by J P Barnaby
“I think your dad is right. I don’t think I’m ready for… for….”
“I. Am. Not. Asking. For. That., Aaron.. I. Would. Never. Ask. You. For. That..” Spencer turned so he faced Aaron completely, but didn’t let go of his hand. “In. The. Last. Three. Months. You. Have. Become. My. Best. Friend.. I. Would. Not. Do. Anything. To. Hurt. You.. We. Can. Just. Be. Friends., Or. We. Can. Do. Something. Else., Something. We. Define.. I. Will. Not. Take. You. Farther. Than. You. Are. Willing. To. Go..”
“That’s just it. I don’t know what I can do. I… I don’t want to keep you from having a relationship with someone that can give you what you want.”
“I. Just. Want. You..”
Spencer’s sentiment made his heart race, and not in the normal terrified kind of way. The contrast made him dizzy. He needed to be away from Spencer for a little while to think about the monumental shift in their relationship. In two and a half years, he never considered he would ever want to date someone. The idea that he did, and more importantly, that someone wanted to date him, just knocked his whole world off balance.
“I can’t believe this is happening. I never thought I would find someone to look past the scars. I want to try, if you do,” Aaron told him, his voice full of hope that Spencer could not hear.
But his eyes lit up like maybe he understood what it meant to Aaron. Maybe something in Aaron’s face showed it, or Spencer merely sensed it, because he smiled softly.
“Then. We. Will. Try..”
THE SCREEN stayed resolutely blank as Spencer watched, hoping Aaron would come online. He felt alone, and couldn’t even explain to himself why. Dad was upstairs in his study, and he’d just seen Aaron at school a few hours before. The empty feeling in his chest had grown steadily through the afternoon until he couldn’t stand it and got onto the computer, hoping Aaron would be there. The solution stared at him from behind the laptop screen. He could just text Aaron and ask him to log on, and he knew he would end up doing that eventually.
The screen blinked and he looked up. A smile played at the edge of his mouth until he saw that the message was from one of his online fuck buddies. He couldn’t have picked a worse time to start that conversation with Spencer.
[MARK]: Hello?
[SPENCER]: Hey, man.
[MARK]: Hey, there you are. You haven’t answered the last couple of times I pinged you. Everything okay?
[SPENCER]: Yeah, I have been busy with school.
The screen stayed clear for a moment, and in the silence, Spencer considered talking to Mark about what bothered him. Mark was a friend, right? They’d exchanged pictures and fucked around online dozens of times. The next message made him sigh in frustration.
[MARK]: I’ve been hard for you for days.
[SPENCER]: I am not in the mood.
[MARK]: Maybe I can get you in the mood. My dick has been in my hand since you came online.
[SPENCER] Seriously, I met someone.
[MARK]: Really? He can play too. I’d love to watch you guys fuck.
Spencer slammed the laptop closed in disgust. He would go in later and clear out all the people from his chat list he no longer had any interest in chatting with. How could Mark even think he’d let that prick anywhere near Aaron? The thought nauseated him. Why did Spencer ever think fucking around on the Internet would make him feel better? He felt good with Aaron, even without the sex. What he had with Aaron was real, more real than anything he’d ever had before. He wasn’t going to fuck that up by playing with guys on the net.
SPENCER’S LIPS felt warm and soft on Aaron’s as they kissed slowly but deeply on the couch in the rec room. He didn’t know where Dr. Thomas was, but got the impression that he and Spencer were the only ones in the house. Aaron’s arms rested lightly around his boyfriend’s neck. His boyfriend—he never thought he’d use those words, but in his heart, and in the dream, that’s what Spencer was. Spencer’s shaggy curls tangled in Aaron’s fingers as he pulled and brought him closer. God, he wanted to crawl in Spencer’s lap and never leave.
Somehow his hand wound up in Spencer’s. Aaron pulled it down to the open fly of his jeans and rubbed. Never in his life had he been touched like that, with such love and tenderness. His cock dribbled drops of something onto Spencer’s fingers, and then Spencer was gone.
Aaron looked down to see those sweet hazel eyes he loved so much looking up at him through a wisp of brown curls. Oh God, he wasn’t…. Spencer’s beautiful lips, the ones Aaron so enjoyed kissing, wrapped gently around the head of Aaron’s cock, and for a moment, he couldn’t breathe. The sensation, even just the idea of it, sent tingles through his body. He felt them everywhere—in his legs, his balls, his stomach. It was like nothing he’d ever felt before.
Spencer kept his eyes on Aaron’s while he worked his mouth lower, taking Aaron deeper. Spencer’s hand stroked the insides of Aaron’s thighs, comforting him, relaxing him, and he felt desired. Aaron felt wanted in a way he’d never felt before. The tip of Spencer’s tongue traced the contours of Aaron’s dick, and he moaned. Spencer’s free hand rested on his chest, and he wondered at it for a moment. Then Aaron realized that Spencer wanted to hear Aaron moan for him; he wanted to feel it in his fingertips. Aaron tightened his fingers in Spencer’s hair and gave him what he wanted.
Under the blankets, Aaron’s hand rubbed his cock through the light cotton sleep pants. He listened intently, but didn’t hear anyone in the hall through the closed bedroom door. Taking a chance, and without thinking about anything other than Spencer’s face, he pulled the pajama pants down his legs just enough to let his dick pop free of the briefs that trapped it. He spit into his palm and kept his mind completely blank as he wrapped his fingers around the shaft. His harsh breaths sounded loud in the otherwise silent room, and he kept his voice quiet so no one would come to check on him.
The tingle in his cock spread quickly up through his stomach and down through his balls until he couldn’t think of anything else. Twisting his slick fist around the head, he massaged back down to the base. With his other hand, he reached down between his barely spread legs to touch his soft sac, and the tingling promise of an orgasm intensified. Please. I want to feel it. Just this once.
The decadent image of Spencer on his knees, looking up at him, with his lips stretched around Aaron’s cock, took him over that final edge and dropped him into freefall. Warm spurts of semen jetted onto the sheet as his hips ground up to meet his hand. Harsh cries were muted into ragged breaths as he tried to stay completely quiet.
His body seemed to melt into the bed, and he closed his eyes against the sheer pleasure of the way he felt: sated, relieved, triumphant. In that moment, he felt like maybe he could function like a real person one day.
Maybe, just maybe, there was hope.
Nineteen
“MY MOM is going to pick me up at three because we’re going to dinner for my little brother’s birthday,” Aaron told Dr. Thomas as he tossed his bag next to Spencer’s bag on the desk. He’d been working with Spencer for the last two hours on their new program, and would much rather be adding additional functionality to it than be down here baring his soul. Uncomfortable as it was, however, Aaron knew that this therapy was the key to him becoming a functioning individual. The final walls he had built to surround the deeply hidden hope that he would ever be remotely normal had fallen. While he knew he was setting himself up for a major disappointment if this failed, it had been so long since he’d even dared to hope. Believing in himself, in Dr. Thomas, and in his ability to heal was essential to the success of his therapy, and for the first time, he was going to embrace it. Dr. Thomas was the foremost expert in the country on his type of trauma. If he couldn’t help Aaron, no one would be able to.
“That’s fine. We should be done before then,” Dr. Thomas said pleasantly. “I read your last blog entry, and I think you’re making great progress in describing your reactions since the attack. Once you can really understand your triggers, you’ll have more success in dealing with
the more subtle ones. You recognize the obvious triggers, like being touched, the smell of gasoline, and the sight of blood. It’s the smaller, less obvious triggers, the ones that bring up memories without being overt. The sound of the thunder yesterday prompted something, and we weren’t even aware that was a trigger for you.”
“Yes, that explains at least one reason why I don’t like stormy days, and I honestly didn’t remember the sound of the storm during the attack until you pointed it out to me here,” Aaron said, and rather than being ashamed by his limitation, he was encouraged at its discovery.
“Aaron, let me ask you,” Dr. Thomas said quietly, sitting back in his chair. “How do you feel you’re progressing in therapy? I can tell you all day long what I think of your progress, but it isn’t me that has to live with what you have to live with.”
Aaron sat back in his chair as well. It had taken weeks of intensive sessions for him to feel comfortable with Dr. Thomas, but now, while he didn’t think he could tell him everything about the attack, he felt like his therapist did truly care about him, about his recovery. That, as much as anything else they’d discussed, made Aaron want to work with the man rather than against him, as he had done with so many other therapists that didn’t believe in him.
“The first therapist my mother took me to was so out of his element. I have a feeling he was used to dealing with stressed-out CEOs or couples fighting about money. He had no idea what to do with me, and even a scared sixteen-year-old boy could see that. The reason he had no chance of helping me is because he never believed that he could, and he never tried. Dumping antianxiety pills and tranquilizers on me was his solution, to make me so drugged-out that I wasn’t freaking out, but I wasn’t really conscious either. After that, I had a successive list of therapists, and with each one, my belief that I could ever be anything more than the broken shell of a person that I’d become, faded.”
Dr. Thomas nodded, but didn’t interrupt. That was one thing Aaron really admired about the man: he always heard everything Aaron had to say, and even some things he never said.
“You never put the ownership of my recovery on yourself. You always put it on me. You didn’t try to hide my problems behind a regimen of drugs. I’m still all kinds of fucked up, but I think the difference now is I have hope,” Aaron explained. Dr. Thomas nodded with a small smile, and then sat back in the chair. His expression changed to something more serious as he spoke.
“I want to try something different with you today. I was thinking about using a mind mapping diagram to chart out a memory and some of the things that might trigger it. It’s pretty much a free association exercise.”
Dr. Thomas wheeled out an impressive whiteboard from where it had been sitting along the back wall, waiting for their attention. In the center of the board he drew a lopsided oval, underneath which he wrote “memory.” From the oval, he drew three lines, each in different directions. At the end of each line he added more ovals.
“I want you to think of a memory, and we’re going to put it in the center oval. Then, we’re going to map out things you associate with that memory. If we find a trigger, we can document it.”
“That sounds easy enough,” Aaron said and grimaced as Dr. Thomas shook his head and laughed.
“It may sound easy, but it’s going to be very hard for you. It could also trigger a panic attack, but we know how to deal with those.”
“Okay, so where do we start?” Aaron asked, even as his body tensed with the idea of remembering something from that night, purposefully, and with painful detail. As much as he wanted to forget every moment, he understood that working through the fear and the anger would be the only way to move on and have any kind of life.
“Think of a memory from that night, but let’s start out with something manageable, like the abduction or the riding in the van. I want for us to be more comfortable with the process before we move on to something harder.” Dr. Thomas stood next to the whiteboard and picked up one of the markers. “Just sit back on the couch, close your eyes if you want, and pick a memory to work with.”
Aaron suddenly wished Spencer were down in the rec room rather than up in his room studying for his calculus final. In addition, he also had a paper due in freshman composition and another one in psychology. The only class he seemed to breeze through was programming. Aaron, having only taken the programming course, didn’t have as much academic work. His therapy homework ended up being far more painful. Dr. Thomas waited patiently for him to come up with a memory, so he closed his eyes and waited for one to come.
“Open your mouth,” the taller man said as he stood in front of Aaron, who had been driven painfully to his knees on the oil-stained floor. His hands massaged the front of his dirty, faded jeans, and Aaron blanched. He could feel every bit of the blood leave his face, and soon his entire body felt as cold as the concrete beneath him. Turning his head, he bit his lips together and shook his head.
“Pete, get him to open his fucking mouth.” He opened the fly on his jeans and pulled out his semi-hard cock. The other man, the one not on top of Juliette, held a lit cigarette within inches of his chest.
“Do it now,” he said and pressed the tip against Aaron’s flesh. The white-hot pain ripped through his skin, and Aaron opened his mouth to scream. The first man choked off the sound, muting it by shoving his cock into Aaron’s wide open mouth.
“Okay, I have it,” Aaron told Dr. Thomas as he pulled his feet up onto the couch and wrapped trembling arms around them.
“Can you sum up the subject of the memory into a few words?” The doctor popped the cap off a marker and turned toward the board.
“Burns,” Aaron said, summarizing the entire horrific event into a single word so he didn’t have to go into the excruciating detail. Dr. Thomas turned to look at Aaron for a long moment, concern written into his slight frown.
“Are you sure that’s where you want to start?”
“It’s less horrible than the other things they did to me, and it’s the first thing that popped into my head. Go ahead and write it up there.” Aaron shrugged and hugged his knees a little tighter to his chest. Dr. Thomas turned slowly, almost as if he were reluctant to do so, and wrote the word burns on the board in the center oval. Then, he drew a line up and to the right, away from the oval. He drew a circle at the end of that line and wrote the word senses.
“Put yourself back into that memory, experience it, and tell me what your senses are telling you: sight, sound, smell, touch, and taste.” The words sounded as if they came out only by sheer force.
What Dr. Thomas didn’t understand was that Aaron needed to do it. He needed to get that shit out of his head, for his mother and for Spencer. Heart slamming against his rib cage, he closed his eyes and let himself go back, back on his knees for the sadists who nearly destroyed him.
“My knees hurt,” Aaron started as the memory took shape in his mind. “It’s cold in the garage. I’m still dressed, but the floor is like ice. I’m on my knees, and they are standing over me.” He cracked one of his eyes open and watched Dr. Thomas drawing more little circles around senses, blurred through the wetness in his eyes. He filled them in with other words: cold, pain, and fear. Aaron closed his eyes again, forcing the hot tears that had welled in them to fall. “I can hear Juliette’s clothes tearing. I can hear her pleading with the man on top of her. She’s just out of my line of sight, but if I turn my head, I can see her. The guy in front of me is touching himself through his jeans. I know what he wants. He smells like piss and sweat, and I’m trying not to gag. My teeth are biting down hard on the insides of my lips to keep them closed as he’s trying to nudge them open.”
Aaron began to rock back and forth on the couch. The burns… the burns are coming.
“His dick is out now, and he’s telling the other guy to make me open my mouth—”
“What the hell is going on here?”
Aaron’s eyes flew open, and he looked around wildly at the sound of his mother’s voice. Out of instinct, h
e kept himself wrapped in the ball as he found her face, which was red, shocked, and livid. Spencer stood next to her, looking confused and wary.
“Mom, I….” Aaron started as he wiped the wetness from his face and stood up. He couldn’t think of anything else to say. His mother would be so hurt when she found out he’d been in therapy and hadn’t told her. The last thing on earth he wanted was to hurt his mother. She’d been everything to him for so long.
“Aaron and I are in the middle of a session, but by your reaction, I’m guessing Aaron didn’t tell you he started working with me,” Dr. Thomas said quietly, and Aaron admired his calm confidence. At that moment, Aaron had neither calm nor confidence, but then Spencer’s father hadn’t just broken his mother’s heart.
“Who are you?” she demanded, and strode into the room to put her five-foot-two frame between himself and Dr. Thomas, as if she were shielding Aaron from him. Ever his protector.
“My name is Dr. Henry Thomas. I’m a clinical psychologist specializing in severe trauma. I met Aaron when he came to spend time with my son,” he explained and turned the whiteboard around to push it back against the wall. At that moment Aaron saw the other circles Dr. Thomas had drawn. Shame welled up inside him as he wondered how much his mother heard.
“Aaron, we’re leaving. Let’s go,” his mother said with a venom that he rarely heard from her. It rang of disgust, anger, and contempt.
“Aaron is an adult, capable of making his own decisions. You can’t force him to leave,” Dr. Thomas said quietly, and Aaron’s mother spun around with raw fury in her eyes. Aaron stood up with every intention of getting between them and reasoning with his mother, but her next sentence stopped him cold.
