by CD Reiss
I trusted him. One, he was a doctor, and a great one. It didn’t get any safer than that. Two, he wanted me to want what he did. The checking in told me that much. He wanted consent. Needed it as much as I did, but I didn’t think… no, I was sure he hadn’t planned the last two rough encounters, so he couldn’t have asked ahead of time. He was getting the idea to hurt me in the moment.
The pain.
Next time, I should stop him when it hurt. When he bit me. When it was uncomfortable.
I should, but I wouldn’t. Morning Greyson, with her mascara running down her face and a bite mark on her neck, knew it wasn’t okay to cause your partner pain or discomfort during sex. Dr. Greyson Frazier knew it was okay as long as it was coupled with consent and clear boundaries.
She knew it had a name.
I tossed the mascara-streaked wipe into the trash and went downstairs before I could say the name to myself.
* * *
Caden was at the stove, making breakfast. My favorite.
“Pancakes!” I fist pumped quietly. “Pow.”
I kissed him and he looked down at me, mask gone. Just my husband. He moved the spatula to the other hand and squeezed my shoulders while he flipped the cakes.
“I have nothing today,” he said. “What about you?”
“Session in the morning and that’s it. I was going to go work out. Maybe. I don’t know. It’s still kind of weird, all this time to myself.”
He laced his fingers in mine, nudging the disks around pensively. “You said a big rock didn’t go with army green. What you wore last night would have been stunning with a ring.”
Pulling his arm off my shoulder I put my left hand next to his. “We match. That works for me.”
He shut off the stove and jerked the pan until the cakes slid. “Do you miss the service?”
He deserved my honesty, but there was more to the question than a simple lament for a job I didn’t have anymore. He was the reason I’d left five weeks before instead of forty years from now.
But I couldn’t lie to him or myself. “Sometimes.”
He shifted the pan back and forth on the burner so the pancakes would skate around. “There’s a thing at Chelsea Piers. Like a festival normal cities have with booths, et cetera.”
“Normal cities?”
“Like where you grew up.” He tipped the pan to slide the pancakes onto a plate. If I’d tried that, their skin would have stuck to the surface and been an entire disaster. Everything he did was so easy for him, as if the laws of physics were his to command.
“I grew up in six different cities.”
“In any of them, did you have festivals and block parties and normal events where people spend money on garbage?”
“A couple.”
“How normal.”
He picked up the plate and looked right at me for the first time that morning. His gaze landed on the bite mark. Reflexively, I covered it. He put the plate down and moved my hand away.
“Broken blood vessels,” he said. “You have some abrading to the skin.”
“It’s fine.”
“Does it hurt?”
“Only when you touch it, so don’t.” I picked up the plate. “I’m starving.”
I kissed him and went to the table. He’d set it with silverware and glasses, and as I draped the cloth napkin on my lap, I took a second to acknowledge that he didn’t usually set up an elaborate breakfast. He cooked for me as often as I cooked for him, but this was a step beyond.
As if he was trying to get back into my good graces.
For the pain. For the roughness. For the use of my body.
There’s a name for this.
* * *
We took a cab to the totally normal thing that normal cities have. Chelsea Piers members had priority entry before four o’clock, so we got in before it got too crowded.
I’d done some classes at the Piers. The sports facility was literally built on three piers that had fallen into disuse when New York was bankrupt. Now it was gorgeous. The warehouse-style buildings had an ice skating rink, a place for all kinds of sports, public spaces, and a driving range, which I’d never bothered with until that day.
We got to the water side of the facility and exited into the bright afternoon sun. The fairway usually had nets on either side to catch golf balls, but they’d been lowered. A Ferris wheel rotated against the blue sky, a band played light rock, and the smell of buttery popcorn filled the air. Yellow-and-blue-striped tents lined each side of the fairway, with hawkers promising more prizes than they would ever deliver.
I heard gunshots and the whee of mortar fire.
My bloodstream flooded with the desire to run, pushing every coherent thought right out of my head. I ducked in time for the explosion, which came canned for civilian ears.
Caden pulled me up and held still as if he wanted to shield me with his body.
The whee resumed, but without the surprise, it sounded as canned as the explosion, coming from a single point on the left instead of moving through space. Caden’s hold on me relaxed.
The explosion came with another whee. I followed his gaze to a pellet gun game. The mortar fire was just for effect, so the players could feel as if they were on the front lines.
“It’s a game.” He brushed hair off my face. “Let’s get away from it.”
He tried to guide me to the other side of the fairway, but I wouldn’t budge. “No. They need to tell people.”
I walked right up to the booth with my fists in a bunch. The squealing of little bombs and snapping of pellets sent shockwaves through a brain stem already firing on all cylinders. When I got there, a white kid of about sixteen, with red bumps all over his cheeks, was making change out of the leather apron.
I wasn’t going to yell at him. It wasn’t his fault I was afraid. It wasn’t mine either, but that wasn’t the point. I hated it. I hated being at the mercy of a noise. I hated that I couldn’t do something because of my own limitations. That was crap. I didn’t believe in limitations. I didn’t believe in self-imposed redlines.
I was going to break this shit into a million pieces, right there, right then.
I dug into my pocket and found a few dollars. I was about to slap them on the counter when Caden pushed my hand down and laid two twenties on the wood, tapping it.
“You sure?” he asked.
He knew what I was doing. He didn’t have to ask and I didn’t need to explain. He knew I needed to smash a boundary.
“Are you?”
“You’re the one with the scar.” His gaze toward my chest wasn’t sexual. The wound I’d sustained when a mortar arced over the wire had left a scar under my shirt and, unexpectedly, in my mind.
“I’m just jumpy. It’s not a big deal.”
“Welcome,” the kid said. “Shoot out the star and win a prize.”
“She’s going to shoot until she says she’s done.”
“Yes, sir.” He took a twenty and made change. “Prize is for the entire star. No red—”
“Yeah,” I interrupted, lifting the rifle in front of me. “We got it.”
Whee.
In the first burst, I missed the target entirely because my adrenal glands were pumping pure fire through my veins. I wiped my palm on my jeans.
“You all right?” Caden asked.
I put my eye in the sight. “Yeah.”
“You can’t win once you miss. You need every pellet,” the kid said.
“I’m not here to win a giant stuffed dog.”
As long as my finger was on the trigger, the sound of whistling and exploding bombs continued. I squeezed off the rest of the pellets. Pop-pop-pop, then the click of an empty magazine ended the bombs. I shook out my wrist. Caden called over the kid in the leather vest, and he reloaded. I was sweating, tingling, jumping out of my skin. I didn’t have a drop of spit in my mouth.
“You’re white as a sheet,” Caden said with true concern. “All the blood’s rushed to your extremities.”
“Yea
h.”
I picked up the rifle and did it again. This time, Caden had the kid set up the rifle next to me so I didn’t have to wait for a reload. I shot at stars until my hand hurt and the sound of mortar fire was background noise. My husband took out more money, and I pumped a bunch of lead at nothing until my body couldn’t maintain the adrenaline dump anymore and the pain in my wrist had gone from a dull ache to a numb tingle.
I held up my hands. “I’m done.”
Caden took my wrist and checked my pulse. “Ninety-two.” He held me, kissing my temple. I was shaking. “You’re amazing.”
“I am!”
“Ah, the endorphins.” He was laughing, and I laughed with him.
“Hey! Lady!” the kid in the leather vest called. “You can pick one of these.” He pointed at a low shelf of prizes. “A snake or a dog.”
I leaned over the counter. I wasn’t interested in either the green foot-long stuffed snake or the furry brown dog.
“My girlfriend has a snake. It fits under her neck when she sleeps.”
“Sold!”
He tossed me the prize. “Don’t join the army. You’re a lousy shot.”
“Thanks for the advice!”
Caden put his arm around me, snickering at the kid’s comment. “What else do you want to conquer today?”
“The world!”
Skipping on air, we got popcorn and beer. I forgot to worry about the bite on my neck or how much I’d liked getting it. I let go of the word that brought to mind and all the psychology behind it. I rejected things in myself I was trained to accept in other people, so I didn’t think of the word in relation to myself. I didn’t think about anything but Caden and how happy he looked when he fed me popcorn.
A cheer went up from a crowd, and we turned to it.
A tower crane rose from a fixed base in the water. Cranes were normal in New York, apparently. It seemed as if something was always being built, and of course everything was tall.
But this crane had a person dangling from the end of it. Their arms and legs were splayed like a starfish as the line behind them got longer to lower them to the ground.
“You want to bungee jump?” Caden asked. “Get fear of heights off the table?”
“Could you watch me fall?”
Caden’s parents had died in 9/11. When nothing was found of them but his mother’s shoe, he’d convinced himself they’d jumped over a hundred stories.
“Negative.” He dropped the popcorn container in the trash and held out his hand. “Let’s go.”
I took his hand and pulled him toward the jump. “Watching me fall is a great way of overcoming your own fear.”
He yanked me toward him. “You’d do that for me?”
I looked up at the crane as someone fell, and I shuddered. My first fall was at six years old, from the top of the monkey bars. I’d cut open my lip and broken a clavicle, but what I remembered was how powerless I felt on the way down; how long it took and how many seconds I spent waiting for impact. Then while in the ROTC program at UCLA, I was making out with Scott Verehoven on the high dive, where—being a diver no girl said no to—he was perfectly comfortable. However, I said no because in the first place, I didn’t think he was worth it and in the second, I didn’t think it was safe. Nor did I trust him to keep me from falling. He proved all three points by pushing me over.
The fact that I could swim didn’t make it funny in the least. If I was half afraid of heights from breaking my collarbone on the monkey bars, I was fully terrified once Scott pulled me out of the pool with a sprained neck and half my body richly bruised from my collision with the water.
I wasn’t bungee jumping off a crane. No way. My endorphins had been reabsorbed. I wasn’t all-powerful anymore.
“Nope.” My hands slashed the air. “Changed my mind.”
“All right. No heights today. Hey,” he interrupted himself as if that was the only way he was going to say what he needed to. “Last night.”
“Yes?”
“It’s not going to happen again.”
“Oh?” I almost said, “why not?” as if I wanted to get bitten again, which I did. But I didn’t want to tell him that, because there was a name for someone who got sexual pleasure from pain and I wasn’t ready to say it out loud.
“Yeah. And I’m sorry.”
“If you were doing something to be sorry for, I would have said stop.”
“In any case. That wasn’t okay.” He took me by the chin and kissed me. “Thank you.”
He wasn’t getting it. Maybe I wasn’t either.
* * *
We made love that afternoon.
And by “made love,” I mean we fucked passionately and considerately. We used our mouths for pleasure. He eased into me with grace, touched me where I liked to be touched, made sure I came long and hard before he did.
The bite mark was gone the next day, and though I didn’t forget about the self-doubt it had revealed, I didn’t think about it much because I didn’t want to.
Two weeks passed.
I picked up two more clients from Ronin, which pretty much filled my schedule. I seemed to have a gift for counseling and medicating PTSD. Go figure. My military life was of use, and as that became apparent, I missed it less and less.
One night, as I was coming out of the bathroom, I caught Caden looking into an empty corner. I say “caught” because when he heard me, he jumped as if he was doing something wrong, then he passed me to go into the bathroom without saying a word or touching me.
He usually found some way to touch me.
The last lack of affection had ended at the fundraiser where he’d fucked me on a banquet hall table. Brutal sex after days of growing emotional distance. And boom, fixed the next morning as if nothing had happened.
Was he having an affair?
I felt every pulse of blood through my veins, hot with sparking electricity at the thought of his body touching another woman’s.
I breathed through it, telling myself nice things about trust and the basic goodness inside my husband. It worked to clear the room of the noise, but the hum of possibility remained in the corners, cowed but not killed.
* * *
I didn’t have time to see Jenn’s show. Not really. I had an emergency session with a new patient who hadn’t slept in a week. His wife had called me in desperation. He was having aural hallucinations and she couldn’t tell if it was the exhaustion or the PTSD.
I met him, wrote him a script, and didn’t have a place in my schedule to see him until he started crying. A grown man. A soldier. Six feet tall and two hundred pounds of muscle, weeping in my office.
And I got upset when my husband was a little distant.
I handed the patient a tissue. He cracked his neck and got on with it. Maybe I needed to relax on Caden a little.
Deciding I didn’t need lunch on Wednesdays, I fit him into my schedule. Then I got a cab to 57th Street while it was still daylight.
“Here!” The driver pulled over in front of the Kadousian Gallery.
From the street, I saw Jenn, in baggy overalls and Vans, animatedly talking to people I couldn’t discern past the glass’s reflection. Rows of painted masks hung on the walls.
Jenn saw me and opened the glass door. “Hey!”
We hugged, and she introduced me to her guests. Tina Molino of Mt. Sinai’s Psychiatric Division, and Dylan Coda from the VA Hospital in Newark.
“I’m sorry I’m late. I had an emergency.”
“I was just telling Tina she works in the same hospital as your husband.”
Tina was almost six feet tall with a black bob, white skin, and red lipstick. She looked like Snow White. “I was hoping to meet you at the fundraiser. Caden St. John is quite a star around the doctors’ lounge.”
“Careful. His ego can get to the size of a blimp.”
“You trained him well.”
“War makes men humble.”
“Nice segue.” Jenn held her hand out to the rows of masks and began t
he tour. “All of these were made by vets as part of the NEA’s Creative Forces program.”
* * *
I was halfway down the block when I heard a woman’s voice calling my name.
Tina scurried toward me. “Hey, I wanted to talk to you. Do you have a minute?”
I looked at my watch. “I have about eleven if there’s no traffic uptown.”
“It’s enough.”
We went into the little coffee shop wedged between a FedEx and an office building. We had our coffee in ninety seconds and seats on the window ledge in five more.
“Okay. Jenn told me you’re an officer and an MD specializing in PTSD in vets.”
“Kind of fell into it. But yeah.”
“Do you like it? I’m trying to hurry so I don’t keep you.”
“Do I have to answer quickly?”
“Take your time.” She sipped her coffee, leaving red lipmarks on the plastic top.
“I’m from a military family. I enlisted at eighteen.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah. It was the only life I knew. Then I met Caden, and he wanted to go into private practice. So I left the army and came here with him. I thought I’d never feel right as a civilian, and New York… my God, there’s no place in the world more overwhelming.”
“That’s the truth.”
We tapped our coffee cups together.
“Helping these men and women… they’re broken, but working with them makes me feel like I’m home. I love it.”
“That’s…” She shook her head in appreciation. “I’m glad to hear that. We’re tackling a mental health unit to serve the military and—here’s the newish thing—civilian contractors. Anyone who’s worked in war. We’re financed by Darren Gibson, and I think I may have an opportunity for you.”
Chapter Nine
Caden
Greyson spit toothpaste into the sink. When she ran the faucet, the Thing spoke inside the gurgling water. When she took the water in her mouth and her lips tightened and moved when she swished, my inner cold ran boiling hot.
