Sorry about the tardiness of my posting *and* my replies to your comments. I'm finding it really hard to keep up this, plus writing, reading, corresponding, work, and a punishing rehearsal schedule for the Proms . I'm doing the best I can, honestly! 
The door to George’s consulting room seemed very solid and uncompromising as Lois approached it. Perhaps it was the formidable personality lurking behind the door which lent it its stern presence, or the painful and very scary talking she knew lay ahead of her once she stepped over its threshold.
She’d have to make a confession: eavesdropping on a conversation she wasn’t meant to have heard. She’d have to describe the paralysing fear which gripped her every time she remembered Clark’s obsession for her. She’d have to ask George to break his patient confidentiality with Clark in order to explain why that fear was groundless.
Her trembling, sweaty finger slipped off the entry buzzer, producing a pathetic hiccup of a beep. No-one would hear that. She’d have to buzz again, or maybe she should just turn around and leave right now-
The door swung open. Too late for escape, then.
George’s shambling bulk and round, smiling face filled the doorway. “Hey, Lois,” he welcomed warmly, ushering her inside. “Come on in.” He crossed to a small table against the wall where a coffee machine was spluttering its way to the end of its cycle. “I was just making a fresh brew – want some?” he asked, twisting around and waving a mug in his podgy fist.
She nodded. “Yes, thanks.”
“Take a seat,” he invited, indicating three armchairs arranged around a low coffee table.
Not the psychiatrist’s couch at the end of the room, she noted. Was that reserved for his own patients? And where did Clark sit, she wondered. She perched on the edge of the nearest chair and watched him pour the coffee and bring it over to her.
“Thanks,” she said, accepting the mug from him and cradling it in both hands.
He settled into a chair opposite her. “So, how’s it going?”
“It’s...been better,” she replied.
“Yeah? What’s not going so well?”
She sipped her coffee. Balanced the mug on her knew with one hand but discovered she had the shakes so badly that she had to return to the double-handed grip. “I overheard something I shouldn’t have,” she confessed.
“Ah,” said George. “Always a risky business, that, listening to other people’s conversations. I’m guessing this was something you wish you hadn’t heard?”
She nodded.
“Why?” he asked. “Why do you wish you hadn’t overheard it?”
“Because.” She raised the mug to her lips again, taking great care not to spill any. The hot liquid slid down her throat and settled in her stomach, creating a hot little centre around which the rest of her body seemed to tremble. This was crazy, she thought. However did she think she was going to do this? “I’m sorry,” she said, leaning forward and placing the mug on the table. “This was a mistake. I’m sorry to have wasted your time.”
She lurched to her feet and hurried to the door.
“It’s about Clark, isn’t it?” said George.
She halted. Freedom was just a few paces away, yet George’s question had reminded her of why she was here: George held the answers. George could banish her fear.
She nodded.
“This thing you overheard. How did it make you feel?”
“Scared.”
“Well, you came to the right place, then,” George said heartily. “Fear’s my speciality.”
She wrapped her arms around herself and eyed the door. Step through it and she’d avoid all of this. Remain and she’d have to go through hell.
So why was she still standing here?
“Come on, Lois,” said George. “We’ll take this thing out together, have a good look at it from all angles, and batter it down to size. Heck, we’ll even batter Clark down to size if it helps. I’m good at that.”
Yes, he was. She’d heard him.
“And your coffee’s getting cold,” he added.
A corner of her mouth curled upwards. Mustn’t let the coffee go cold. Nothing more important than that.
Suddenly all the blood seemed to rush to her head and she whirled around in a wild burst of energy. “I heard you talking to him,” she gabbled, letting it all out, all the fear, shock, and horror. “I know everything. I know he searched for me. I know he’s obsessed about me. I know he loves me, or at least he thinks he does. I think he fixated on me after breaking up with Lana, not sure about that, but I know for certain that he turned to drugs because of me. I know he was forced to tell everyone who he really was when all he probably really wanted was a quiet life, and that’s really sad, but then again, I know he’s obsessed with me and that absolutely scares the living daylights out of me because I can’t take on the responsibility of being someone’s dream come true and anyway he’ll probably want things from me I just can’t give him.”
Her breath ran out abruptly and she was forced to suck in a lungful of air that turned into a half-sob. Tears threatened, but instead she let out an angry yell and crossed her arms in front of her. “I am not going to cry over this,” she gritted defiantly. “I am damned well not going to cry!”
She dropped her gaze to the carpet and bit back another sob.
“Hell,” muttered George from his chair. “Lois, I’m sorry you overheard all that. The clinic has very stringent procedures to make sure consultations are kept strictly confidential, but clearly I screwed up like a rookie amateur that day. How did you overhear us?”
“The door was open,” she said, keeping her eyes on the carpet. “You were upstairs in one of the shared treatment rooms.”
He nodded. “Oh, yeah, this place was being cleaned. One of my patients...well, you don’t need to know. No excuse, though. I still should have followed protocol.”
“Yeah, well, I should have followed good manners and walked away, but I didn’t,” she answered miserably.
George sighed. “I guess we’d better see if we can fix this mess. You want to come back here and we’ll see what we can do?”
She nodded and trudged back to her chair.
George’s face was unusually sombre when she finally found the courage to look at him. “Okay,” he said, “I think I can remember most of that session with Clark, but just to remind me, what were we talking about when you first heard us?”
“You were saying something about payback day,” she said. “You were trying to convince him he wouldn’t have felt so bad that day in the park if he hadn’t been under so much stress lately.”
“Oh, yes. Finally got it through his thick skull, although I had to do more yelling than usual. So...” He sucked air noisily through his teeth and tapped a finger against the arm of his chair. “Let’s deal with the reasons you’re scared first. You said you can’t take on the responsibility of being someone’s dream come true. What do you think Clark’s dream is?”
“Well...I think he’s quite lonely, so he wants a companion. Someone to come home to at the end of the day and share his troubles with,” she replied. “And he nearly got married once, so I assume he wants a wife.”
“So which part of that is the scary part?”
She frowned. “None of it, really. But he must have this whole perfect picture built up in his head – that’s the scary part. He must have expectations of how I’ll behave, of how I’ll react to him. Maybe even what I’ll look like and what clothes I’ll wear. What food I’ll eat,” she added. “I don’t want to fit someone else’s template of how I should behave. I want to be me.”
George nodded. “Of course you do.”
“And I’m scared that he’d try to force me into his idea of the perfect me.” There. She’d said it. Most of it. She gripped the edge of her chair as a familiar fluttering sensation started up in her stomach. “I’m scared he’d want to control me.”
The fluttering grew worse. A memory was trying to squeeze back into her head, an ugly picture of ropes and-
“Do you think Clark’s the controlling type?”
“No, but how can I be sure?” Ropes and a chair and a filthy gag in her mouth, the taste bitter and dusty. Hands on her legs, sliding lasciviously up her thighs-
“Well, I guess you can’t until you know him better,” conceded George. “But, as his shrink, I know him better than anyone else on this planet, so I can be sure. Clark couldn’t control you, Lois. It’s just not in his psyche.”
“How do you know?” She brushed the hands away. They were going to teach her a lesson, punish her for looking at something the wrong way, so far as she could figure it. The hands came back again and she pushed them away again.
“Well, for one, he has too much respect for the principle of free will,” he replied. “He’d only intervene if he thought someone was in danger. If you want proof, look at what he does every day of his life. He responds to emergencies. He doesn’t go-“
The stench of stale male sweat. A glinting knife blade lifting up the hem of her tattered t-shirt. Hands on her thighs...she pushed them away.
“...dangerous activities, and he doesn’t anticipate the danger by pulling them away from whatever they’re doing before the emergency has even occurred.”
“For two, he’s been the victim of controlling behaviour himself. If you know he split up with Lana, then you probably also know that she insisted he never use his special abilities in public. What you might not know is that extended to their private life together. She effectively kept him in a tightly controlled box from the day they met as kids to the day they split up...Lois, are you okay?”
She stilled, her hands poised half-way down her thighs, ready to push the threat away yet again. “I’m fine. You were saying...” She tried to remember his last couple of sentences, pieced together what she thought she’d heard. “Clark used to control Lana?”
George frowned. “No, I said Lana used to control Clark.” He got up and came to crouch beside her chair. “What’s happening, Lois?” he asked softly. “Are you having a panic attack?”
The knife glinted again. She pressed herself back into the chair, shrinking away from the cold steel blade.
“Lois?”
She nodded. “Please...please don’t come any closer.” She snatched a pleading glance at him. Big, friendly George with the owlish glasses and round, open face. Not a threat. Definitely not a threat.
“I won’t,” he reassured. “But you know how to do this, Lois. You don’t need my help. Just remember what we’ve taught you...”
And she did. Eventually. With George coaching her. Managed to put the panic back where it belonged, squashed the memory back into its box. It wasn’t a new memory. Just one of many she carried around with her in little boxes. Very leaky little boxes.
“Better?” asked George, still crouching beside her.
She managed a shaky smile. “Yeah. Sorry.”
“No problem. You okay to continue, or do you want to take five?”
“I’m okay.”
“All right.” He went back to his own chair. “Where were we? Oh, yes...”
He repeated his assurances about Clark’s non-controlling nature, and this time she managed to listen properly and understand what he was telling her. It made sense. Especially the part about Lana.
“By the way, what I just told you about Clark’s relationship with Lana is confidential, okay?” he added. “I’m only telling you because, in my professional judgement, you need to understand where Clark’s coming from.”
She nodded. “But he still scares me. I mean, intellectually, I can see that Clark’s not a threat – he wouldn’t try to force me to do whatever he wants. And you obviously know him really well and I think I can trust you to tell me the truth about him. But...his obsession was so strong he turned to drugs, George! That terrifies me.”
“Why?”
Her lip curled. “How did I know you were going to ask me that?”
“Hey, it’s what I do,” said George. “I throw out randomly inane questions and wait for a reaction. But okay, since you insist, I’ll give you a prompt. You said his obsession was ‘so strong.’” He drew finger-quotes around the words in the air. “Is that what scares you?”
She nodded. “Yes. The sheer power. The strength of emotion that must drive him. I don’t know if I can handle that.”
George nodded. “He and I have done a lot of work on it. His problem, you see, is that he internalises everything. Goes back to when he was a kid in the foster care system – he learned that life was easier if he just kept quiet and didn’t draw attention to himself. He bottles it all up inside.” He chuckled. “When I first met him, trying to get him to open up was like drawing blood from a stone.”
“And now?”
“Now I just yell at him a lot,” said George with a grin. “Sometimes he even yells back, which is when I know I’ve done a good job.” He shrugged. “I’m his safety valve. Stuff builds up; I help him get rid of it. Believe it or not, he’s actually a lot better than he used to be.”
Remembering how hard she’d found it to make him tell her anything important about himself, she did find that difficult to believe. What’s more...“I heard you warning him that he was heading for disaster again,” she pointed out.
“Well, I may have exaggerated slightly.” George winked. “But don’t tell him I said so.”
“So you don’t really think he’s likely to end up back on drugs again?”
“I doubt it, but it doesn’t hurt to keep him vigilant,” said George. “And my job isn’t just to keep him off drugs. I also have to coach him on how to maintain his emotional health in the longer term.”
Well, that was good to know, she supposed. “But he still has these strong feelings for me, doesn’t he?” she said. “He said he loves me.”
“Yes, that’s what he thinks, which is why I told him to back off. He needs to get a better perspective on his feelings, and he won’t do that by wallowing in them day after day. He’s putting himself under shit-loads of stress, and it’s not helpful to you, either.” George slurped some coffee; grimaced when he presumably discovered it was cold. “Where’s Superman when you need him?” he muttered.
She smiled. “I think he’s got more important things to do than heat up your coffee, George.”
“You think? I think it’s the least he can do after all I’ve done for him.” He dumped his mug on the table. “Okay, how are we doing? Have we knocked that fear of yours back down to size yet?”
She pondered that. “I don’t know. I guess it’s good to know you’re making sure he doesn’t let this overwhelm either one of us, but it’s still daunting. Maybe I’ll feel better when everything you’ve told me today has really gone in...here.” She pointed at her head. Settling back in her chair, she added, “There’s one thing I still don’t really understand, though.”
“What’s that?”
“Why me, George?” she asked. “Why did he fixate on me, a person he’d never even met? I had this theory that he saw my picture in back issues of the Planet, but then I realised I’ve only appeared once, maybe twice at most, so the chances of him seeing my picture were pretty slim.”
“Ah,” said George. He rubbed his chin thoughtfully for a few moments, sucking his teeth noisily at the same time. For her part, she gritted her teeth against the irritating sound. Did he do it deliberately? Frazzle the nerves of his patients until they broke down and told him their innermost demons?
“Well, that’s complicated,” he replied eventually. “More complicated than you could ever imagine.”
“And?” she prompted.
“And I can’t tell you.” He held up his hands in self-defence when she began to protest. “I’m sorry, but there’s a limit to how fast and loose I’m prepared to play with patient confidentiality.”
“George! I need to know, otherwise I’ll dream up all sorts of horror scenarios.” She crossed her arms and glared at him. “I thought that, in your professional opinion, I needed to know this stuff.”
“The parts I’ve told you, yeah,” he said. “This...well, I’ve got to balance your needs against Clark’s, and this time he wins. You’ll have to go to the source.”
“That’s easier said than done,” she scoffed. “How can I ask him without explaining how I already know so much?”
George shrugged. “It’s not easy, I’ll grant you that. Look, the best advice I can give you is to sit down with him somewhere quiet and tell him everything you know and why you know it. Then you can ask him what you just asked me. Believe me, once the initial shock has worn off, he’ll be relieved that you know everything and that he doesn’t have to maintain his pretence any longer.”
“You really think so?” she asked. “I think it’ll just create a new set of problems between us.”
“Yeah, well, wouldn’t life be boring if everything ran smoothly?” said George. “But seriously, I don’t want you to carry this knowledge around with you for too long before you tell Clark. Not for his sake, but for yours. Letting things fester is just not an option for you right now, okay, Lois? We need for you to keep dumping the bad stuff and replacing it with the good stuff.” His eyes crinkled. “Hope that’s not too technical for you.”
“I think I just about followed the gist of it,” she replied, rolling her eyes up to the ceiling.
“Hey, I like to keep things simple, okay?” he exclaimed “I can hit you with the psycho-babble version if you’d prefer.”
“No, I’ll stick with the idiot’s version, thank you.”
“Good choice. So, do you promise me you’ll talk to Clark soon?”
“I’ll try.”
“Hmm. I’ll give you a week.” He hauled himself out of his chair and shambled across to his desk. Leaning over to the other side of it, he swivelled around his desk diary and flipped it forward a page. “I’d like to arrange a follow-up to this, if that’s okay with you? Next...Tuesday?”
“Okay. There’s other stuff I’d like to discuss with you anyway,” she said, thinking of her earlier plan to talk over the stuff about her father with him.
“Oh?” George twisted around in the midst of scribbling in his diary. “More stuff you can’t talk to Francine about?”
She bit her bottom lip. “Sort of.” Because she knew she could raise it with Francine fairly easily if she put her mind to it. George was just...preferable.
“You do know that she and I share each other’s notes? Anything I know, she knows.”
“Yes, but...” She shrugged. “You’re easier to talk to about certain things.”
“Well, okay,” he said. “I will tell Francine, as a courtesy, of course.”
She nodded. “I understand.”
So she had a week to pluck up her courage and talk to Clark. Well, so far as she knew, he was still due at her next session with Francine, although she wouldn’t be that surprised if Francine told him not to come. Even Lois had to admit that he wasn’t really needed any more, and Francine clearly didn’t think he had a role to play. If he was there, though, she could talk to him afterwards.
Except how did she do that? “Hey, Clark, I know you’re totally obsessed with me. I also know that you love me. Well, you think you love me. No worries, though, because I talked it over with George and he says you’ve got it all under control.”
No. She’d no idea how she was going to handle it, but whatever, she’d have to be more subtle than that. For now, she couldn’t imagine even broaching the subject – she was still shrivelling up inside every time she thought about what she’d overheard between George and Clark. George had helped today, but the things he’d said had yet to shift from being just a collection of facts in her head to being something she actually believed in.
So she’d wait a while before approaching Clark.
*********
