by KD Robichaux
In one fluid motion, he reaches out and grabs me by the tops of my arms, spins his body to sit forward on the couch, and pulls me across his lap. The moment my stomach flattens against his thighs, his huge, strong hand slaps my right ass cheek, and I gasp, pulling in a lungful of sweet, cool air. My entire being melts across the couch and his legs as I pant. I can feel my heart beating as it thuds against the cushion on the opposite side of Dr. Walker.
A sense of calm I haven’t felt in a decade washes over me, and when my breathing evens out, he scoops me up and sets me back in my place. He picks up his notepad and pen off the floor, where he must’ve thrown them before he grabbed me, and his face shows absolutely no emotion as he jots something down. When he looks back up at me, I feel he’s waiting for me to continue my story, as if nothing had just transpired between us. I’m grateful for this, because my head would swim if I had to digest what just happened.
My voice returns to its quiet monotone. “I walked with Alan down the stairs, across the long yard between the complexes, which separated the apartments from the townhouses, and got him up the staircase that led to the bedrooms at their place. I got him into his bed and had only planned to stay in his room long enough for him to fall asleep. Then I was going to move the baby monitor into his room and sleep in Alaric’s with the receiver. The entire time, all I could think about was the story Corbin told me. His girlfriend choking on her vomit in her sleep, so drunk her heaving never woke her up. That’s what was in my head when I lay down on top of the covers next to my friend, waiting for him to fall asleep peacefully. That’s what was going through my mind as I closed my eyes, just for a minute, because it seemed like it was taking forever for Alan to stop fidgeting beneath his comforter.”
I take a deep breath as my heart pounds once more, but when I close my eyes, I allow myself to remember the feel of Dr. Walker’s stinging smack across my ass, and the calmness I felt afterward spreads through my veins. When I open them again, I meet his concentrated stare and finally reveal the truth.
“The next thing I knew, Alan was on top of me. He had his hand over my mouth and he was bearing down on that hand with his full weight, pressing my head into the pillow. I came fully awake then, realizing I had accidentally fallen asleep in his bed, never making it to Alaric’s room. I clawed at him, fighting with all my might twisting underneath him, but the way he had his hand clamped over my mouth, it felt like my neck was going to snap. Plus, my movements only seemed to help him get me out of my pants.”
Even though my eyes are still on Dr. Walker, I don’t see him. My brain isn’t absorbing the handsome, bearded face before me. No. In my mind’s eye, all I see is Alan’s black hair falling over his tan forehead, and the crazed look in his almost-black eyes, his pupils overtaking his irises. His mouth was slack, his breathing steady, as if my flailing and fighting with all my strength was nothing for him, just a tiny bug beneath his giant boot.
“I can remember thinking about my legs. My legs were super strong, my biggest strength, from years of working out at the rock gym. If I could just get them between us, I could kick him off me and run. So even though I was naked from the waist down, still pinned in place by the death grip he had over my mouth, I managed to bring my feet up and push my heels against his already bare hips. He must’ve taken off his jeans before he attacked me. I kicked him with every ounce of strength I had in me. But it did absolutely nothing. And then he—”
I choke on the sentence, unable to finish. All that comes out is a sound somewhere between a gulp and a sob. I stare into my lap, trying to gather the strength to tell the rest of the story, but the only thing that leaves any part of me are the tears falling from my eyes.
Suddenly, a giant mitt of a hand enters my field of vision, palm facing up, and it stays there. A silent invitation for loaned strength. And timidly, I finally place my much smaller, trembling hand in Dr. Walker’s. The contact opens the floodgates, and every second of gut-wrenching, body-wracking, pain-filled wailing I had held in for the past ten years takes the opportunity to escape. He doesn’t move to hug me, which I’m grateful for. The physical connection we have is more than enough, more than I’ve been able to stomach in the past decade.
“Let it out, Vivian. Let it all out,” Dr. Walker murmurs encouragingly, and damn it, I do.
I don’t know how long I sit there, crying, sobbing, and whimpering. I lose count of how many tissues I go through, as he goes from handing me individual sheets to just handing over the box. I’m sure if I were to take a moment to look in the small trash can next to the couch, it would almost be overflowing with the drenched, balled-up white pieces of waste.
When I’ve exhausted myself to the point where all I can do is sniffle, my eyes feeling like a bucket of sand has been poured into their sockets, that’s when Dr. Walker asks me to do one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to pull up my big girl panties and do. “All right, Vivian. Finish your sentence. And then he… what?”
I close my swollen eyes, and on a weary exhale, I finally confess my deepest, darkest secret. “And then he raped me.”
“ALL RIGHT, MOTHERFUCKER. I’m here. You want to tell me why I was denied access to the goddamn session video when I tried logging in?”
It had taken every ounce of my self-control to not throw my fucking laptop across the room when my username and password wouldn’t let me into the footage. Fifteen minutes after Vi’s session ended, I received a message from Doc telling me to meet him at the club. So here I am, after storming into his office like a raging bull.
Doc sits at his desk, his face solemn. It’s not until Seth speaks that I even realize he’s sitting on the leather couch against the wall. “Corbin, we… we didn’t think it’d be a good idea for you to watch the video alone.”
“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” My heart pounds angrily against my ribs, like a prisoner behind bars.
Doc stands, gesturing to his office chair as he moves away from it. “Have a seat.”
I glare at him for a moment before circling his desk to take his place. Just then, Glover’s tall frame comes through the door, and suddenly I’m in a sea of giants. He comes to stand next to Doc, feet shoulder-width apart, and he crosses his arms over his chest. Gone is the bright-eyed and bushy-tailed young cherry from nearly a decade and a half ago, and in his place is a hardened grown man who had seen a lot, both on the battlefield and during his time as a mercenary.
“Well, the whole team is here. You want to tell me what’s going on?” I growl, hating the way my three best friends are looking at me. Their faces are a mix of worry, anger, and… is that a hint of pity? Fuck this. “Somebody better fucking speak up, or I’m gonna start throwing shit.”
“Vi’s last session was… revealing, to say the least. Not at all what we were expecting. Seth and Brian have not seen the video, but I have given them a full debriefing. Corb, before you press Play, just know we are all here for you,” Doc says in his shrink voice, and I suddenly feel nauseous. What? Did she go into so much detail of her affair that they thought I wouldn’t be able to handle it? That I’d go off the deep end after hearing the who, what, when, where, and how of her cheating on me while I was deployed?
If they only knew how many different scenarios I’d come up with in the past ten years of her fucking another man, they wouldn’t have bothered calling in the troops.
Without wasting another minute, I click on the triangle across the video to make it start playing. And as always, the moment I see Vi’s beautiful face, the bees in my stomach take flight, buzzing and stinging my insides. Even so obviously nervous, her little knee bouncing a mile a minute, there is no denying she is still the most perfect woman I’ve ever laid eyes on. I hate that I still find her so attractive. The ugly thing she had done to me should’ve masked those gorgeous, delicately feminine features, but they never did.
“Dr. Walker,” she begins, “if your plan is to pick up where we left off in my life’s time line, I should warn you…” She visibly chokes on her
words and clears her throat. “I’ve never once told another person on this entire planet what I’m prepared to share with you today. And after seeing what happened when I told you about the happiest time in my life, I can only imagine what will happen telling you about the worst.”
My brow furrows. Except me. “Never once told another person on the planet,” except me, right? She must mean she never told anyone else about her affair, after she’d confessed it to me over the phone while I was in Afghanistan. I don’t have time to think much more about her opening, before heat rises up the back of my neck as I watch her ask Doc to sit with her, him complying and taking up the cushion next to her small frame. He dwarfs her, making her look childlike, especially as she slips off her shoes and curls in on herself, turning to face him on the couch after I hear Doc tell her to start this week’s session with where they’d ended last week, with me deploying.
When she starts speaking, her voice is devoid of all emotion. “My best friend, Sierra, and her husband lived in a townhouse-style apartment. They had a roommate—Alan.”
Alan. Is that who she slept with? Did the motherfucking homewrecker finally have a name?
“…I was friends with Alan. I spent a lot of time getting to know him, because I hung out with Sierra there at the apartment. When we found out we both needed a credit in the same class at our community college, we took it the same semester, so we could help each other study.”
Ah, I remember Alan now. She talked about him every once in a while, when I’d call home every few days from overseas. She had painted him to be a completely unthreatening nerd-type, someone she crammed for tests with, always at Sierra’s house, and never alone with him. So I guess that was a goddamn lie.
“Corbin was deployed, so I used the opportunity to take as many semester hours as humanly possible, to get as many out of the way while he was gone as I could. It helped keep me busy, less time to sit around and miss him.”
The look of pain on her face is unmistakable. At least she really did miss me while I was gone, even if she did pass the time by fucking another man.
“…Sierra invited me, wanting to get me out of the house. At this time, I lived in a little one-bedroom apartment across town, closer to my parents. I didn’t really know anyone that would be there. Todd and his best friend were in a different platoon than Corbin, so it was a totally different crowd. But Sierra would be there, of course, and so would Alan. So I went.”
I scoff. Yeah, her little fuckboy would be at the going-away party, so why not?
She leans backward over the armrest, cracking her back the way I’ve seen her do while she’s writing. Normally, she’d then stretch her arms high above her head, arching her back before rolling her head in a circle, as if getting rid of a crick in her neck, and then she’d set to typing like a woman possessed. But this time, she just continues her recollection, speaking to Doc almost robotically.
“Corbin had once told me this story… the saddest story I’d ever heard. He and a girlfriend from high school went to a fair, and they had gotten super drunk using fake IDs.”
My brow furrows once again as she tells Doc, almost word for word, the story I had told Vi on our first date. Shit, I hadn’t even thought about the night of that tragic event since I had told Vi. And here she was, stuck on it after all these years?
“This story… it scared me. The impression it made on me… at the time, it made me think that even a sip of beer would intoxicate a person, and they wouldn’t be safe alone.”
Her face conveys the fear she’s speaking of, and I almost feel guilty for telling her that part of my past if it traumatized her this much.
“…I saw Alan heading for the door to leave Todd’s friend’s apartment, so I told Sierra I was going to make sure he got home okay. I don’t even know if she registered my words as she and Todd were doing shots when I hollered to her over the music. But I hurried after Alan, wanting to be there to help him down the flights of concrete steps.”
Yes, chase after your secret lover, I think. Wouldn’t want him to fall and break his dick, since you needed it to kill time until I got home.
I’m stewing in my bitterness, acid sitting heavy in my throat, when Doc’s voice suddenly comes through the computer’s speakers.
“Vivian, take a breath.”
My eyes narrow, watching closely as Vi goes from unemotional to full-on panic mode, bursting into tears and visibly trembling, even from the distance of the camera aimed at the couch. Her hand shoots toward Doc, as if she’s drowning beneath the water’s surface, flailing to grasp hold of anything to pull her to safety.
And what I witness next makes me see red.
Doc tosses his notepad and pen to the ground before swinging his arms toward Vi. He takes hold of her biceps, his hands looking so huge around her thin arms it looks like he could snap her without applying any force, and then pulls her tiny body across his lap.
The second I see and hear his palm connect with her ass, without even thinking, I lunge across Doc’s desk, my fist a hairbreadth away from connecting with his face, before I’m tackled to the ground. The wind is knocked out of me, and it takes me a moment to realize both Brian and Seth are on top of me. And then, like a wild animal, I fight back.
By the time I exhaust every ounce of my energy, my knuckles are throbbing and my head feels like it’s going to explode. But the way the two larger men are panting and cussing, at least I know a couple of my punches landed.
I glare up from the floor at Doc, who towers over our piled bodies. “You put your fucking hands on my goddamn woman!” I snarl.
“Corbin,” he starts in his calm shrink voice, “she was having a severe panic attack. By now, you know we’ve already determined she’s a natural submissive. I did the first thing I thought of to bring her out of her panicked state before she passed out. If you would just get up and watch the video, you will see—”
“Fuck you!” I yell, launching upward at the fucker who had dared to touch my sweet Vi, much less spanked her ass.
“Corbin.” His voice is sterner this time. “Get up and watch the video.”
My eyes shoot daggers up at him, but it’s Seth’s voice that breaks through the ringing in my ears. “Bro, just watch the fucking video. You need to hear what she says.” His tone holds warning, and a sense of foreboding washes over me, making my anger sizzle as if it were doused.
After a minute, I sigh and then jerk against their hands holding me restrained. “Fine. Get the fuck off me.”
Brian stands first, placing himself between me and Doc like a human shield. Seth stands quickly, jumping back like I’m a firecracker he just lit. But even in my fuming rage, I get up calmly then walk back around the desk. I rewind the video, then fast forward it just a second after Doc’s hand landed on my ex-wife’s perfect ass, so I don’t have to hear the sound of the slap again.
I watch as she goes limp across his lap, her body going from painfully rigid to melted butter within one breath. And I’m begrudgingly thankful when I see not even five seconds later, Doc sitting her back upright in her spot on the couch. His face holds no emotion—not the satisfied smirk of a Dominant, nor even a look of concern a doctor gives his patient. He simply picks up his notepad and waits for her to continue.
Vi’s voice goes back to that eerily robotic monotone. “I walked with Alan down the stairs, across the long yard between the complexes, which separated the apartments from the townhouses, and got him up the staircase that led to the bedrooms at their place. I got him into his bed and had only planned to stay in his room long enough for him to fall asleep. Then I was going to move the baby monitor into his room and sleep in Alaric’s with the receiver.”
My heart slowly sinks into my gut. Why would she be planning to sleep in a different room if she’d been fucking him? What, she could have sex with him, but she thought sleeping next to him was going too far? I bite my lip as she continues.
“The entire time, all I could think about was the story Corbin told me. His girlfri
end choking on her vomit in her sleep, so drunk her heaving never woke her up. That’s what was in my head when I lay down on top of the covers next to my friend, waiting for him to fall asleep peacefully. That’s what was going through my mind as I closed my eyes, just for a minute, because it seemed like it was taking forever for Alan to stop fidgeting beneath his comforter.”
As my heart takes up residence somewhere in my intestines, my breathing starts to pick up.
“The next thing I knew, Alan was on top of me. He had his hand over my mouth and he was bearing down on that hand with his full weight, pressing my head into the pillow.”
No. Nonononononono….
“I came fully awake then, realizing I had accidentally fallen asleep in his bed, never making it to Alaric’s room. I clawed at him, fighting with all my might twisting underneath him, but the way he had his hand clamped over my mouth, it felt like my neck was going to snap. Plus, my movements only seemed to help him get me out of my pants.”
Oh, Jesus fuck, no. My hands shoot to the armrests of the office chair, and I hear the wood pop in my grip.
“I can remember thinking about my legs. My legs were super strong, my biggest strength, from years of working out at the rock gym. If I could just get them between us, I could kick him off me and run. So even though I was naked from the waist down, still pinned in place by the death grip he had over my mouth, I managed to bring my feet up and push my heels against his already bare hips.”
My eyes shut of their own accord, the picture she’s painting vividly playing out in my mind. My sweet, tiny, innocent Vi, beneath not only a man, but one whose strength was enhanced by the alcohol he’d drank that night, which made him reckless and uncaring if he hurt my fragile wife.
I want to cover my ears and rock back and forth, anything to cover up what I know must be coming next, but I can’t. If my angel had gone through this, then I need to hear it. I need to experience her pain through her retelling of that night. A night I’m starting to realize went down nothing like she had said all those years ago.
