Addiction Therapy

I bounce my knee as I tug at a thread dangling from the edge of my plaid skirt. My eyes dart around the room, taking in the red velvet curtains—the kind of brocade that might edge Mr Darcy’s bed—and a beige armchair. Pam’s sizable bottom has made a dent in the pillow that looks like a perfect peach. Vanilla and rose incense curl around my face like a lover’s hand.

“How is the withdrawal technique working for you?” Pam says, placing a cup of tea with a clink on the side table and settling into the chair. It creaks under her weight.

“It’s… difficult.” I chew on my lower lip.

She peers over her glasses, trying to soften the disapproval twitching in her blue eyes with a tight-lipped smile. “Well, battling addiction is hard, Lena.”

“Elizabeth,” I mutter under my breath before I can stop myself.

“No,” she says firmly. “Lena, we agreed that an important step in your therapy is to extract yourself from Elizabeth’s world and reclaim your own identity. You are Lena.”

I nod. “Sorry, Pam.”

Pam. With a name like that, it’s hardly her fault, but she hasn’t got a romantic bone in her body. I pity her. She doesn’t know how it feels to have a man’s lips trail your collarbone, sending ecstasy rippling down your spine. Can’t possibly imagine what it’s like to know that your future husband is there, etched on the page in black and white—Fitzwilliam. Or maybe I’d call him Fitz? William is far too common to do justice to such a man.

I’ve been coming to Pam for five weeks now to deal with my “romance addiction.” Mother said it got out of control when she found me rubbing a copy of Pride and Prejudice over my naked body while listening to Celine Dion. If that scared her, she really doesn’t want to know what I was up to that morning.

I digress. Silly Elizabeth, focus.

“Have you read Pride and Prejudice this week?”

“Just a couple of pages.”

“Let’s be specific. How many pages?”

“Fifty…ish.”

“Lena.”

“Fifty nine. And a half.”

“And Wuthering Heights?”

I leap to my feet, hands trembling, heart pounding. “You only told me to cut out Pride and Prejudice!”

If she takes Heathcliff from me too… the room swirls, my breathing turns ragged, my heart palpitates beneath my whalebone corset, and I think I might faint. Oh, Fitz, do catch me.

Pam lurches to her feet and grips my arm in her sausage fingers. She forcefully lowers me back into the chair.

“Take a breath, Lena. Remember our box breathing: in for four, out for six. In through the nose, out through the mouth. There you go girl,” she says like she’s calming a spooked horse.

Oh, to have a horse-drawn carriage. My breathing eases as I envision the flicker of their velvet ears and the soft clip-clop of their hooves as they tug my little chaise down the road. Fitz curls his fingers around mine and squeezes so that the little white crescent moons in his nails stand out. I slip his hand out from under mine so that it falls on my silk skirt. Reading the faint flush that creeps across my throat, he slides his hand up my thigh, drawing my skirts with it. Heat stirs low in my stomach, and I stifle a moan.

“Lena!”

God damn it, Pam! I straighten with a growl—in my visions of ecstasy, I’d begun to slide down the chair.

“You were doing it again. You must ground yourself in the present. In REALITY.” She emphasizes the word with such force it leaves a nasty taste in my mouth. What good is reality to me?

Realty is working night shifts in the fish and chip shop at the end of my road and forever stinking of fried batter, cod and oil. Reality is waking up to the pink walls of my bedroom that I painted when I was twelve, in the same house I’ve lived in for thirty-five years, and staring at the sallow, bitter faces of my parents who barely look each other, or me, in the eye anymore. Who on earth would want this festering turd of a reality?

Mr Darcy is all I need. Nothing Pam or my mother or Reddit tells me will change that.

Take me, Fitz. I’m yours.

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