Adrianne Byrd - King's Promise

Q finally clamped his mouth shut when he realized what the whole thing must have sounded like on the other side of the door. “Uh, yes! Never better.”

There was a brief pause before Christina asked. “Why were you screaming?”

“What? Uh…”

Alyssa snickered and then immediately launched into a game of charades to help him out.

“I saw…someone? No. Something?”

Alyssa nodded.

“Like what?” Christina asked.

“I, uh…” He looked to Alyssa, who was running around the bathroom with her fingers in the shape of a V over her head.”

“I don’t know. It looks like a rabbit—no? A what? What the hell is that?” he whispered to Alyssa.

“A cockroach,” she answered, offended that he didn’t get it. “A cockroach!” he thundered. “That looked nothing like—”

“You have roaches?” Christina asked, sounding disgusted.

“No!” he snapped at the door.

“You said—”

“Forget what I said.” He glared back at Alyssa. “I, uh, just thought I saw a gray hair.”

“Oh,” Christina said dubiously from the other side of the door.

“A gray hair?” Alyssa challenged, frowning. “You’d freak out like that over a gray hair?”

“Maybe.” Q rolled his eyes. “By the way, what happened to my privacy?”

Alyssa shrugged. “I waited until you had finished showering.”

“I don’t get this. How in the hell am I being haunted by someone who is still alive?” He headed toward the door.

“Maybe that’s why you need to go back and see Dr. Turner.”

“No! I’m not crazy!” Quentin snatched open the door.

Christina, clutching the top silk sheet to her chest, asked suspiciously, “Who are you talking to in there?”

“No one,” he answered too quickly.

Christina peered over his shoulder and looked into the empty bathroom. “You know, uh, I really should be going. I, uh, have a very full day tomorrow.” She turned and started grabbing her clothes.

“Wait. You don’t have to leave,” he said.

“Don’t worry. I’ll call you later,” she said, moving like someone had struck a match to her behind. Less than two minutes later, she was dressed and racing out of the house with Q trying to catch up so that he could at least walk her to her car. But just as he reached the front door, it slammed in his face.

At the top of the stairs, Alyssa folded her arms. “That went well.”

The next day Quentin stretched out his six-foot-two frame across the black leather chaise, staring up at the ceiling in Dr. Julianne Turner’s downtown Atlanta office. Truth be told, he’d surprised himself by returning to the doctor’s office for another round of therapy, especially since he didn’t really believe that there was anything wrong with him.

“Oh, there’s plenty wrong with you,” said Alyssa, his hallucinated sister-in-law/fantasy-lost-love from across the room. She wore that damn white wedding gown again today. Their marriage was a scab that everyone had hoped would heal over time, but so far—no dice. He’d been the one who his li’l Alice had a crush on. It was he who had first fallen for the li’l minx when she’d grown up to become a beautiful fashion model. It was Sterling who had discouraged Quentin from pursuing a relationship with her—since according to his brother she was like their younger sister—only to have him turn around and marry Alyssa himself.

“I wish you’d put something else on,” Q mumbled under his breath to his mirage.

“Like I have something to do with what I have on,” Alyssa said, throwing up her hands. “I’m not really here!”

“What was that, Quentin?” Dr. Turner asked, sitting across from him in a straight-backed chair.

“What? Nothing.” He shook his head at the doctor, who took great pains to hide her lush curves under large, unflattering clothes. The fact that she dressed so frumpy bothered him more than it should have. He didn’t understand why beautiful women did things like that. Didn’t they understand their power?

Alyssa smirked. “Are you really sitting there thinking about having sex with your psychiatrist?”

“Who said anything about having sex with my doctor?” Q snapped.

“Excuse me?” Dr. Turner said, looking up from her notepad.

“What? Nothing.” He glared at Alyssa, who shrugged her shoulders.

All right, yes. Quentin knew that it wasn’t exactly normal to be seeing and talking to someone who wasn’t there. But as far as he could tell, it was just a coping mechanism until he could work through his conflicting emotions. So far, it was better than getting drunk and being pulverized in bar fights—which had actually been his first line of defense.

Dr. Turner started scribbling in her yellow notepad. “You think today you’ll tell me who it is that you see and talk to?”

He hesitated as Alyssa raised her eyebrows. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he lied. “I’m here because…I want to understand…”

“Love?” the doctor suggested.

Quentin bobbed his head while Alyssa shook hers.

“That’s a tall order, Mr. Hinton,” Dr. Turner said, crossing her long, chocolate-brown legs, which continued to distract him. A connoisseur of women, Quentin had spent his entire adult life enjoying learning all there was to know about women—sexually, that is, he proudly boasted. He loved nothing more than to lose himself in the curve of a woman’s hip, the valleys between and around a pair of succulent breasts and, of course…other hidden treasures.

“Quentin?” Dr. Turner repeated, breaking his trance from her long limbs.

“I’m sorry. What?”

Alyssa huffed out a frustrated breath and plopped down in an empty chair across the room. “This is a complete waste of time. This isn’t about love. To you this is about winning and losing.”

Quentin frowned, but before he could ask Alyssa what the hell she meant by that, Dr. Turner cleared her throat. “I said that trying to understand love is a tall order. Many people spend their entire lives trying to figure it out, nurture it and even control it.”

“I’ll take control for two hundred, Alex,” Alyssa said, mimicking a Jeopardy! contestant.

“Humph.” A half smile curled Q’s lips.

“I guess I’d be remiss if I didn’t add those who try to run away from love,” she said.

Once again, they had hit his category and the room fell silent.

“Have you given any more thought to calling your brother Sterling?”

I think about it all the time. “No.”

“Do you think that you’ll never be able to forgive him for the wrong you feel that he has done to you?” Dr. Turner asked.

Quentin held Alyssa’s gaze from across the room. “I’m not sure.”

“That’s different from the flat no last week,” the therapist gently reminded him.

He stopped and weighed his words carefully. “Trust…is still an issue.” He shifted in his chair and ignored the way his beautiful mirage frowned at him. “No matter what has happened in my life, the constant power struggle between me and my father or the insane messes I found myself in, I always thought that I could trust my brothers. Sterling…Jonas. We’re each different. Granted, they are megasuccessful and now happily married with children, and probably a dog and even a white-picket fence. I never questioned their loyalty or intentions. I believed that my brothers, more than anyone, always had my best interest at heart.”

Q shook his head. “How do you learn to trust someone again after they’ve poured gasoline on that bridge and blown it up?”

“Perhaps by reaching out?” Dr. Turner suggested.

“So it’s all on me?” The idea repulsed him. “I wasn’t the one with the gasoline.”