Pretty Nightmare (Creeping Beautiful Book 2), page 14
All of it unsettles me.
Every time Adam called me back, I had this overwhelming compulsion to get the fuck out of there as fast as I could. And when I pulled away, I had this equally overwhelming feeling that my entire life with them was nothing but an overwhelming compulsion that I had no control over from the beginning.
I’m not an impulsive man. At all. I’m methodical. I am contemplative. I am rational, and steady, and objective.
So what the actual fuck was I thinking? Who was I at fifteen that today, at twenty-nine, I can’t recognize that kid?
Was it life on the island that warped me? Seeing those girls in cages? The excitement of the auction and the forbidden nature of the events that took place there? What? What was it?
I don’t know. All of it, maybe?
And here’s the real problem: I can’t go to an outsider and ask these questions. If Ana knew what I’ve been up to for the last ten years, she would quickly diagnose me as a psychopath. And that would not be a casual diagnosis, either. It would be legit. This woman has as much training as I do. She’s not a medical doctor, but a PhD in cognitive neuroscience is no fucking joke.
It doesn’t even matter what she thinks. I understand I’m a psychopath. I have to be. There is just no other explanation for the decisions I’ve made. And yeah, I could just point to Adam and McKay and say, “So are they.” But it’s not the same. They don’t know better and I do.
There has to be something wrong with me. There has to be.
Of course, it’s pretty common for most psychopaths to feel normal. And I do. Most of the time. I don’t feel like a psychopath. I can point to hundreds of things in my day-to-day life that are completely normal.
I chuckle under my breath as I pull forward, listening to the tires of my Jeep crunch on her gravel driveway as I approach the cabin. Because that’s part of the problem.
I feel so fucking normal and that has to be a sign of disease. Doesn’t it?
Ana pulls the white curtains aside to peek out the window. But I only get a glimpse of her. Two seconds later she’s throwing open the raw-wood front door to her little cabin and walking through it to greet me with a wide, honest smile.
She waits for me on the porch with her hands on her hips looking like a dream in a light-green chiffon dress with tiny straps that show off her bronze shoulders.
I step out of the Jeep with a grin I couldn’t hold in if I wanted to. And I don’t want to.
After everything that happened yesterday, I need this.
I need her.
She opens her arms to me as I approach the porch stairs. “My Donny. How are you?”
“Donny.” I laugh. She is the only person who can get away with calling me Donny. “Forget about me. How are you?” I pull her into a hug when I reach the top step and just hold her for a moment.
But she pushes back almost immediately and holds me at arm’s length. “What’s wrong?”
I sigh. “Nothing now.”
“Stop it. I’m not going to listen to lies, Donovan Couture. A man from my past does not travel seventeen hundred miles from New Orleans to Ten Sleep on a whim because nothing is wrong.” She looks me up and down for a moment. “And I can feel the stress coming off you like heat.”
“Well.” I take a moment to gather my thoughts by running my fingers through my dark hair. “I’m not here for that. You know.” I wave my hand at her cabin. “Your facilities. Which are sparse, by the way. But I like it.”
She looks at me funny for a moment. “Oh. No. This is your cabin, sweetie. I thought you might need some privacy. I live on the other side of this hill in the lodge. That’s where the guests stay. We’ll take a look at it later. After you tell me why you’re really here.”
“As I was saying, I didn’t come for your healing. I just need some advice. You know. Colleague to colleague.”
She raises one eyebrow at me. “You came all this way to ask me an academic question?”
“Yeah.”
“That must be some question, Donovan.”
“It is.”
“OK. Well.” She looks over her shoulder. “Let’s go inside and have a chat then.” Then her wide smile is back and she hooks her hand around my arm and leads me inside.
It’s a typical cabin. Comfy couch and chairs. Raw-wood end tables. Small kitchen with knotty-pine cupboards and wide-planked floors. Very chic, and yet simple at the same time.
She makes tea and I sit on the couch and watch, wondering why I didn’t pursue her more. Why I ever let her leave. Why I didn’t chase her down and keep her a part of my life forever.
Her tea is a production. Tea pot, little cups sitting on pretty saucers. Flowers on the tray when she sets it down on the table in front of me. And the whole place smells like jasmine and… I don’t know. Something sweet. Sugar, maybe.
I wait patiently for her to serve the tea. She is a slow woman. A woman who will not be rushed for any reason, and if you understand anything about her at all, you don’t want to rush her.
You just want to settle in and enjoy it.
The slow life.
I could get used to it.
She made me an offer. “Come with me,” she said. “Let’s do this together. I know you don’t really want to be a doctor. I can feel these things, Donny. Just come with me.”
But I walked away and now, for the life of me, I can’t understand why I did that. It’s the same feeling I get when I think about Indie and why I convinced Adam to buy her and then shape her into the pretty little nightmare she is today.
But this isn’t about Indie. It’s about me. So I push her out of my thoughts and try to concentrate on the best way to phrase what I need to ask Ana.
Finally, Ana settles in the chair across from the couch and we both take a sip of our tea and then set the cups down, the fine china clinking in that old-fashioned, alluring and seductive way that fine china does.
“What’s on your mind?”
I take a deep breath and spit it out. “How…” Well. Not quite spit it out.
“Go on, go on.”
“Have you ever done any self-hypnosis?”
She raises that eyebrow at me again. “Like… the power of positive thinking kind of self-hypnosis?”
“No. The other kind.”
“Hmm.” She looks up at the ceiling, thinking. “Yes. I’m pretty sure I did.” Then she laughs. “But I was a little bit high on peyote at the time.”
I laugh too. She makes me want to laugh. She is a good thing. Something I didn’t… ruin.
“OK. I’m getting serious now. The answer is yes. And yes, I was on peyote. But I had a fantastic guide.”
“So you had someone there with you?”
“Yes. Of course.” She says this like it’s a given and for a moment I second-guess my decision to come here. “But listen…” She pauses and leans forward. “If you’re looking for the self-guided kind, I’m not going to talk you out of it. You are a genius of a man, Donovan. If this is what you think you need, then who am I to caution you?”
“Well… you’re Ana. And if it’s a bad idea, I’d like to hear it from you.”
She slows us down again—on purpose, maybe. Or maybe not—and takes another sip of her tea. She doesn’t set her cup down this time. Just holds the cup and saucer in her hand. “What are you looking for, Donovan?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“But something. There must be something. Or you wouldn’t be here.”
“Fair enough.” I wipe my hands on my jeans. They’re sweaty. “I’ve made some decisions over the years and I don’t really understand why.”
“Hmm.”
“I just want to like… go back, ya know? And figure it out.”
“You have regrets?”
“I think so. But it’s more than that.”
“I could help you—”
“No.” I cut her off and her head juts back a little. She’s not quite startled—women like Ana don’t startle easily—but she’s definitely taken by surprise. “It’s not that I don’t trust you. You know I trust you, right? It’s just… it’s very personal.”
“OK. So you’re looking for a technique?”
“Yes.” The word comes out rushed and filled with relief. “A technique. Because, as I’m sure you’re aware, this is kinda”—I bob my head back and forth and suck some air—“unscientific.”
“I wouldn’t call it unscientific, Donovan. It’s just outside the realm of typical.”
Like her healing center.
“Exactly. This is my point. The information I have access to, on how to do this in a… scientific way, well, it’s sparse. At best. I need something I can track.”
“You’re going to record the sessions? Video them?”
“Both. Probably.”
“Hmmm. This is very interesting.”
“How so?”
“Well, you’re a psychiatrist.”
“Not really.”
“Stop it. You are a medical doctor who specializes in the art of minds, Donovan. And you did a PhD in psychoanalysis.”
“I never finished.”
She waves a hand in the air. “Neither here nor there.”
“Ana, I’m not saying all this to… be propped up.” If she raises that eyebrow any higher it’s going to disappear into her hair. “I am quite aware of my limitations.”
“Well. I’m not propping you up. So you can let that go. I don’t feed egos. Not even for friends. I’m telling you that a psychiatrist—which you are, like it or not—performing analysis on himself…” She shrugs and throws up her hands. “It’s not recommended.”
“I understand that. And again, I’m not a psychiatrist. I’m a reconstructive surgeon.”
“So this is self-help?”
I see where she’s going. Anabelle Avery is the most ethical person I have ever met. She dots the i’s and crosses the t’s. And then she dots the t’s and crosses the i’s just to be double sure she’s walking the line. She is not going to teach me self-hypnosis if I’m going to hurt myself in the process.
But. If I tell her that I’m looking for some techniques to aspire to a higher realm of… what’s the word she used to use? Enlightenment. Yeah. She would be on board with that.
So I say, “That’s right. Self-help.”
“OK.” She pauses for a moment to smile at me from behind her cup as she takes another sip of tea. Then she lowers the cup, her smile gone. “But I get to do a baseline.”
“Fine.”
“Because you said you wanted to know if it was a bad idea. So we do a full session. One on one. And I get to record it.”
“OK.”
“Really?” She cocks her head at me.
“I’m fine with it. And I trust you. Whatever you need to feel comfortable with this. I just need… some truth, Ana. So say what you need to say.”
“But you’re going to do whatever you’re going to do in the end, aren’t you?”
I don’t answer. I don’t need to.
“OK, then. But we should do it in my office.” She stands up and smiles wide at me, then extends her hand. “Are you up for a hike?”
A hike. You gotta fucking love her. And I do.
So I take her hand and let her take me on a hike.
PRESENT DAY
The first thing I did when I decided to leave my partnership in LA and move back to Old Home after Indie returned from her four-year hiatus was to rent an office space in Pearl Springs. It’s on the second floor over the printing shop on Main Street. Close enough that I could come here regularly, but still have the privacy I was used to.
I’m not hiding anything from Adam and McKay. If they wanted my secrets, they would have them. But so far, neither of them has taken much interest in my frequent trips into Pearl Springs.
The office is large—much larger than I need—and smells like old books. Not the good kind of old books, either, if that is even a thing, but the musty, moldy smell of ink and paper that’s been hoarded over decades.
But it’s only seven hundred dollars a month and that includes utilities and internet, so… fuck it.
There are seven rooms up here. Three of them feel more like large closets than the private offices they might’ve been at some point. One is a bathroom with a shower. Handy. One is an open space that was probably a reception area. And then there are two larger offices. The partners worked there, I suppose. This used to be a law firm.
But I only use the main reception area and one of the large closets. I pulled up the old carpet and refinished the floors before I moved in, then added some haughty leather couches with nail-head trim and a matching set of wingback chairs by the long wall of windows.
I sometimes sleep here. I like this place even though it’s not that private. The walls are thin—I can hear everyone downstairs in the print shop—but they close at four-thirty Monday through Friday, and I mostly work here in the evenings. So it’s fine.
But the main reason I need this space is so I can continue my sessions.
I spent three days with Ana up in Wyoming during my first visit four years ago. The ‘office’ she took me to that first day was a small ledge at the top of a nearby plateau with views of a river valley down below and her healing center off to the west.
I lost my breath up there, it was that beautiful.
Her healing center though… it’s huge. Everything I had imagined it would be on the drive up and then discarded when I saw the small cabin.
I wanted to resent it. And I had a few thoughts about her being a sellout. But I am the last person to judge anyone who sells out.
Anyway, it’s a very nice place. Has a very spa-like feel to it.
We didn’t do the session on the plateau. We just sat there in silence for a little while. I’m the kind of man who is comfortable in silence. I’ve been alone my whole life.
Well, most of it. Anyway. Carter was there in the beginning.
Wasn’t he?
This is part of my problem. I remember having a brother. A twin brother. He was there. But memories are unreliable. This is what Ana and I talked about once the initial silence was over.
Memories. The memory. It was mostly an academic conversation about anatomy that called up—ironically—memories of med school.
But the take-home message we both agreed on was that it’s all very unreliable.
Not comforting, but what can you do?
We didn’t do our session until the morning of the third day. And by that time, she had talked me down from the idea that I could do this all myself and I let her hypnotize me with a specific set of questions.
They were not the questions I needed answers to. The baseline, as it’s called. This was her idea and it made sense scientifically. She needed to get a general starting point. But we recorded it. That was the important part. This is how I learned her technique for putting someone under. My own technique was severely lacking, I was not too proud to admit after I saw how she did it. And I felt so bad for how I had mishandled Indie all these years that I nearly fell into a crushing depression when I got back to LA.
Nearly? That’s a lie. I took two months off and pretty much started talking to myself. It wasn’t the rambling of an insane man. It was more… functional. List-making. Talking things through. Planning. But it wasn’t how I had planned on returning home.
McKay called a few more times, mostly asking about Indie. Filling me in on his attempts to find her. I never heard from Adam at all.
I was never important enough for Adam to call me. If it didn’t involve Indie making a catastrophic mistake, he couldn’t be bothered with me.
Eventually I went on to finish my residency and then I started formulating my plan to tackle my memory issues. And specifically why I cannot recall a clear reason for taking such an interest in Indie.
But I’ve had some success in that area, at least.
When I put myself under it’s not really under, it’s just a very deep relaxed state. A freeing state where my mind is allowed to wander and thoughts pop up almost at random. Visions too. I can even hear people when I’m in this state.
It’s not a dream, but a precursor to a dream. In science, we call this hypnagogia. It’s an intermediary state of consciousness people experience just prior to falling asleep and consists of visual and auditory sensations. It’s quite helpful for problem-solving. Although the difficulty of inducing it for a long enough period to study, and the fact that, like sleep, it induces amnesia, makes it a little unreliable.
Some people never experience hypnagogia, or don’t remember it. But I have always had bouts of extremely vivid visions and sounds as I was falling asleep. Stress can bring it on as well. And it’s been known to be helpful working things out. Some very smart and famous people have reported solving big problems while in a hypnagogic state.
Ana was the one who turned me on to this. Prior to seeing her out at the healing center I hadn’t thought about it much. It was brushed over in my neuroscience classes in school. One or two paragraphs in a text. A single multiple-choice question on an exam. That’s about it.
It’s not very helpful in a therapeutic situation. It doesn’t last long enough and again, the memory of it is unreliable.
In Ana’s world this state is used for lucid dreaming.
I was skeptical at first. But after I left and went home to LA, I practiced. It was surprisingly enlightening. I videotaped every session, even though the video was mostly me just lying there, and hooked myself up to an EEG and did an audio-only recording too, trying to keep it all scientific.
It’s not very scientific.
But I had a timer set to wake me. A loud bell that would jolt me. And then I would talk it out. Say everything I could remember.
On a scale of one to five, I would rate this therapy a one and a half. But I persisted. Because even small steps forward can be helpful. I remember that much from all that PSYOPS training.
Also, I kind of enjoyed it. The lucid dreams were interesting. I’d see people sometimes. Doing very random things, like riding a bike in a circle. And they talked too. That was creepy, but also cool. Most of it is meaningless. But it was a little bit like… spying on strangers. I understand that these people I saw weren’t real, but… fuck it. I wasn’t consciously making them up. So they were a little bit real.
