He stroked my back from neck to ass. “Baby—”
“Get out. I have shit to do.”
“Why’s it gotta be like that?” He got the condom off and rolled it up in toilet paper.
I stood up. “How else should it be?”
“You don’t want me to be nice?”
“You thought you were the one using me? Funny.”
“You some kinda weirdo?”
“You’re in a mental ward, dude. Come on. Get the fuck out of my bathroom.”
Condom stowed in his pocket, pants zipped, girl disinterested, he got the hint and opened the door. He was almost out, but being a man, he needed the last word.
“Slut.”
fourteen.
“Last session,” Elliot said. “How do you feel?”
He looked relaxed, clean-shaven, happy. I hadn’t realized how troubled he’d looked during our last session.
“I’m okay. Are you going to let me go?”
“I can only make a recommendation. After this session, I’ll type it up, and we’ll meet with Frances and your lawyer. Give me an hour after we’re done. Your mother and lawyer are already here.”
I sit on the couch. “Are we doing hypnosis again today?”
He shrugged. “Sure, if you’re up for it. I’d like to try to find more recent memories. Track back to the last thing you remember.”
I laid back. “We tried this before.”
“Maybe things have changed.” He sat next to me and got out his pen.
I wished I could have met him under different circumstances. When he was a seminarian, before I was a happy little fuckdoll, when things could have been kind of normal. That absurd sense of humor would drive me insane while my affluenza frustrated him.
“Things have changed,” I said, though I couldn’t define them.
“Keep your eyes on the tip of the pen.”
Are you relaxed?
I am. I feel a freedom I hadn’t felt before. I feel hopeful and generous, sweet and melancholy. Emboldened and encouraged, ready to start a new journey, a life after this incident.
I want you to think about the ride here, to Westonwood. Can you remember that?
I don’t. It’s not even a blur; it’s blank.
Go back a little further. To the stables. You were given a shot. Do you remember the pain in your arm?
The black goes grey, and I feel something in my arm, as if I’m being poked with a rigid finger. I feel something else, a pounding in my chest, a confusion that I’m separate from. I can’t tell what’s happening, besides the feeling of being restrained.
Go back further. Before the shot.
I don’t want to. I feel the resistance binding me to my forgetfulness, the comfort of not knowing. If I lean into it, just a little, maybe I can see what happened without feeling it. Maybe I can observe coldly, like a reporter noting facts for relevance, not profundity. If I let myself accept that fear, I’ll know. So I relax into where the rope of my fear pulls and binds me, dropping into some unknown graphite-colored place in my head. I expect to go back in my memory a minute, two minutes, half an hour, but intuitively, though I can’t tell the whens and wheres, I know I’ve gone back further.
His breath falls on my cheek, and a pain in my arm runs from my wrist to the sensitive side of my bicep.
“You did not,” he says from deep in his throat. He’s naked, stunning, the stink of sex and blood on him. He pins me to the wall, the friction screaming against the open skin on my ass.
Regret. Pounds of it. Miles wide. Regret to the depth of my broken spirit.
“I’m sorry.” Am I? Or am I just saying it?
“Why?”
My wrist hurts. He’s pressing it so hard against the wall, as if I’d leave, as if I’d ever turn my back on him. Yet I want to get away, to run, to show him that I can abandon him the way he abandons me.
I wiggle, but he only presses harder and demands, “Why?”
“Get off me!”
“Tell me why!” His eyes are wider, his teeth flashing as if he wants to rip out my throat. “Why?”
“I need it!”
The words come out before I think, and they’re poison to him. Before I expect it, he slaps me in the mouth. He lets me go, and I fall to the floor. When I look at him, he’s cradling the lower half of his face as if he can’t believe what he’s done. He’s slapped me plenty, but not in anger. Not without me halfway in subspace and high on dopamine. Never outside a scene.
But that’s nothing compared to what he does next. The ropes of my fear try to pull me away, back to safety, and I let them.
What is it? What does he do?
I must have been silent too long. I must have watched Deacon’s face, frozen in my memory, for a second too many. The sense that he is going to do something terrible is all I have, but I don’t remember what it is. When Elliot asks from the present what Deacon does, I stay to see it.
“I’m sorry,” Deacon says.
I don’t say anything. My face hurts, and I taste liquid copper. We stay like that forever, or time is stretched in my memory. This is the moment I can tell him it’s okay, or the moment I can be angry, or I can have a reaction that will make him not do what he’s going to do.
But I don’t do anything. Not a word or gesture.
He walks out.
I don’t know why there’s a finality to it that I haven’t ever felt before, but there is. When the bedroom door clicks behind him, that’s it.
I want to wake up. I don’t want to observe my emotions, even as a time-traveling bystander.
You’re fidgeting.
Pinkerton Pinkerton Pinkerton
Okay, on three, you’ll wake rested and happy.
Amanda’s next to her hot pink Bugattti. Pinkerton, before it became the assassin of the 405. She tips, holds herself straight, smiles at me. Oh, no. I don’t think so.
One.
I snap the keys from her and give them to Charlie. I open the passenger door in the front, even though it’s her car. Let her sit in the back. I don’t want her puking on Charlie when he’s driving.
Two.
I’m not in the mood to die.
Three.
“You associate those two things,” Elliot said. “Amanda dying, and Deacon hitting you.”
“He hit me all the time. It was a turn-on.”
“Hard enough to break a molar?”
I heard him shift in his chair. I wanted to sit upright, but my body felt like the inside of a broken egg.
“Did you usually sit in the back of Pinkerton?”
“If Charlie was driving and it’s Amanda’s car, I should be in the back. That’s just social mores. But Amanda got aggressive when she drank too much, and she was doing God knows what else. I just didn’t feel like worrying about her having a psychotic break while Charlie was driving, because it wasn’t like he was in much better shape.”
“And Deacon hitting you?”
“He left. That was the painful part.”
“Why did he leave?”
I sighed. It had been the sore point between us. Our thing. “He went away for a few days to hang a show in San Diego. And I swelled, so I needed to fuck, and I got it where I could. I tried not to. I tried to be good, but I failed, okay? And he found out, which was lying on top of cheating. I packed my shit and left. That was the last time I saw him. Until the stables, which I still don’t remember.”
“So you feel responsible for him leaving?”
“I was. We stopped sharing and fucking around. We agreed.”
“I think you need some therapy after you leave here. I don’t think you’ve worked through your feelings. We haven’t had time to touch on anything in your past.”