The Hot Mess Collective, Vol. 2 Ch 17: The First Session

Maeve had finally reached the point where talking to a stranger about her feelings sounded marginally less awful than one more day of being herself.

The apartment had gone still around her. The dishes in the sink had grown a skin. Her laptop had died on Tuesday and stayed dead, because the outlet was behind the couch and moving the couch felt like a job for someone with a future. Under all of it ran the same sentence, on a loop, in Alex's voice. Level. Tired. Decide if you want to be in this, or if you just want to keep proving yourself right.

Both answers made her sick. Choosing Alex meant admitting she had a problem, and she had spent her whole life arranging things so she never had to say that out loud. It meant looking at the walls she'd built and seeing a cell instead of a fort. It meant being seen. On the third night she ended up on the bathroom tile, knees on the cold grout, waiting for something to come up. Nothing did.

The other answer was worse. Letting Alex go meant crawling back into the story she'd always believed about herself. And she kept remembering small things. Alex laughing at a terrible pun in the Key Food checkout line. Alex sliding her the last dumpling without a word. Alex saying "okay" after she'd said something unforgivable, and meaning it. Every one of those memories argued against the voice in her head, the one that said she was a broken thing nobody could love. She was losing the argument in both directions.

So she did nothing. She lay on the couch and scrolled, and the scrolling wasn't a distraction. It was a sentence she served. She read Nori's posts about the podcast, all caps and certainty, and envied her for knowing what she wanted. She thumbed through GlimGlam, past brunch tables and engagement rings and glamoured faces that had never cried in a Duane Reade, and let each one confirm what she already knew. She liked a post from a girl she'd gone to high school with, a sunset over a Montauk dock, then unliked it, then lay there wondering if the girl had gotten the notification anyway. At two in the morning she watched a forty-second video of a man restoring a rusted cast-iron pan. She watched it eleven times.

That was how she found it. Not in the main HMC threads, where people were still screaming at each other about the activist and sanctuary split. Three menus deep, in a dead sub-board called Magical Maintenance & Odd Jobs. Last post, two weeks ago.

A username she didn't recognize had written: Shout-out to Ben G. Had a grounding session with him last week for my magical anxiety. First time in months I can cast a basic glamour without a migraine. Lifesaver.

A few comments down, someone else: Seconded. Ben's a miracle worker. He did an aura-cleanse for me and pulled out old hex residue I didn't even know I was carrying. He's like a magical therapist or something.

Maeve read the last line three times. A magical therapist. It sounded like something a human screenwriter would invent after a weekend of bad Fold movies. And Ben. Ben from the meetings. The GutterMage. Kind face, nervous hands that never stopped moving. He could bring a dead toaster back from wherever toasters went. He had no Court license. No healer's seal on his door. He was a back-alley aura-cleaner. A handyman for the soul.

It was the first idea in a week that didn't make her want to lie down on the floor. A human therapist would want forty minutes of backstory before anything real, and she'd have to explain her family, and the Fold, and why none of it showed up in a DSM. Ben wouldn't need the preamble. Fold problem. Fold fix. It wasn't the door Alex had held open, and it wasn't the exit. It was a third door, and it had nothing to do with Alex. It had to do with her. That was the part that scared her most.

She didn't decide anything, not really. There was no speech to the mirror. She was just more tired of standing still than she was afraid of moving.

She wouldn't text Alex. Not yet. She didn't have an answer for them, and reaching out without one would be its own kind of cruelty. This part had to be hers.

Ben's handle was in the Collective's Signal group, buried between someone's sticker spam and a pinned post about meeting dues. She opened a new message. Her thumb sat over the keyboard for ten minutes by the clock on the stove. She wrote openers and deleted them.

Hey, I'm a complete emotional disaster and I heard you fix those. Too desperate.

Hello, I would like to book your magical therapy services. She sounded like she was ordering a large plain from Joe's.

I have some issues. She laughed out loud at that one, alone in the apartment, and the sound startled her.

In the end she fell back on the only mode she'd ever trusted. Blunt. Mean to herself first, so nobody else had to bother.

Heard you help people with magical bullshit. I've got a lot of it. You available?

She read it once. Her pulse was going hard in her neck. She hit send before she could stop herself and flung the phone to the far end of the couch, face down, as if it might bite. Her cheeks were hot. She pressed the backs of her wrists against them and stared at the ceiling crack she'd been meaning to report to the super since March.

The phone buzzed in under a minute.

She picked it up. Her hands weren't steady.

Magical bullshit is my specialty, and you're not the only one carrying a lot. Office is in the back of my repair shop in the Undercity. Quiet. Warded. Tomorrow afternoon?

No questions. No how are you feeling. Just a place and a time. Maeve read it twice, and something wet hit the screen and smeared the word Warded.

Tomorrow's good, she typed. Her thumbs worked better this time.

***

The shop sat under a dead neon sign that read REPAIRS in about half its letters. Taped inside the door was an index card in block capitals: NO CURSED ITEMS AFTER 6PM. CASH OR BARTER. The front room smelled of solder and hot dust and 3-in-One oil. Every surface held something half-gutted. A crystal lamp flickered in a Nike shoebox. A deck of cards shuffled itself on the counter, over and over, and a brass clockwork bird glared at her from a coat hook and clicked its beak.

Ben met her at the counter. He gave her a small smile and wiped his hands on a rag that was more grease than cloth. He didn't make small talk. He lifted the counter flap and led her through to the back. A transistor radio on the workbench played a Mets postgame show at low volume. He reached over and switched it off as they passed, and the silence that followed was thicker than she expected.

The back room was nothing like a therapist's office. Steel shelving lined the walls, the cheap Home Depot kind that wobbled if you leaned on it. Every shelf held jars of dust that caught the light. Bundles of dried lavender and chamomile hung from the uprights, tied off in butcher's twine. A row of rocks on the lowest shelf buzzed faintly as she passed. Two armchairs faced each other in the middle of the room. Both sagged. One had a patch of silver duct tape on the arm. The noise of the Undercity stopped dead at the doorframe, and she could feel the wards in her back teeth.

It was safe. Obviously, insultingly safe.

Maeve hated it on sight.

She sat on the edge of the duct-taped chair. Back straight. Leather jacket on and zipped to the collarbone. Feet flat on the floor, ready to push off. She felt like something pinned to a corkboard. She had a dozen sarcastic lines loaded and waiting.

Ben sat across from her. No notepad. No couch. He picked a gray river stone off the side table and turned it over in his palms, and then he just sat there. The silence stretched. She counted the jars on the nearest shelf. Thirty-one. She ran through openers in her head, jokes that would make him laugh so he'd stop looking at her.

He didn't ask what brought her in today.

"Where in your body does the anger sit?" he said.

Every line she'd loaded went out of her head at once. She stared at him.

"The... the anger?"

"Mm." Ben turned the stone over. His thumb found a groove in it, worn smooth, and stayed there. "The magical bullshit, you called it. It lives somewhere. Where's yours?"

Against her will, Maeve checked. It didn't take long. There was a knot behind her breastbone. It was hard and tight and hot, and it had been there so long she'd stopped noticing it.

"My chest," she muttered. She hated how easily it came out.

"And the fear," Ben said. "What color is it?"

"It's not a color." The words snapped out of her. "It's a fucking state of being."

Ben didn't flinch. He nodded slowly, as if she'd given him a perfectly sensible clinical answer. "A state of being," he said. "If it made a sound, what would it be?"

That was how the hour went. Ben didn't ask about her childhood. He didn't ask about her relationships. He asked about the texture of her shame and the temperature of her loneliness, about weight and color and sound, and she understood every question, because it was the language she'd learned to cast in. That was the problem. In that language there was nowhere to hide.

So she fought. Her throat closed at the thought of saying any of it aloud. Her family's long record of magical failures. The thing with Finn. The mess she'd made of Alex, still open and bleeding. Each one sat in her like a swallowed shard of glass. She kept her answers short.

"How long has the knot been in your chest?"

"Forever."

"Does the state of being have a weight?"

"Yeah."

"Heavy?"

She shrugged and found a crack in the ceiling to look at. Every question was a thumb pressing on the lid of a pressure cooker, and she had no idea what would happen if the lid went. She gave him sarcasm, then silence, then a glare that had made grown fae back out of rooms. Ben waited. He had an enormous amount of waiting in him. Her anger broke against it and went nowhere. Somewhere out front, the self-shuffling deck finished a pass and started another. The clockwork bird clicked twice. Ben didn't look at the clock on the wall, and she realized, after a while, that there wasn't one.

After a while he set his own stone down. He reached into a wooden salad bowl on the shelf and came out with a lump of raw quartz. The edges were rough. It was milky and clouded at the heart. He held it out.

"Here," he said. "Just hold this a minute."

She looked at his hand. "Why? Is it going to read my mind?"

The corner of his mouth went up. "No. It's a rock. It's good at listening, and it doesn't judge." When she didn't take it, he set it on the arm of her chair. "Hold it and think about the last time you felt safe. You don't have to tell me."

It was stupid. It was exactly the kind of thing she'd mock in a GlimGlam comment without finishing the post. Every reflex she had told her to say something cutting and walk out. But she was so tired. Tired of fighting him, tired of fighting everyone, tired of the full-time job of being Maeve.

She picked up the quartz.

It was cool and heavier than it looked. The rough edges bit into her palm. She closed her eyes. Every muscle in her legs wanted to stand. She didn't let them. She held the rock and breathed in through her nose, lavender and solder, and out through her mouth.

Safe. She went looking. Every memory she pulled up had something wrong with it. Alex, warm against her on the couch, and right behind that, the cold certainty that she would ruin it. Nori and Imani and Sayo crammed into a diner booth, laughing, and under the laughter, her assigned seat. The screw-up. The one they worried about.

Then something else surfaced, small and unexpected.

Her apartment, late, every light off but the one over the stove. The smell of rosemary and old silver. On the table, a length of red string, a smooth river stone, and a tiny tarnished button off a coat she no longer owned. Her own magic moving down through her fingers into the charm. Slow. Steady. Earthy. Not a failure. Not a family embarrassment. She remembered tying the last knot and pulling it tight. She remembered the faint warmth that rose off the finished charm and sat in her palm like a held breath.

Nobody had seen it. Nobody had helped. She had made that safety with her own two hands.

A tear slid out from under her closed lid. It ran down to her jaw and dropped onto the quartz. She didn't wipe it. She didn't open her eyes. She sat in the warded room in her zipped-up jacket and held the rock.

Ben said nothing about it. When she finally opened her eyes, everything blurred at the edges, he was looking down at his own stone, turning it over, his face mild. As if people cried on his quartz every Tuesday.

"That's enough for today," he said. "You stayed in the chair. Most people don't, the first time."

And that was it. She set the quartz back in the salad bowl. She mumbled a thank-you without looking at him, and she walked out past the cards and the bird and the half-dead lamp into the Undercity gloom.

She wasn't cured. Nothing had cracked open. The knot was still behind her breastbone. The fear was still a state of being. The hour had been awkward from the first minute to the last.

She was going back next week.

The walk home took forty minutes. Past the shuttered bodega, its orange cat asleep on the bread rack. Past the subway grate that breathed warm air up the legs of her jeans. Somewhere on the second stairwell up out of the Undercity, she noticed she was breathing down into her stomach. The knot hadn't gone. It had given, by a single degree. A jar lid on its first quarter-turn. It was still wound tight. It could still snap. But it was not as tight as it had been an hour ago, and she walked the last four blocks without once checking her phone.

At home she dropped onto the couch and opened GlimGlam on reflex. Her saved queue was the usual. Memes about anxiety. Memes about failure. A cartoon skeleton waiting for a text back. Dark little jokes about how nothing meant anything.

Next up was a comic she'd been planning to repost all week. A small anxious goblin sets his own house on fire, then sits on the lawn complaining about the smoke. It was her brand. She'd built half her following on goblins like him, on reposting other people's misery with a caption like same or lmao me. The comments always came fast. People loved a girl who was in on the joke of her own life.

Her thumb hovered over Share.

She looked at the goblin. His scorched little face. His folded arms. The house going up behind him, and him on the grass, blaming the smoke.

It wasn't funny. It was a little sad.

She pressed and held until the menu came up, and tapped Delete. The goblin vanished. The queue closed over the gap, and the skeleton slid up into his place.

Nobody would ever know. It wasn't an answer for Alex. She set the phone face down on her chest and lay there in the dark, and she didn't pick it up again that night.

Updates

Follow for the latest on my stories.

Fiction

contact@msrayed.com

© 2025. All rights reserved.

My Substack: https://msrayed.substack.com

My Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/cw/MSRayed