Blurred by Tara Fuller

white one with a gruesome-looking fake bloodstain in the side. On the front it said in big block letters, I’m fine .
    I looked up and sighed. “Pretty sure you’re not charging my dad a fortune to talk about my T-shirt collection.”
    “Fair enough. So, tell me about you, Cash.” He leaned back in his chair and clicked his pen.
    “I’m sure my dad’s already filled you in, so I don’t really know what you want me to say here.”
    “I want to hear it from you.”
    “I’m fine. There’s nothing to talk about.”
    Dr. Farber cleared his throat and set the pen down. “Okay. Why don’t we start with the fire.”
    “What about it?” I averted my eyes to the big, glossy, cherrywood desk behind him and tried to hold my eyes open. When I let them close there were flames. Smoke. Chaos.
    “Your father seems to think that’s when most of your problems started.”
    “So?” I asked. “Wouldn’t you be a little screwed up if you’d almost died in a fire? Does that make me crazy?” Not crazy. Just haunted. Though hunted would be a more appropriate term.
    “Let me ask you something.” He leaned forward and pushed his glasses up his nose. “Why did you go into the house that day? It was clearly dangerous. You could’ve waited for the fire department to show up.”
    I finally let him snag my gaze. “And what? Just let her die?”
    “Her?” Dr. Farber looked down at his notebook. “I assume you mean your neighbor.”
    I swallowed and looked out the window. “Her name’s Emma.”
    “Girlfriend?”
    “No.”
    “Do you want her to be?” he asked.
    I shook my head, feeling uncomfortable in my own skin. “No. No, of course not. Emma’s my best friend.”
    “Then why are the two of you estranged?”
    I laughed and slapped my hands over my knees. “How much did my dad tell you?”
    “Answer the question.”
    “We’re just going through a rough patch. That’s all,” I said. “Friends disagree sometimes. It’s not a big deal.”
    He scribbled something on his pad. “And it has nothing to do with the fact that she has a boyfriend now?”
    “No,” I said, my mind reeling with memories and feelings I didn’t want to deal with. He was fishing. And I could feel his hook in me, bringing it all up my throat. Hell, maybe it was just because she finally found a boyfriend and I was a jealous ass. Or maybe it was because I was dying and I couldn’t stop myself from thinking I’d pissed away the past eleven years with her and now I wasn’t going to get any more. “Okay. Maybe I used to think that someday…”
    I closed my eyes and groaned.
    “It’s okay, Cash,” he said softly. “Keep going.”
    “I used to think that later, maybe when I was done being stupid, and she was done being scared of everything… I thought that maybe we might end up there. Together.”
    He nodded and waited for me to go on. When I didn’t, he shifted gears.
    “What about other girls?” He cocked his head to the side to watch me. “Any other relationships?”
    I rubbed my palm over the back of my neck. There were too many discarded girls to count. What did Emma always call them? My “disposable girlfriends.” I felt so detached from that guy it was almost as if the old Cash didn’t exist anymore.
    “I’ve dated a lot of girls.” If you could call an evening in the back of my Bronco or on the sofa in my studio “dating.”
    “Anything serious?”
    I stared at my sneakers, feeling a little guilty. What I felt for her was beyond my control. Like it had always been there, just waiting for her to bring it out. “No.”
    Dr. Farber wrote something else on his pad. “Let’s talk about your mom.”
    I clenched my jaw and sat back. “There’s nothing to talk about. She’s not a part of my life.”
    “How old were you when she left?”
    “Six,” I said.
    “That must have been hard.”
    “Of course it was hard.” It would have been a lot harder if it hadn’t been for Em and her mom. They’d fed me when Dad