Spoiler! :
The time was approaching five-o-clock, and Daniel Phillips couldn't have been more anxious. There was only a little more than an hour that he had left to tread until he could be home and away from his job. He ruffled his dirty blond hair, glancing at his client list out of mere routine, for he knew well that his next session featured his least favorite couple. After snatching the right folder from his desk and placing it aside, he sauntered out of the room and down the hallway with quick haste, as if his walking speed was directly connected to the time on the clock.
He reached the end of the elongated hall, opening the door to peek his hazel eyes out onto the lobby. It was almost entirely void of patients, the couple being the only ones present about a slew of empty chairs. Back when he first started his job, he had a secret desire to see all the seats filled with clients of his, clamoring as they waited to be seen. It was a childish desire (as well as physically impossible on his part to have so many patients) but his mind would still drift helplessly towards that daydream. Now that he was older, his desire was to see the waiting room as empty as it could possibly be.
The couple, unfortunately, saw Dan before he could see them. It must have been difficult to miss the sight of him. His chin was rough and unshaven, augmenting the rest of his haphazard appearance, such as his button-up shirt that was missing a button and mismatched socks that were partially concealed by the cuffs of his pants. The young secretary behind the front desk looked up as the couple stood from their seats and after one glance she became bored at the sight, popping her gum as she returned to her magazine.
"Marsh and Emily; it's nice to see you could make it." Dan forced this greeting with everything he could muster. The couple didn't seem to notice the feigned cheerfulness in his voice. He was glad that they didn't.
Several weeks back Dan decided to take on a couple for marriage counseling. He had been thinking of doing so previously because his job had begun to tire and frustrate him; as such he would do anything he could to improve his attitude towards work. He wished he had realized that it would have pained him more than single person sessions, but after reviving his own marriage from the depths that neared divorce, he had become a little arrogant on the subject.
"We're just so glad you're back! We heard you were sick all last week!" Emily's obnoxious voice sounded a little less so than usual as she expressed her concerns for their ill psychologist. Emily wasn't anything special to look at — slightly overweight with highlighted blond hair tied back behind her, grey eyes tilted downward in concern displaying a smile cropped to fit on her large chin that consisted of a small upper lip that her lower lip cradled. Her husband, Marsh, was tall — much taller than Emily, with pale skin and thin but bushy eyebrows that hung above his relaxed blue eyes. A long nose with a ballpoint tip suited his height, and a pair of perfect lips that were uplifted at each end to express the grin on his face.
"That was nothing," Dan insisted as he held the door past the secretary's desk open for the two. "Was just a small head cold, is all."
"Oh, that's good…" Marsh's soft voice echoed through the halls as they walked, sounding something of an unnerved father holding his new born child. "We didn't want it to be anything like those last two months you were sick…"
Dan tried to remain cheerful despite the remembrance as the group entered his room. "Right, but that was months ago…I'm much better now. How about you two, did you have any troubles this week?"
The group took their seats and Dan had barely reached for his pen when the couple began to clash back and forth. Dan let them argue as he went over notes from last week's session and after assuring his pen had ink, softly stroking his pen against his notepad, he interrupted them with ease. They stopped immediately at the sound of his voice, taking in his wisdom as if he was truly all-knowing.
"Let's see…Marsh, maybe you should try listening to what Emily's got to say?"
"You never listen!" she huffed at her husband distastefully.
"Emily, did you ever go to that therapist I suggested?" Dan scratched his scalp with his pen, eyeing his notes with slight confusion. "She's really great, and I think you'd like doing sessions alone with her."
"Actually…she did seem quite nice, but I noticed she was a psychiatrist…" She put hard emphasis on the word before continuing on, and Dan rather wished she'd have stopped there. The implication was enough. "I don't really agree with using medicine to alter moods."
"Right, well, if you tell her so I'm sure she won't prescribe you any medicine. She's a much better therapist than me, by far."
"Is she? But oh, don't worry about it. I've found a much better therapist right in this office!"
He stared. Had he awakened that morning to some parallel universe wherein there were other therapists working in his portion of the building besides himself? He laughed and said "You mean across the street, right?"
"No, no. I mean right in here. I could have sworn it was here…."
"Well, the Dr. Simmons I recommended works across the street, but there are a lot of other therapists working there as well. Do you know the name of your new therapist?"
"Honestly, I can't quite remember…Wallace, Wallace something…"
"William, maybe?"
"Right, that's the one!"
"Definitely across the street, though…" Dan scribbled some notes about her new therapist and asked once more about their week, and the couple fought over the details involving their daughter's first school field trip. As he listened, he thought it was a wonder he had put up with his job for so long. Day in and out, patients complaining about the smallest of wrongdoings within their lives. He let the couple argue on, hardly conscious of the words he was spewing onto the notepad. His chest ached as his mood shifted, and he desperately wanted someone to hear him out just as he heard others. He felt lonely as he recalled the last decade of his life. Who in the world would listen to him?
Though, there was always Elaine, his wife. She would listen to whatever he had to say. He thought her vibrant blue eyes against her pale face, and of her nose powdered with warm brown freckles as if snowflakes; and he reminisced in her long, wavy chestnut colored hair that sat well past the curves of her breasts. Now that she was on his mind, he was looking forward to seeing her a little more than usual come the end of the day.
After he walked the couple out at the session's end and locked up the building once the secretary left, he walked outside to his shabby old car and began his drive home with the night's stars leading the path. One of his favorite songs soon started to blare its way through his speakers, and his fingers tapped on the steering wheel to its beat. If Dan had taken the main roads, he would have been home in minutes, but each and every day he would scale the back-roads to and from work and the duration of each trip was over thirty minutes long. He didn't mind the delay. Since his wife's car accident almost half a year ago, he had let his paranoia get the better of him as he started to plan his trips in advance to be as safe as possible.
Dan was proud of his home. It wasn't anything special, of course; a small, bright green single floored home whose window panes Elaine had painted bright orange. A seemingly tacky little place on the outside, Dan thought that what was inside mattered most. Wood floors covered most of the house, while the bedrooms themselves were cozy with carpeting of obscure colors (once again chosen by Elaine). As he stepped out of his car, he found it depressing that he couldn't see the home very well in the dark. He had been longing to bask in the beauty it emitted from the outside, for it was as if a swan among the slew of dull neighboring homes.
Dan entered, reassured as he walked through the living room to find Elaine in the brightly lit kitchen. Five years his junior, she was sitting alone at the kitchen table, cross-legged in a dark blue sundress. The kitchen table was covered in a sea of papers. As a teacher, it was normal to be sitting in front of a table of papers after campus hours; but as a kindergarten teacher, it was normal to do so with a wide smile, stickers stuck to your forehead and a piece of candy hanging from your mouth. Even before Elaine greeted him, he was feeling vastly inferior to her; it was a given that her energy usually doubled his, and the youthfulness in her face made her shine.
She removed her reading glasses, flashing Dan a smile. "You'll never guess what happened today!"
"Did you lose your crutches?"
"Wh—" she began to answer before it dawned upon her what he had asked. "No!"
"Will I find them out back in the trash, same place you lost them last week?" Dan picked fun at her hatred for her crutches, of which had been dawned upon her after the accident. She could be frequently found having tossed her crutches aside, limping on her damaged leg. It was a small hobble, and after enduring 6 months of it thus far, Dan had adjusted a lot of his own preferences to match her disablement, such as slowing the average speed of his walking pace.
Elaine started to ramble on about what Dan would "never guess", which wound up being that the book fair had started at the local elementary school, and how she (along with her teaching assistant) had brought the classroom to visit. He made his way to her side as she went on, plucking a sticker from the end of her freckled nose before beginning to glance through her graded papers.
"—But my absolute favorite part has to be the way they lined up the bookcases. You know, they decorated them just right. All the kids there really got into it!"
"…Yeah?" He was eyeing one of the papers he held. "Have you seen this kid's future ambition? Fighting aliens on Mars."
"You must have picked up Jonathan's paper—don't mind him, he just thinks he's being funny."
"Funny? The kid's brilliant. How much do you reckon fighting aliens pays?"
"Hopefully more than I do."
During moments such as this, Dan forgot of the turmoil that once existed between them after the crash, which nearly tore their marriage in half. It happened suddenly one morning; another car slammed into Elaine and the culprit sped off so fast that the police hadn't been able to track him down. When Dan arrived to the scene, Elaine looked worse than he had ever seen her, bruised as if beaten and forlorn. She was fretting to the paramedics in tears that she could not recall the face behind the wheel of the car that had hit her. One of the paramedics relayed the situation to Dan: Elaine had broken several bones, including her femur, and had suffered a minor concussion. Their three year old son, who had been sitting in the booster seat within the car, was in critical condition had been taken to the hospital by helicopter.
Just as Dan had feared, their marriage collapsed with the loss of their child. He admitted he was horrible to Elaine afterwards; he would quarrel with her (especially over the identity of the driver that had hit her) and he quit showing up to work, leaving Elaine alone to make ends meet. At the time he saw no harm in his decision, for they had money saved up and it seemed that Elaine wanted to continue working regardless of the circumstances. She'd douse down her pain medication and hobble out the door pitifully with the help of her crutches. For months Dan slumped into a gloomy phase of depression, and Elaine was doing her best to avoid falling into the same state as him. Even so, there were times Dan would find Elaine alone and in tears. It hurt him to see her like that, but it hurt him more to know she was hiding it from him. Surely her desire to hide her tears was the only reason she wasn't in his arms during her breakdowns.
Now however, things were different. Upon recognizing that divorce seemed imminent on the route they were treading, Dan convinced Elaine to work with him in improving their relationship. He thought it incredible how much progress they had made in only four months. Elaine had become chipper and seemed to be back to her old self for the most part, and Dan was so happy to see her doing better that he didn't dare admit he was wretchedly melancholic. His depression was much different than it was when he was grieving after the accident. Now his job no longer interested him, and he very much wanted to quit. Even worse yet, his ambition to go back to school to seek a higher degree of education had vanished. If it wasn't for Elaine being around, Dan would declare life to be pointless.
The following morning should have been the usual for Dan and Elaine, but it wasn't. It was normal for the couple to be awake around 7AM, partaking in a quick breakfast before taking off to work. It wasn't until 8AM that day that the two awoke, however, to the sound of Elaine's cellphone ringing. Dan remained still, holding his aching head in disdain as she jumped from bed to answer it.
"This is horrid, Dan!" Elaine said to him as soon as she hung up, limping across the room to her dresser. "We're late, we're late…my alarm didn't go off and we're really late!"
He sat up, scratching his dandruff infested scalp. "So?"
"I really have to be there today, really."
"Really?"
"Yes!"
"Let's just stay home today." He suggested it even though he saw she was already halfway dressed.
"Oh, that would be nice, but the kids have this test today and—"
"Don't forget your crutches, Elaine."
"…Dan—" She squeaked.
"Don't Dan me. Your leg will never heal right if you—"
"Fine, Fine, I get it!" She sighed heavily, snatching her bag and crutches that sat near the door. She struggled to comfort herself onto her crutches, her pale face appearing somewhat lined. She hobbled his way once standing to bid him a good day with a kiss. By the time Elaine left, Dan was feeling drained as if his day had already ended.
He arrived to his office in less than an hour. He opened the door and slipped into the lobby, cool air gracing his face. An empty waiting room greeted him, easing him into believing that the day would be a good one. He passed the secretary's desk, opening the door that led into the familiar hallway he galloped daily, and as he reached his office door he stopped, dumbfounded.
The previously unoccupied room across from him had its door ajar, and just beyond the doorway of the room stood a young man. He was younger than Dan and a little bit shorter in height, with a head of black hair and dark eyes that rested behind his glasses. He was smiling at Dan, holding a cardboard box in front of his chest, blocking proper view of his suit and tie.
"Well hi there!" Judging from the stranger's cheery voice alone, Dan guessed him to be as much as ten years younger than him. "I'm sorry to say this, but patients aren't allowed back here. Do you mind waiting in the lobby?"
Dan was grimly silent for several moments, gritting his teeth before answering, "I'm not a damned patient; I work here. Who are you and why are you taking this room?"
This time, it was the stranger's turn to grow quiet. His eyes were wide and he was flabbergasted. "…You work here? So you're Daniel Phillips?"
"Yes, and I'll have you know that trespassing is a serious offense around—"
"Daniel Phillips!" He dropped his cardboard box and it landed with a slam, but the man could care less of the box's safety. He swept forward, grabbing one of Dan's hand's to shake up and down violently. "It's great to meet you, it really is! I loved your book!"
"…My book? Good God, someone actually read that thing?"
"Are you kidding? Of course! I read it in college! Psychology at its best, I'll say," he let go of Dan's hand, gleaming still. "I'm Weston, pleased to meet you!"
"Great Weston, but fan or not, trespassing isn't the smartest idea."
He laughed. "Oh, are you pulling my leg or have you really forgotten you hired me?"
"…What are you talking about?"
"I was supposed to start today, wasn't I? That's what your assistant's email said. Starting today, 8AM."
"My secretary emailed you?"
"No, no; not your secretary. Your nice little assistant! What was her name…Elaine, was it? She was the sweetest thing over the phone!"
…Elaine? Such a mess had been Elaine's doing? He stiffened as he recalled his laments about the rent for his section of the building being much too high to afford on his own. He said that if he could bring together coworkers (what he had described as a "team" at the time) it would be less hard on him. Not only that, but therapists with more availability meant more business, more clients and a heightened popularity.
Still, it wasn't what he honestly wanted! He had vented those frustrations in the heat of the moment. He wanted to call Elaine right that minute and demand an answer as to why she would so blatantly go behind his back. Weston had gone back to unpacking, humming a song to himself while removing all the textbooks from the cardboard box he had dropped out of excitement. Looking him down now, there wasn't any way Weston meant harm—calling Elaine just to scream at her over something she had done to help him began to look like a bad idea.
But what of competition? He would lose clients to Weston. Without competition within the office, Dan had been free to do what he pleased as well as dress as unprofessionally as he wanted. He glanced down at his outfit, ashamed; a faded shirt that was once a dark blue, a black pair of pants that were a little torn at the ends and. His chest tightened as he touched the unshaven whiskers on his chin that were quite possibly just as ratty as his unbrushed hair.
Dan made a decision sporadically, exiting the halls to interrupt the secretary's phone call with, "Put all my calls to voicemail, I've got to pick something up."
"Pick something up?"
"Yeah—a hairbrush, a razor and a new shirt."
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