"The Session"

“I’m sorry,” he said, wiping his glistening brow with his monogrammed handkerchief. “I don’t know what has gotten into me, usually this kind of thing is no problem for me.”
“Don’t worry about it,” she said, “it happens more often than you’d think,” her thick southern drawl swirling in the air with the coffee scent that still clung to her red lips. “We could just talk if you’d like, see where that takes us, if you want you could tell me a bit about yourself.”
“Well,” he began his self-pitch, “I was born in Texas but raised in New Jersey by my dad and my step-mom until I was sixteen.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah, my real mom was here and there, I guess. I never really got a chance to spend much time with her when I was younger and she was always taking me on trips when I did see her. I guess I don’t really know if they were trips or if she just didn’t really live anywhere. I never wanted to ask, even when I did spend time with her.”
“What happened at sixteen? Why did you not live with your dad and step-mom anymore?”
His smooth fingers glided around his Rolex, back and forth, turning it in circles, “He found my mom again. Before that, when I got to see my mom I was dropped off at some point with a social worker and she would come pick me up and off we would go. This time, my dad stuck around, stabbed her four times in her abdomen. I don’t know why I am telling you all this, being as it is just our first time together.” He finished his sentence brusquely as if she had dragged this information out of him without his knowledge.
“Don’t worry about it, at some point, this kind of stuff made it into my job description.” She chuckled at the idea of a normal meeting with her clients, probably not possible. “So what happened to you then?”
“Well,” he settled back in to his story, relaxing at the idea that he was not the only one who cracked life secrets around this place, “I spent a lot of time in law offices when I was with my mom and had read a lot of book on children’s rights, so I lawyered up with a guy whose law firm was a pretty regular stop when I was with my mom, and he helped me get emancipated, instead of going into the system.”
“What’d you do after you got ‘mancipated?” her painted fingernails picking carefully at her bouffant hairstyle.
“The lawyer offered me a job as a gopher and I took it. I quit school and worked full time. When I wasn’t running errands or looking up cases for him, I was studying every law book I could get my hands on.”
“Why would you want to do that?”
“I wanted to make sure that other families got that justice that my family never got. You know, my step-mom bailed out my dad and he only served five years for killing my mother. So I took the bar in California, no law school, and passed. Been a lawyer ever since.”
“So how’d you end up back here in Texas?”
“Wanted to be closer to my mom’s grave, she was buried here by her parents. You know, you smell like she did, same perfume and everything.” He thought carefully now about his life with his mom and why he hadn’t gotten to spend more time with her. He thought about why this session had gotten so...off topic.
“Well, sir, time’s about up unless you want to double your session, is there anything else I can do for you tonight?”
“No, not tonight, I may see you again though,” he handed her seven, crisp, one-hundred dollar bills. “You deserve the double payment even if it’s not double time tonight.” He walked out of the room swiftly, suit jacket still in hand.
“Thanks, I hope I do see you again,” she said as she thumbed her hour’s pay and checked her makeup in the cracked mirror. The peeling paint behind her finally chipped onto the floor as she shut the door of room “#G” for the night.
As she walked back to her post on the corner, she stopped to pull up her fishnets. Another girl wearing a leopard print mini dress and red high-heels came up next to her, “how’d it go tonight, girl?”
“Another easy seven hunskie; I guess there’s no psychologists in this town quite as good as a naked girl in bed for a guy with mommy issues.”
“Damn girl, you always get lucky. All I got was fifty bucks and another black eye.”
Disclaimer: This was a fictional story depicting fictional characters, not based off any real people or events and came completely from the author's imagination.