Doctor Feel Good

"I shouldn't have called you."

Will Barton's voice dragged over the line, rough and soaked in liquor, nothing like the easy grin he brought into her office every Thursday. Georgia sat up in bed and caught the blue-white glow of the clock on the nightstand. 3:17 a.m.

"Where are you?" she asked.

Down the hall, a floorboard gave a soft creak near the guest room Richard had taken for the night. Georgia lowered her voice anyway and swung her feet to the floor.

"Hotel. Downtown. The Belmont." He let out a short, ugly laugh. "Suite 1204. I know you shouldn't come. I know that. I just needed someone who isn't going to hand me over to a columnist or my father."

She crossed to the closet and yanked out the first sweater her hand hit.

He had her private number. He was drunk. He was alone in a hotel at three in the morning. Each fact landed hard and clean.

"Are you hurt?"

"Depends how generous we're being."

"Will. Answer me."

A pause.

Then, quieter, "No. Not hurt. Just alone. Please come. Twenty minutes. I won't make this worse than it already is. I just need one person who doesn't want a piece of me."

She should have ended the call and reached for every proper option instead. A hotline. An emergency contact. His sponsor if he had one. The list of what a careful therapist did was long, and she knew every item on it.

Instead she was already pulling on jeans.

"Stay in the suite," she said. "I'm coming."

The Belmont's garage gate lifted after the attendant checked the room number against a screen and waved her through without interest. In the elevator, she used the spare key waiting at the desk under Will Barton's name, the clerk's face blank with expensive training.

By the time the doors opened on twelve, the carpet had swallowed the last sound of the lobby.

She turned right.

The hallway ran long and hushed under shaded sconces. Cream wallpaper. Thick carpet. Doors spaced for people who paid to keep the world outside them. Georgia found 1204 and knocked twice.

The door opened at once.

Will looked stripped down in the worst way. His shirt hung half-open, one cuff still fastened, the other loose. His dark blond hair was pushed up and wrecked by impatient hands. His eyes were red and bright, as if sleep and anger had both missed him.

"You came."

"Move."

He stepped aside without a joke, and that frightened her more than the slur in his voice.

Georgia entered and heard the door shut behind her. Locks turned. One, then the other.

The suite spread out in quiet wealth after the narrow hall outside it. A sitting area faced a wall of glass over the city. A jacket lay on the floor beside a leather chair. A crystal tumbler rested on the low table next to a bottle on its side and a spill he had half-heartedly blotted with a hotel napkin.

Past the open bedroom door, the bed remained smooth and untouched.

He hadn't come here for s*x. He'd come here to come apart in private.

That should have made this easier. It didn't.

Will walked to the window and braced one hand on the glass. Downtown glittered below him, all that money and exposure packed into neat lines of light.

"I was at Marcus Lyle's place," he said. "Poker game. Very tasteful self-destruction. Catered, expensive whiskey, people pretending not to watch each other bleed."

Georgia stayed by the sofa instead of following him. "And?"

"And I won thirty grand, lost sixty, won it back, and spent the whole night waiting for my father to hear about it before sunrise." He rubbed a hand over his mouth. "Marcus's crowd loves a collapse as long as it wears a good watch."

She took in the room again because looking directly at him for too long made her careless. The suite smelled faintly of peat and hotel detergent. Somewhere beyond the glass, a siren passed and faded. The thermostat pushed out cool air that lifted the damp edge of his shirt collar.

Will turned from the window and leaned back against it.

"Tonight he finally said it out loud. Arthur wants an engagement announcement by spring."

Georgia held still. "To who?"

"Chloe Ashford."

The name meant exactly what it was supposed to mean. Old money. Correct family. A woman selected the way people selected schools and board appointments.

"You don't want that," Georgia said.

"I don't even want dinner with her." He gave a short laugh, then looked away. "She's fine. Pretty. Polite. Built for Christmas cards. My father thinks marriage will sand me down into something presentable."

Georgia set her bag on the arm of the sofa and kept her hands off it. If she held onto the strap, she might walk back out. If she walked out now, she would spend the rest of the night hearing his voice on the phone.

"So you called me because you're angry at him?"

"I called you because everyone else in my life keeps score." He looked at her then, fully. The drunken blur hadn't touched that part of him. "You don't."

That landed where she had no business letting it land.

"What I do is a job," she said.

"I know."

"Then say it like you know it. Calling me here crosses a line. Me coming here crosses a line. If anyone finds out about this, I could lose my license."

He pushed away from the glass and came a little closer, slow enough that she could have stopped him and didn't.

"I sat here for two hours trying to think of someone else," he said. "A friend. My brother. One of the women people think I collect for sport. Anybody. But every name came with a price tag. Favors, gossip, my father by breakfast. So I called the one person who might tell me the truth and still leave me in one piece."

She had spent years building a life on restraint. Careful tone. Careful clothes. Careful distance. Tonight that discipline felt thin, like paper left in rain.

"I can't be your friend," she said.

"Then what are you doing here?"

The answer should have come fast. Professional concern. Risk assessment. Crisis response. Instead she heard herself say nothing at all.

Will stopped a few feet away. Scotch clung to his breath, but not enough to hide the clean soap from earlier in the night, the kind of detail her body registered before her training could strike it out. His shirt had slipped farther open. A sharp line of collarbone. Faint gold at his throat from the hotel lamp.

Georgia looked at his face, not lower.

"I'm not marrying her," he said. The polish was gone now. "I don't care what he calls it. Stability. Optics. Family. I'm not handing over the rest of my life because Arthur Barton wants a better headline."

"Good," Georgia said.

His expression changed, just a little. "You mean that."

She should have softened it, pulled back, wrapped the answer in neutrality. Instead she gave him the plain truth.

"Yes."

For a second the room narrowed around that word. Around his stare. Around the awareness that she had stopped speaking to him the way she spoke in the office.

Georgia stepped back and reached for her bag. "I should go."

He didn't touch her. He only watched as she moved toward the door, and that was somehow harder to manage.

She had almost reached it when he said her name.

Not Dr. Mendes. Not the careful version of her he used under bright office lights.

"Georgia."

Her hand paused on the handle.

When she looked back, he was still standing near the window, shirt open, face bare of any practiced charm. She thought of the clerk downstairs, of the silent elevator, of how much money it took to create this kind of privacy. Wealth could buy thick carpet and unasked questions. It could not make this safe.

"Can I call you again?" he asked. "Not for an appointment. Not for therapy. If it gets like this again."

The smart answer was sitting right in front of her, bright as an exit sign.

No.

No, because he was her patient. No, because one secret meeting became two with almost no effort at all. No, because she had worked too long for the letters after her name to throw them away for a man in an expensive hotel room looking at her as if she were solid ground.

She opened the door.

The corridor outside was as quiet as a sealed vault. No footsteps. No voices. Just the soft mechanical hum of the building and the muted click of his suite behind her as he followed her as far as the threshold.

"Georgia."

She turned.

His hand was braced on the frame above him. He looked younger there and more dangerous for it, all the money stripped away by one honest question.

"Can I?"

She could still fix it. Walk to the elevator. Tell him to call the office. Put this night into a locked box and sit across from him on Thursday as if it had never happened.

Instead she met his eyes and said, "Yes."

Georgia had already straightened the legal pad twice by the time her two o'clock knocked and stepped into her office.

The room carried lemon polish from the credenza her cleaner had wiped down that morning, and she stayed behind her desk with her hands folded, keeping the width of it between herself and Will Barton on purpose.

The scheduled session was on her calendar, the chair across from her exactly where it always was, and she had spent three days putting everything else back into lines she could live inside. Client files. Insurance forms. Continuing-education modules she should have finished months ago. Routine had done its best work on her. Almost enough.

Then Will walked in looking rested, and the work of those three days thinned at once.

He dropped into the chair with that same expensive ease, but the stubble was gone, the exhaustion scrubbed away. He wore a navy sweater and dark jeans, and when he met her eyes, his mouth curved just enough to let her