Chapter Text
The waiting room smelled like eucalyptus and old money, and George Russell hated it immediately.
He’d expected something warmer. Therapists’ offices in films always had a certain softness to them — worn armchairs, a box of tissues angled just so, maybe a plant somebody actually watered. This one had none of that. Grey walls, a single abstract print that looked like it had been chosen by an algorithm optimizing for inoffensive, and a receptionist who hadn’t looked up from her screen since he’d walked in.
He checked his phone. Two minutes past three. He was never late for anything and he hated that today, of all days, he’d been early.
“Mr. Russell?”
The voice came from the doorway to his left, and George looked up expecting — he didn’t know what. Someone older, maybe. Someone with the kind of face that had heard everything and stopped being surprised by any of it.
Dr. Max Verstappen was not that. He was maybe early-thirties, dark hair cut close, wearing a jumper that looked expensive in the way that expensive things look when they’re not trying to. He had the kind of stillness that made George immediately want to fill the silence, which he supposed was probably the point.
“That’s me,” George said, standing, extending a hand out of habit before he remembered this wasn’t that kind of meeting. Verstappen shook it anyway. Brief. Professional. A single assessing glance that didn’t linger anywhere it shouldn’t.
“Come through.”
The office was better than the waiting room — books, actually read from the look of the spines, a window that looked out over a car park but let in real light. George took the chair that was obviously meant for him, angled across from a smaller one that was obviously Verstappen’s, and did the thing he always did in new rooms with new people: catalogued the exits, catalogued the man, decided within four seconds what version of himself he was going to be for the next fifty minutes.
Max sat, opened a folder he didn’t look at, and said, “Do you know why you’re here?”
“My job made it a condition of me keeping it,” George said. “So, technically, no. I’m here because a woman I was seeing complained to HR, and it turned out I’d been sleeping with rather more people than was sensible, some of them a bit too close to the office for comfort. It was cheaper for everyone if I looked contrite in front of a professional twice a week instead of getting fired outright.”
He said it lightly. He’d practiced saying it lightly.
Verstappen didn’t write anything down. “That’s why the referral happened. I asked why you’re here.”
“Isn’t that the same question?”
“No.”
George laughed, a short surprised sound. “Fair enough. I don’t know. I’m here because it was that or lose the job.”
“And is that a good enough reason to spend fifty minutes a week talking to a stranger about your sex life?”
“When you put it like that it sounds bleak.”
“It is a bit bleak,” Max said, and there was something almost like amusement at the corner of his mouth, gone before George could be sure he’d seen it. “I’d rather start honestly than start comfortably. We can do comfortable later, if we get there.”
George shifted in the chair. He was used to being one of the more likeable people in a room, used to steering conversations by instinct — small corrections, always in control of the line. This felt different. Max wasn’t performing anything, which meant George had nothing to react to except the plain fact of the questions.
“What do you want to know,” George said, “specifically.”
“Whatever’s true. I’ll ask the specifics. You don’t have to volunteer anything you’re not ready to.”
“That’s very generous of you.”
“It’s not generosity. Rushed disclosure is usually inaccurate disclosure. I’d rather you tell me the real version slowly than the version you think I want to hear quickly.” Max finally looked down at the folder, flipped one page. “Your file says you were diagnosed — self-reported, actually, this was your idea, before the HR complaint — with compulsive sexual behavior two years ago. You saw someone for eleven sessions and stopped.”
“I got busy.”
“You got scared.”
George opened his mouth to argue and then didn’t, because it was true, and because something about the flat, unhurried way Max said it made arguing feel pointless, like disputing the weather.
“Yeah,” George said. “Probably.”
“What scared you?”
“Dunno. Looking at it, I suppose. It’s easier not to look at things.”
“It is,” Max agreed, and wrote something down this time, unhurried, and George found himself watching the pen rather than the man, and wondering, with a small discomfort he didn’t examine too closely, what it said.
They spent the rest of the session on logistics — frequency, confidentiality, what Max would and wouldn’t report back to his manager (nothing specific, only compliance, and George’s actual disclosures were his own). It was clinical and dry and George found himself, against every instinct he had, telling the truth about small things. That he hadn’t slept properly in a month. That the HR complaint had been the fourth close call in two years, not the first. That he genuinely didn’t know if he could stop, and that not knowing frightened him more than any meeting with management could.
He hadn’t meant to say that last part. It came out somewhere around minute forty, in the flat unbothered quiet Max left after every answer, the kind of silence that didn’t ask to be filled but somehow always got filled anyway.
Max didn’t react the way George expected — no soft therapist noises, no “that sounds really hard”. He just nodded once, made a note, and said, “We’ll come back to that.”
“Not going to reassure me?”
“Would it help?”
“Probably not,” George admitted.
“Then no.” A pause. “I’ll tell you when I think something’s going to be okay. I won’t tell you before I mean it.”
George left the session unsettled in a way he couldn’t name, turning the sentence over in the car like a stone in his pocket. He’d been reassured by a lot of people in his life — his mum, mates after bad breakups, women who didn’t know yet that he wasn’t going to call — and all of it had slid off him the way water slides off something waxed. This had stuck. He didn’t like that it had stuck. He drove home telling himself it meant nothing.