by CD Reiss
“He’s too nice to you,” he said, jerking his head toward Deacon, who must have moved behind me. “You’re just a little fucktoy, and he treats you like a woman.”
He removed his hand from my mouth. I choked and gurgled out a glob of spit. He slapped each cheek. Palm. Backhand. Like it was nothing.
I wanted to say my safe word. I didn’t think I could stand him doing it again. I was humiliated, but not as a sex object. I could take sexual disgrace and eat it for lunch. But now I was degraded as a person. A human. His slaps weren’t sexual or personal. They were detached, public, shameful. My nudity and my position were stripped of their power to seduce. And that was where I lost myself. I broke like a handful of spaghetti, right in the middle, pieces flying away.
He put his dick in my mouth and I took it down my throat, while someone I couldn’t see fucked my ass as if I wasn’t even there.
And in a sense, I wasn’t.
I’d gotten myself in too deep on Maundy. I’d asked to be broken. Begged. Maybe it was the novelty of the idea, or maybe it was a real kink. But I dropped out of those ropes changed.
I was bone-tired. Cold. Aching everywhere. Sticky with the juice of half a dozen men. When Deacon tried to touch me, I thought I’d be physically ill.
“Get away from me.”
Someone scooped me up and took me to the Care Room. I didn’t want to be there. It was too generic a space. Like a hotel room for anyone stuck in subspace. I hated it suddenly, and wanted to be in a personal space that wasn’t accessible to any sub who needed aftercare.
But I was too wrecked to protest. I was laid on the clean white sheets in the windowless room. I shivered. I didn’t know I could be so cold. Candles were lit.
Soothing music came on, and a lovely female voice said, “Welcome to the world of the broken.” Debbie covered me with a down blanket. “You were always lovely. But right now, you are most beautiful.”
She sat by me and stroked my hair. I felt isolated, alone, floating in the stars, miles above the movements of the human race.
24
FIONA
I wasn’t broken during the paddling in Laurel Canyon. My ass hurt, and I was annoyed. I was waiting for Elliot to show up and make a scene. Then I would have to act quickly to defuse it.
“Twenty-five!” I said through gritted teeth, more relieved that we’d get to do something else than that I’d reached the end to the pain.
He tossed the paddle aside and pushed me down, pushing my face into the bench.
“Remember how I broke you last time?”
I couldn’t answer from the pressure on my jaw.
“Desexualizing you.” He put his other hand on the open wounds on my ass, digging in his fingers. “Same thing rarely works twice.”
He pulled back, getting both hands on my bottom, and pulled the cheeks apart. I didn’t know what he intended, and I never found out. Because he got a look at what was going on back there, and the cruelty dropped off him.
“What the—?”
“Wait, I—”
“Who did this to you? The fucking doctor?”
“No!”
He yanked up my underpants. Angry. Tender. All the things at once.
“This”—he indicated my body as one violated unit—“I’ve seen everything. This was not consensual. Fiona. Kitten. What happened? What did he do to you, and why are you protecting him?”
Deacon was always in control, but standing over me as I adjusted my pants, he exhibited a level of confusion and pain I’d never seen before. It was like the earth shifting beneath me. If he didn’t know what to do, then every action I’d considered taking must be wrong.
Right before my eyes, all the confusion congealed into rage, and I feared for my friend, my plan, and my Master.
“Leave him alone.” I could have denied further. I could have told him it was Warren, but I did a calculation faster than I ever had, and I made a choice to build a wall around Elliot. “I will rain hell on you, Deacon. I love you, and I will ruin you.”
“Are you threatening me?”
Again, the confusion. Recognizing it for the second time, I knew what his confusion turned into when it transmuted into a solid emotion.
I said nothing. I held my hands at my sides, paddled ass waiting for the aftercare that wasn’t coming. Wanting to let him hold me and care for me, to kneel before him because it would make everything all right. I wouldn’t have to take responsibility for a damn thing. It would just work itself out in the form of violence.
A knock at the door, and a voice through it. Willem. “There’s a guy at the gate.”
He barely had the sentence out before I ran past Deacon, opened the door, and blew past Willem, past Debbie gathering fallen oranges in the yard, through the front house, to the driveway, which I took in loping strides, barefoot on sharp stones, and opened the pedestrian gate.
Elliot waited in his car.
I yanked on the door handle. “Unlock it!”
Clack.
I threw myself into the passenger side. “Get me out of here.”
“What—?”
“Go!”
He backed out of the drive, little car spitting pebbles, and got on Mulholland. I turned my body around to see if anyone was following.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“I’m fine.” The coast looked clear for the moment.
“What happened?”
“Deacon thinks you raped me.”
“What?” He skidded onto the shoulder.
“Keep driving!”
He pulled back onto the road. I twisted again, looking for the private road to spit out a black Range Rover.
“You told him I raped you?”
“Of course not. He saw…” I sank in my seat.
“What’s happening?
“Just drive. Please.”
“Where are we going?”
“You tell me.”
“Fine,” he said, as if making the decision was more of a relief than a burden.
He took a left, then a right, then a series of turns I’d never remember, heading deep into the basin. We didn’t talk. There was too much for me to know where to start, where to end, what to tell him, and what to hide.
25
FIONA
Elliot pulled up to a meter on Wilshire, set the wheel to its straight position, and put the car in park. He tapped the gearshift and said, “You’re squirming in your seat.”
“I got twenty-five with a paddle.”
He looked at me.
“That turns you on,” I said. It wasn’t a question.
“My dick is the last thing on my mind.”
“But it reacted.”
He stepped out of the car without confirming, and walked around to my side. He opened my door. After I got out and he closed it, he guided me into a little coffee house.
He whispered as I passed, “Everything about you makes my body react.”
I smiled at him. “I’ll have a buttercup. No sugar.”
I sat at one of the lacquered teak presswood tables under the hardware store buckets hanging from the ceiling. A bonsai tree sat in the center of each table and along the bar, and the Korean love ballads were loud enough to shield our words.
He put my cup in front of me and sat. I stirred the fat into marbling spirals in the black sludge.
“Thank you,” I said.
“Do you want to tell me about Warren?”
I nodded, biting my upper lip. My eyes filled up. I hadn’t told a soul, and admitting it made it real. I didn’t look at him. I said the words to the swirling pat of butter in my espresso.
“By the creek. He hurt me badly enough for Deacon to see two days later. I said ‘no.’ I said, ‘lube me up,’ something, you know? Just… it was bad enough sitting still for it. Having to because no one would believe he raped me. But it hurt. Having him call me a whore who liked it. Because I had. I’d liked it like that often enough.
“It was so bad. It hurt inside. In my guts.
I felt like I was getting ripped up. And he just… he felt like having anal and I was there. It wasn’t that he liked that it hurt me. He just didn’t care. I was invisible. I died. I feel like I died.”
Elliot put his hands over my arms and tightened them around me. He didn’t say a word.
The weight of it was too much. The flat grey mass of sadness broke me again. I should have broken that day behind the fence. I should have gone into subspace and had aftercare and walked out a shiny strong new woman. But I’d been holding myself together, and in that coffee shop in Koreatown, I was falling apart, leaking all the garbage and reeking toxins that I’d carried. My humiliation and pain spilled onto the cracked sidewalk with the rest of the trash no one picked up.
But it wasn’t done. Maybe the valve on the bucket had been loosened. Maybe the pressure was relieved enough to continue with my head on straight.
I pulled away a little.
“You have to know it wasn’t your fault,” he said.
I nodded, but I didn’t believe him. A part of me would always wonder how much my history had played into Warren’s decision, and how much I should have expected from a guy who sold amphetamines to an anorexic. I always said I was smarter than that. Better equipped than the girls who woke up on the beach with their panties missing and blood under their fingernails. Sharper than the ones who had to abort fetuses with mystery fathers.
Maybe not.
“What do you want to do?” he asked.
His fingertips brushing my palm was sexual but comforting. He wanted me. You didn’t need to be a rocket scientist to figure that out. But he wouldn’t try to fuck me. Not while I was talking about rape. Not as long as the pall of inappropriateness hung over us.
“Nothing,” I said.
“Nothing? You’re going to let him get away with it?”
“I never said that.”
“You need to tell someone.”
“Who? His father owns the mayor’s office. His mother? In Carlton, he cornered Robbie Sanchez in the bathroom and fistfucked him in front of the entire lacrosse team. Literally fistfucked him. Warren’s mother decided he was pushed to do it, and guess what happened?”
“Robbie got suspended.”
I put my finger on the tip of my nose.
“You’re not a Sanchez,” he said, running his thumb along my arm. “You’re a Drazen.”
“I’d rather take care of this myself.”
“How?”
“I’m still deciding. But I’m pretty sure I’ll run over anyone who gets in my way.”
He nodded, as if accepting not only that I wasn’t making an empty threat but that the threat could be directed at him. “I won’t get in your way.”
“You might.”
He tilted his face toward me. “No. I don’t think I would. I know what it meant for you to tell him no.”
There was something strong and sure about him. Something overtly understated. I could love him, maybe. But not for long. I’d ruin him just for the challenge, even if it broke my heart.
He took my hand and squeezed it. His hand was dry and strong without hurting mine. The touch was tender without seduction.
“Again, it wasn’t your fault,” he said.
“How do you even know that?”
“Because there’s no shame in you. If you wanted to do it, you’d just say so and tell everyone to fuck off.”
I spit out a laugh that turned into a quick inhale and a sob. I pulled my hand away and covered my face. I didn’t want him, or anyone, to see me cry. I wanted to be the one in control for a fucking change.
“I want to die,” I said between my hands. “Like, really die.”
“I won’t let that happen.”
I took my hands away from my face. “Elliot, come on.”
“What?”
“You’re not the type to be able to stop anything from happening to me or anyone else.”
“The type?” He tapped the end of his spoon on the napkin, carving a stack of fading taupe frowns.
“Sweet guy. Sensitive. Measured.”
He smiled at me. “Of course. I get it. A nice, measured guy can’t protect you.”
“A God-fearing, rule-following guy. And maybe that’s the point. If I wanted someone to protect me, Deacon would do it.”
“But you didn’t tell him.”
“I can’t protect him. See, he gets a lot of things about the world and how it works. He’s seen a lot of scary shit and… you know… done scary shit too. But he doesn’t understand my world. Not even a little.”
“You shouldn’t handle this on your own.”
“There’s nothing to handle,” I lied. I’d led him too close to my center and wanted to throw him. “I just have to deal and move on.”
“A minute ago you wanted to die.”
“I’m not known for being consistent.”
He leaned against the wall, put his ankle on his knee, and tapped the table. “When we met, I wanted to make you better. I want to make everyone better, but you? I wanted to reach inside you and heal whatever it was. Now I think it’s all flipped around. I want to wipe the evil off the face of the earth so it’s safe for you. But I’m not the guy who’s going to decapitate Warren Chilton. Because I know how his world works.” He jabbed the table as if his point was there, and he turned his upper body to face me. “I know his status, and I know he’s going to do it again. So he’s not getting away with it. I promise you, because you have this face on like it’s fine, but a minute ago, all your hurt spilled out. This fuck isn’t getting away with shit. His life’s going to be a living hell inside that place. Isolation’s going to be a cakewalk.”
“I don’t want you to get involved.”
His phone rang, and he pulled it out. He looked at the screen, smiled, and showed me the readout.
FIONA
“Too late, princess.”
Shit, Deacon had my phone. I grabbed for Elliot’s, but he pulled it away.
“Hello?” he said as if he didn’t know who it was. “Yes, this is Doctor Chapman. We’ve met.”
“Jesus, Elliot, come on.”
I grabbed for the phone, but he turned away. Was he enjoying this?
“She’s here. She looks beautiful, by the way.”
“Do not bait him!”
He glanced at me then put his hand over the phone. “Why not? Are you afraid of him?”
“For your sake, I am.”
He shook his head and put the phone back to his ear. “She’s fine. You don’t have to worry.” Pause. “What’s that supposed to mean?” He leaned back in his chair again.
Fucking men. You’d think they’d both pissed on me like a hydrant.
“I would never take what wasn’t freely given. I think you know that.” Elliot just smiled as if Deacon had said something particularly amusing. “I’ll take that into consideration.” He handed me the phone. “He wants to talk to you.”
I took the phone. “Deacon.”
“Come back. Come back now.” He used his cold, Dominant voice, and it went right to my very soul.
“I can’t.”
“Kitten, you are in no place to get your life under control, and that man you’re with is not qualified to keep you safe.”
“Safe from what?”
“Yourself.”
Fuckhim- Fuckhim - Fuckhim - Fuckhim
I hit the red button to cut him off and plopped the phone in front of Elliot.
“You all right?” he asked.
“I left my car at Laurel Canyon.”
“I can get it for you.”
“No. I want to go to my condo in Malibu. Can you take me?”
“Sure.”
26
FIONA
He took the 101 and dropped down through the mountains, over Las Virgenes because PCH was always a disaster. He didn’t even tell me he was going around the civilian route. He just knew the best way to get to my place the way he knew how to get to me.
Estates hid behind hedges, and Bentle
ys stopped at lights, next to circa 1977 Chevys. Elliot had one hand on the wheel, fingers articulated and active when he turned it.
I didn’t know what I wanted from the man. Maybe I wanted to destroy him. If that was the case, I’d certainly set on the right path.
“I don’t want to freak you out,” he said, “but I want to tell you something. Or some things before I even get you to your place.”
“I’m a captive audience. But Doctor Chapman?”
“Elliot. Please.”
“Whatever you say, it won’t change anything.”
Undaunted, he continued. “The first thing is, I’m as confused as you imagine I am. I shouldn’t be doing this. You’re considered my patient for at least two years after our last session. I shouldn’t even let you in my car, much less track you down in Laurel Canyon. Much less call you. I’m risking everything. My license. My reputation. My jobs. And I know I’m going to walk away with nothing. I’m fully aware that either you’re going to hurt me or I’m going to have to start my life over from scratch as a short-order cook or something. There really is no other way around it. I accept that. I’m a martyr for you right now.”
A big package wrapped up in a bow. Ten tons. No sound from inside. My name written in fancy script on the tag. That was his life, and he’d just handed it to me. It wasn’t even my birthday or Christmas or anything.
I didn’t know if I wanted it or not. It was just a heavy box. But I couldn’t give it back, couldn’t thank him for it, and I wasn’t ready to open it. Not yet. Its presence in my life was too overwhelming.
“Have you thought about why?” I asked. “Because there’s no reason you should feel this way. I couldn’t be more wrong for you.”
He stopped at a light and looked at me. “Do you play chess?”
“I used to play with my sister. She creamed me.”
The light changed, and he pulled forward. “The biggest learning curve in chess is the opening. Your first few moves. Your initial choices decide the game. With every move, nearly infinite options turn into fewer and fewer options until you’re cornered. Or your opponent is cornered. You go from infinite possibilities to despair in fifty moves as a result of the first five.
