It's not much later, in Isabella's room, that she asks:
"So... is Alex really a dom?"
"...and um?" She keeps her voice level, but there's a horrible feeling at the pit of her stomach.
"Jackson..." she starts carefully. "Are you sure... you want to stay with him?"
"But you weren't suffering so much. Guy uses stuff on you you don't like, basically tells you to fuck a girl without a condom, you're repressing enough upset that you're crying—Jackson, this isn't good for you. And yes therapy, even if in the short term it doesn't help, in the long term it will, and you'll find a dom that actually loves you."
"Why do you believe that without at least trying? Why can't you do the therapy thing and stay with him, then, if you want that so much? Then you can see for yourself. Because Jackson, this isn't you happy, that's not what happy looks like!"
"So maybe I don't get to be happy for more than half an hour in a row, maybe that's just my life. Not everybody can just show up and be the new kid in school and land the hottest dom in school and get hand-fed breakfast and called 'pet'. I'm lucky anybody would look at me twice let alone collar me."
"You keep saying that, but you can't know that's true, not when that's exactly the kind of thing having clinical depression would look like. The simplest explanation that fits the fact is the most likely to be true."
"I can throw books at you, if you like, talking about how depression works. I don't need you to take it on faith, like I said, you could go to therapy and stay with him so that if one thing fails you still have the other. It doesn't have to be either-or, and you could collect the evidence yourself."
"If they think you're likely to present a danger to yourself or others."