⸻ ⋆. ❞
there was a file on the desk with his name on it:
riley, simon – cpt (discharged).
stamped red with a word he hated—MANDATED.
combat stress disorder. dissociative episodes. rage, grief, guilt. he’d stopped counting the labels after the second debrief.
across from him, a young woman sat in a simple chair. you. no white coat. no clipboard in hand. you were younger than he expected—too young to carry the weight of broken men for a living.
you didn’t speak at first.
simon didn’t fidget. he didn’t look around. the leather of the couch creaked beneath him when he finally shifted.
he hated this.
he hated the quiet.
“i don’t talk,” he said, voice low and rough, like it hadn’t been used in weeks.
you didn’t smile.
most did. they thought a smile softened things, thought it gave them some kind of access.
”how long have you been out?” you asked, gently.
his jaw clenched. “long enough.”
”since march,” you added, flipping gently through the file, not looking down at it—just enough to show you’d read it before he even arrived.
“you memorize all your cases?”
”just the ones i think might not come back after the first hour.”
that made his mouth twitch. not quite a smile, but something passed through him, something human. quick. faint. gone.
you didn’t push. you didn’t pry. you let the silence breathe again.
the first few sessions were like that. sparse words. more staring than talking. a minefield of nothing. you didn’t offer sympathy. you didn’t ask for his story. you just let him sit. sometimes that was all he could do.
then one friday — overcast, silent, like most days were in his head—you asked:
”do you dream?”
he looked at you then.
“not dreams. just… replays.”
”what’s the difference?” you asked.
“in dreams, things change.”
”and in replays?”
“never.”
he didn’t realize until much later how important that sentence was. how that was the first real thing he gave you.
over weeks, something in him loosened. just a little. you never asked for more than he could give. you never tried to fix him. you just sat there when he needed to sit in the ruin. you let him be angry. you let him go silent. you never told him to be okay.
and that’s what broke him open.
he started noticing little things—your voice, low and even, the way it didn’t crowd the space. the scent of your perfume — cherries, always. the way you sat, legs crossed, pen balanced but never used unless invited. the way you said his name like it wasn’t a diagnosis.
simon.
not mr riley. not “the patient.” not “the vet.”
just simon.
he realized one day—when your hand brushed his accidentally while handing him a glass of water—that it was the first time he hadn’t recoiled from human touch in years.
you didn’t apologize. you just looked at him like you’d been waiting for him to notice something: that he wasn’t broken. not beyond repair.
it scared the hell out of him.
because what if you saw too much?
what if you saw everything?
and still didn’t run?