by Jack Fisher
“And that was enough?”
“We were in motel room in less than twenty minutes,” replied Mary. “He was…passive. I could tell that on some level he felt guilty. I didn’t care. That had never stopped me before. That just meant I had to be more assertive. I stripped him where he stood. Then, I gave him a little lap dance to ease his guilt, so to speak. He didn’t say much after that. He just laid back on the bed, I got on top of him and we did what we did.”
“And that’s all there was to it?” Peter said.
“It was enough. I still got what I wanted,” Mary said. “I even told him it could be our little secret. Nobody ever had to know. I just assumed he agreed because I got out of bed, got dressed and left—not expecting to ever see him again.”
“How long did that last?”
She sensed that Peter had probably pieced together more of the fateful moment already. Like him, she’d brushed aside any signs or reservations after she’d had her way with the man. It reminded her of the attitude he’d described when he told her how he chose to be with that woman instead of respond to a fire alarm. The similarities actually ran much deeper than that.
“It lasted less than twelve hours, if you can believe that,” she admitted.
“I believe it. I really wish I didn’t, but I do,” Peter said.
“After I left that motel, I went home and had my last peaceful night’s sleep. The next day, I went to the gym to open up, like I always did. But when I got there, the whole front entrance had been cordoned off by police. There were even a few local reporters gathering outside. Something was going on and—not knowing any better—I went in for a closer look. That’s when I saw it.”
Sorrow turned to horror as the memory of that fateful moment flashed before her eyes. Mary could still remember the sights, sounds and scents of that instant. Even after all this time, it still felt so intense, as though it had just happened yesterday. It had plagued her ever since and would probably do so until her dying day.
She swallowed a few times in an effort to gather her strength. More tears welled up in her eyes as she fought the need to break down. Peter attempted to comfort her, just as she had done when he’d told her his story. She didn’t reject it, but she didn’t acknowledge it, either. This was her burden. She deserved the torment it brought her.
“That was a Thursday. I always came in a half-hour late on Thursday because I picked up supplies on my way,” Mary said through her sobs. “My staff knew this, so Sarah Michael Peterson—this beautiful young woman who taught yoga part-time—worked the front desk. Had I been there on time, I…”
She had to stop for a moment. Her emotions wouldn’t let her continue. Tears streamed down her face. Peter tried to wipe them away, but she wouldn’t let him.
I deserve this pain. I deserve this sorrow.
Just saying the young girl’s name out loud made the image of her appear before Mary’s eyes. Then a much more gruesome image flashed before her and her stomach churned almost as much as it had on that fateful day.
“She was dead. Shot in the head…murdered…executed,” she finally said out loud. “I saw her body lying on the floor, surrounded by a pool of blood. She had been shot…a lot. She had like…nine bullets in her chest. There was so much blood and so much…other stuff.”
“I’m a firefighter. I’ve seen some pretty gruesome shit, Mary. I know how disturbing death can be,” Peter said in an effort to show empathy.
“Not like this,” Mary said, her lips quivering at the memory. “I’ll…I’ll never forget that sight—her face frozen with her eyes still open. Then there was that smell—that godawful smell!”
“It’s okay. You don’t need to be so vivid.”
He lightly grasped her arm to dissuade her. This time, Mary didn’t shrug him off. She needed someone to pull her back. If she continued, she would’ve deepened the scars. She couldn’t do that to herself. She couldn’t do that to Peter, either, making him share the sorrow that was hers to bear.
With Peter’s comforting grip on her, Mary managed to regain some strength. She wiped the tears from her eyes and took several deep breaths. The intense imagery of that moment still lingered, but she refused to turn away. She was determined to continue.
“It was Mark’s wife. She was the one who pulled the trigger,” Mary said, her voice still strained. “Sarah wasn’t the target, though. I was.”
“So…I guess it didn’t stay your little secret,” Peter said.
“No. It didn’t,” Mary said, shaking her head solemnly. “According to the cops, he’d gone home that afternoon and sobbingly confessed that he’d slept with another woman. There was a fight—a big fight with lots of yelling and crying. At one point, Mark’s wife threatened to leave him and take the kids. It pushed him over the edge. That’s when Mark went up into his attic, found a Glock nine-millimeter pistol and—”
Mary let Peter fill in the rest. She didn’t have the stomach to finish this part of the story. Even Peter, despite his experience as a firefighter, wouldn’t be eager to know the details. He just gave her arm a light squeeze and let her continue.
“When she found him lying dead in their bedroom, I guess she just… snapped,” Mary said, her words doing little justice to the horror. “Can’t say I blame her, either. It’s not every day the love of your life cheats on you then blows his brains out. She went from a woman who’d never committed a crime in her life to one with murder on her mind.”
“So, she blamed you for everything,” Peter said.
“And she should’ve,” Mary said. “I seduced her husband. I destroyed a loving couple and their entire family just because I was horny. It’s every bit as crass as it sounds, but she didn’t know that. For all she knew, I was trying to run away with the guy. She wasn’t going to let me get away with what I’d done, even if he was dead. So, she found where I worked, stood in the parking lot for two hours and waited for someone to open. She didn’t have a picture of me. She just knew I was some pretty girl. Sarah fit that description. So, in the end, two more innocent people died because of me.”
“Two more?”
“Yeah, did I forget that part? After Mark’s wife killed Sarah, she turned the gun on herself,” Mary clarified, her voice now full of self-loathing.
“Damn…and here I was thinking it couldn’t get much worse,” Peter said.
“Funny, I thought the same thing at the time. I guess karma is a fan of overkill,” Mary said. “Mark’s wife didn’t even know that she’d killed the wrong person. She probably died thinking she got her revenge. Instead, there I was, standing outside my gym, watching this terrifying scene that I created. You want to talk about a moment of clarity? Well, that is the kind of clarity that makes you want to violently throw up.”
“It’s also the kind of clarity that reveals the truth in its coldest, hardest form.” His tone had shifted. Then Peter let go of her arm and faced her with that penetrating stare of his. It was a gaze she never got from Sister Angela or anyone else from the Chapman Hill Addiction Outreach Program. It was the look from a man who’d experienced that same painful clarity—of someone who’d felt firsthand the weight of the trauma such clarity had wrought.
Mary tried to turn away first, but there was no escaping it. When she finally turned back toward him with tears still streaming down her face, she saw more than just empathy. There was a strange intrigue in his eyes, as though she held the key to something that he had been searching for. Mary wasn’t sure what to make of it, but she felt it, too. “You say that like it’s a good thing,” Mary said.
“It isn’t,” Peter said.
“So why are you looking at me as if I just said something profound?”
“Because it is,” he replied. “I’d even go so far as to say it’s more profound than you realize, but I’ll wait until you finish. I’m guessing there’s more.”
“Guessing or assuming?” Mary asked.
“Does it matter?”
There was a distinct certainty in his tone, almost
to the point of being smug. Mary chose not to contest it. She would’ve only proven Peter right. Now curious herself, she gathered what remained of her strength and continued.
Her emotions settled and her tears finally dried up. There was no use crying over it anymore. Mary knew what she had done. She knew what she had become. She’d stopped running from it after that fateful day. Even so, that cold, hard truth had never stopped tormenting her.
“What happened after I saw that body… I want to say it was all a blur, but I wasn’t that lucky,” Mary said. “The first thing I did was throw up right there on the sidewalk. I think I threw up every meal I’d had for the past three days. One of the police officers actually tried to call an ambulance. I talked him out of it.”
“I doubt that wouldn’t have done much good,” Peter said. “Even morphine only goes so far.”
“You’re probably right. They didn’t even make me give a statement. I just ran home as quickly as I could, drank everything in my kitchen that had alcohol in it and passed out on my living room floor. Keep in mind that this was still early in the morning. I was still bawling my eyes out, but I wasn’t crying. I was just so…so horrified that I couldn’t process it.”
“So you tried to numb it,” he surmised.
“And I failed,” Mary said. “I woke up seven hours later with no fewer than twenty missed calls and the worst hangover I’ve ever had. I stumbled over to my bathroom, took off all my clothes and looked at myself in the mirror. That’s the moment when it finally sank in.”
Mary dropped her head low in sorrow. This time, she didn’t cry or sob. She just let the anguish consume her. She felt Peter’s penetrating gaze on her, but she didn’t try to avoid it. He was still looking for something in her. However, that didn’t concern her at the moment. Right now, she needed to complete her confession.
“I was… I am responsible for those deaths,” continued Mary.
“You didn’t pull the trigger. You didn’t buy the gun,” Peter said.
“You’re not the first person to tell me that. You’re not even the tenth. As far as the police were concerned, I’d committed no crime. I’d slept with a married man. That’ll get you on a few dirty glares and a spot on daytime TV, but it won’t get you thrown in jail.”
“But that didn’t make it any easier, did it?” he said.
“I’m sure people told you the same thing about Gabriel Anderson and his family. That didn’t stop you from blaming yourself,” Mary said.
“I never said it should.”
“Then I don’t need to tell you how much it tormented me. I finally had to take a long, hard look at myself. I was a selfish, unapologetic slut who exploited her looks to get what she wanted. I may have come off as an open, outgoing ball of sexy feminine energy, but at my core I was just…cold. It didn’t matter who I slept with. It didn’t matter how many people I connected with. I just…” Mary’s ability to make sense of the situation failed her. She started feeling overwhelmed again. Then, Peter placed his hands on her shoulders and turned her gaze toward his once more.
“You couldn’t be intimate with them,” he told her. “You could be passionate with them. You could be close with them. You just couldn’t be intimate.”
“Yes, that’s…actually pretty accurate,” Mary said.
“You finally saw how selfish that was—how empty that made you. That emptiness became a scar, the first of many.”
“Your accuracy is getting a little scary here, Peter…but not in a bad way.”
“I’m sorry if I’m putting words in your mouth,” Peter said.
“It’s okay. You’re saying it way better than I could have. Besides, there isn’t much else to add from there. Once I confronted that emptiness, I realized I had a problem. Shortly after that, I also realized I wasn’t in a very good environment to solve that problem. I still had all these hot guys around me, ready to give me all the pity sex I wanted.”
“You were tempted to accept it, but you held back, didn’t you?”
“I want to say you’re still scaring me, but I can’t say I mind,” Mary said. “It’s true. I was tempted. Hell, I wanted to just drown my sorrows in all the dicks in Miami, but I knew it would just make me feel worse. I tried reaching out to my brothers, but…let’s just say that wasn’t an easy conversation. That led me to sell my gym, give up modeling and move back to Hartman County.”
“But you didn’t come back with a plan,” Peter said, making even more connections. “You didn’t know how you were going to heal. You didn’t know how you were going to deal with the void. You just needed to get away because you didn’t trust yourself anymore.”
“Okay, now you’re scaring me again,” Mary said.
“Then look me in the eye and tell me I’m wrong.” He said that with complete confidence.
Mary still made the effort, looking at him like he’d asked and trying to get the words out. Again, she failed. However, she didn’t mind this time. Instead, her intrigue only grew.
The sentiment must have drawn Peter closer to her. In a bold gesture, he snaked his arms around her and pulled her into a light embrace. It should have triggered the kind of feelings in Mary that had made her leave Miami, but there was something different about this.
Under his penetrating gaze, she felt genuinely vulnerable. However, that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Peter might be onto something and Mary needed to see where it led.
“You didn’t think you could do the right thing for the right reasons. Hell, you didn’t even know what the right thing or the right reasons were anymore,” Peter said, continuing his thought. “You did what you thought made sense at the time. You ran. You ran from the world you’d once embraced. You told yourself it was just to avoid the temptation. Except—”
“That wasn’t the only reason. It wasn’t even the most important reason,” Mary said, now making some of those connections as well.
Peter smiled. Her line of thinking was catching up to his. Now, Mary could follow it with him. She still had no idea where it would lead, but she needed to find out.
“So, you’ve been running now for how long?” Peter asked.
“Almost a year,” answered Mary.
“You’ve tried to rebuild your life while treating this addiction that left you so scarred. Near as I can tell, you’ve learned to cope. I don’t get the impression you’ve slipped up and dry humped a bartender.”
“I haven’t…although, believe me, there are times I’ve wanted to,” Mary said.
“If it makes you feel better, I’ve wanted to bang every pretty waitress I’ve seen since I moved back to Hartman County.”
“It doesn’t, but I’m guessing there’s something else you’re getting at.”
“I’m trying. I’m not sure I’m succeeding, but damn it, I’m trying,” Peter said, embracing her a little tighter. “In hearing your story and thinking about mine, I see something that I didn’t see before—something I think we’ve both overlooked.”
“Well, what is it?” Mary asked intently, clutching him as though Peter were her last hope.
“I’m still trying to figure it out, but I think you’ve proven that just coping isn’t enough. You can function as a recovering sex addict. You can avoid sleeping with every cute guy you see. But that’s not enough, is it? It’ll keep you from making the same mistake you made with Mark Howard. It’ll keep me from making the same mistake I made with Gabriel Anderson. But in the end, we’ll both still feel miserable because…” His thoughts obviously stalled. He kept embracing her, but now Peter seemed stuck. This strong, handsome man couldn’t finish this thought. He began shaking his head in frustration while holding onto Mary, as if to cling to it.
However, Mary tried to pick up where he left off. She found herself cradling his unshaven face and watching her reflection in his eyes. In that reflection, she saw what he was unable to put into words.
“We didn’t confront the emptiness,” Mary finally said. “We never tried to figure out what it was that made us fee
l so empty in the first place.”
“Wow. Could it really be that simple?” Peter said.
“It sure doesn’t sound simple.”
“Maybe we’re just making it difficult. Maybe we already know the source of that void. We just never had a reason to confront it when our addictions ruled our lives.”
“Still seems pretty hard,” Mary said.
“Does it have to be? What if we just followed our instincts?”
“Correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t those the same instincts that made us sex addicts in the first place?”
“You’re only half-wrong,” Peter said. “I think we followed those instincts down one path—one we only thought was right because we’d never tried anything else.”
“And now you want to try it? At a time when we’re both so utterly broken?” Mary asked, already tempted to follow his words.
“Why not? Maybe that makes this the best possible time to try a new path…for both of us.”
As he said these words, Mary felt those very instincts guide her in a whole new way. Peter drew closer to her as his embrace tightened. Mary caressed his face. Nothing about it made sense. Her brain urged her to stop and think, but another more powerful feeling urged her to keep going.
Mary smelled his breath and his distinctly masculine musk. It was intoxicating, sending her into a daze where she could no longer rationalize her actions. She had been in such a state before around attractive men, but this time felt different. It wasn’t the same temptation that she had experienced before. It was something much deeper. Whatever it was, it led to an inevitable conclusion.
In an instant that stopped time, he leaned down to her and initiated an intimate kiss. The feelings that followed were overwhelming.
Mary had kissed many men before, but it had never felt like this. A strange shiver shot through her body. Her legs became weak while her arms became stronger, allowing her to embrace him even more tightly. He pulled her closer, allowing her to feel the full warmth of his body.
