing her week after week. I played along, acting like I didn’t know exactly what she was because I’m attracted to her. Plain and simple. I enjoyed having my ego stroked by a beautiful, powerful woman, and yesterday, that careless indulgence blew up in my face.
Avery arrived to her appointment five minutes early, wearing a form-fitting gray suit and a provocative smile. I found out why a few moments later when she hung her purse and blazer on a hook by the door and took her seat in the armchair across from me.
Avery wasn’t wearing a bra.
Her perky, peaked nipples strained against the silky blush-colored fabric of her blouse as she lazily arched her back and tossed her thick auburn hair over her shoulder. I became aroused immediately, and she knew it.