by CD Reiss
When I claim chastity, that’s when the fantasy is most vibrant. That’s when he walks me to my car and his words of affection, of longing, of repressed desire pulse between my legs. The kiss I imagine, with his hands on my face and his dick pushing against me, makes me so wet I have to rub it off in my mental ward cot.
I imagine going down to Compton, to some rat-infested shelter or run-down church, and seeing him. Our hurt for each other is so strong that the magnetic pull makes our will to remain professional and proper impossible.
He says, “I always wanted you.”
I replayed our short time together, looking for moments when that might have been true. As the days wore on, I imagined he has me on the bed. He takes my ankles and spreads my legs so far, and looks at my wet cunt for a second before kissing it. The look on his face is one of bliss, as if he’d been starving and imprisoned and I was a great meal of freedom. When he fucked me, he did it like in the movies, with his face close to mine, eyes half closed, breathing my name.
I knew it was fantasy and impossible. I didn’t know the man at all, yet I did. He was normal, straight-laced, probably vanilla. He’d never be with a fuck-up sex addict, a druggie slave worthless whore camera-magnet like me. I’d never attract a man who was plain nice. I didn’t have access to the ordinary world, yet I craved it. My darkest desires were for an inaccessible normality.
I hadn’t wanted that until Elliot left. In the days following, as my fantasies became more outrageously mild, I thought of Deacon, my master, the one who had helped me function and who I had betrayed. Maybe one day I’d remember the sticky web of circumstances that put us both in the stables, but did it matter a fuck? In the end, did I stab him to be free of him?
And free to do what?
Fuck? Snort? Party?
Or free to be normal?
CHAPTER 2.
ELLIOT
I didn’t like rushing. If everything was done properly and in the right order, I never had to rush. Even the most tedious parts of the day could be managed effortlessly if they happened when they were supposed to.
On Tuesdays, I had therapy before work. As a therapist, I needed my own therapy sessions in order to maintain my sanity, though some weeks I had nothing to discuss and my sanity was only impaired by having to spend yet another fifty minutes in Lee’s office, talking about nothing. Those sessions supposedly gave me an angle from which to see the seemingly unproductive sessions with my own patients, but I felt more and more like I was wasting my time.
I opened my car door. The bougainvillea that hung over the driveway needed a trim. I often did the trimming myself because I found it soothing, but since I took the job at Westonwood, I had stopped. Since the gardeners had been instructed to leave it alone, they did, and it exploded into a waterfall of purple blooms that dropped onto my windshield.
I’d gone back to work at the Alondra Avenue Family Clinic in Compton. I’d left a chaplaincy there that had had a limited time frame. They’d asked me to stay on, but I went to Westonwood. When I left the enclave for the rich and troubled, I picked up some part-time work at Alondra while I sorted out my life. I didn’t like the instability any more than I liked the upset schedule, but I needed the balance badly.
L.A. traffic was famously brutal, but it was easily managed if one took into consideration the season as it related to the LAUSD, the time of day, the weather, and were willing to change routes at a moment’s notice. If I turned right on LaCienega at 7:01 a.m. on a normal Tuesday, I’d be on time. Turning at 7:02 made me upward of ten minutes late. I never figured out where the eight minutes went, but that extra sixty seconds seemed to increase the density of the traffic arteries by an order of magnitude.
So when I turned at 7:04, I assumed I’d have to apologize as soon as I walked into my session. That always led to an explanation of why I was late, and why it was important to be punctual, and back to how I felt about it, and so began the digging like kids in the yard, looking for treasure that wasn’t there. But I’d forgotten that it was still Christmas break for the LAUSD, and the roads were clearish. I pulled into the alley behind Lee’s office and took a deep breath. I’d made it, and I’d get to Alondra in time because the traffic was light. Being late for Lee was forgivable. Being late for my patients was egregious. They were people who had nothing reliable in their lives but me.
“Why do you worry about them?” asked Lee, her fingers laced together over her pregnant belly. She’d managed to get knocked up at forty-two, and I often found her in a state of bliss, sickness, or a meld of the two.
“Because I’m human. It’s human to care.”
“But it’s not your job.”
We’d had that discussion a hundred times. My job was to give patients a safe place to work on their problems. If I cared about them, I’d be emotionally shredded at the end of the week/month/year, and unable to work with the rest.
I didn’t answer her. There was no point. I felt fidgety and caught myself rubbing my upper lip with my middle finger. I had nowhere to put the energy. I’d been that way since I left Westonwood.
“You were almost late this morning. I saw you pull in.” Lee indicated the window beside her desk, looking onto the parking spaces. She didn’t have any tics. World’s perfect therapist, recommended by my mentor for her completely calm, organized, non-distracting demeanor.
“Jana caught me in the shower,” I said, remembering the perfectly pleasant, if ill-timed lovemaking in the bathroom. “Set my morning back.” She’d moved in six months before, after a whirlwind of dating, and had made little or no impression on the house except to be the prettiest thing that had ever stepped foot in the kitchen.
“Ah,” she said. “Can I assume things are going well?”
“The usual. She wants me somewhere safe. She thinks I’m going to get jacked every day. She puts on a show of panic and worry. I soothe her. It works for a little while, et cetera et cetera…”
“And she wants you back at Westonwood.”
“Yes.”
“Did you tell her why you left?”
That was sticky, very sticky. Only Lee was qualified to unravel it, and she was the only person I’d trust with that level of complexity. I’d downloaded my desire to protect Fiona from her family and the media to her during the first session after I left Westonwood, and she’d let me dance around it, waiting for me to describe my exact feelings in my own time.
“Jana wouldn’t understand,” I said.
“You should try.”
“She’s a delicate person. If I tell her about a patient’s family pressuring me, she’ll worry. If I tell her about the countertransference, it’s worse.”
“Countertransference happens. The thing with the girl’s family, that’s something she deserves to know, and it’s well outside the privilege of the room.”
“There’s nothing to tell,” I said. “That’s what I told you—it was all inference. If I express inference, she’s not going to have a place to put it, so it goes in the panic bucket. She can’t deal with things that aren’t facts.”
“How are you going to live like that, Elliot?”
“You make my eyeballs ache, you know that?”
“You’ve said the same about Jana.”
I sneered, knowing it was a sneer and she’d think it was funny. She was pointing out my transference, the redirection of feelings related to someone outside the room to the therapist. Transference was necessary. Countertransference, where the therapist placed unresolved feelings onto the patient, was trickier. Though it was normal, my countertransference with Fiona had to be dealt with. That was why we needed therapy for the therapy, to keep things in check.
“I didn’t trust her father’s motives,” I said. “He comes in and tells me I should let her go. Tells me they’ll take her in and watch her and thanks me very much for my time. The way he said it, it was off.”
“So you think he should have asked you to keep her for more observation?”
“I think the fact that he even
asked is a problem. If he’d asked me to feed her at noon, I would have fed her at eleven because I don’t trust him.”
“That’s very reactionary,” Lee said.
“You’ve never met the guy.”
“And do you consider your decision meddling?”
“Anyone with a television knows what’s going on. The media frenzy around her brother’s accident and her stabbing her boyfriend; no sane person could survive it. She’d go back to using. Letting her out would have been setting her up for failure.”
She leaned back in her chair. I didn’t know if she needed the belly space or if she was taken aback by my tone.
“You believe that you made this decision based solely on the data?” she asked.
“Lee, what’s the difference if it was the right decision?”
“You tell me.”
I didn’t, because I wasn’t ready to say out loud that I had feelings for Fiona Drazen.
CHAPTER 3.
FIONA
I didn’t require black dark to sleep, which was good since I fucked anywhere, any time, and sometimes I needed to drop off afterward. Once I woke up on top of Owen Branch on the floor of Club Permission Granted at ten thirty in the morning. All the lights were on, and ladies in blue smocks were vacuuming to the Spanish music on the boombox. Owen wasn’t even fully awake when he lit a doob and handed it to me. I went back to sleep for another half an hour.
But at Westonwood, I had a problem I’d never had before: Everything kept me up. I knew I couldn’t blame it on the light coming through the door window, or the crickets, or the whooshing of the pipes whenever someone, somewhere flushed.
It was stabbing Deacon and the waterfall of guilt that followed. Everything I’d done in my young life. Everyone heartbreak. Every careless betrayal. Every time I hurt someone to fulfill some minor need or wisp of a desire. For ditching Owen the morning after the high school prom. For sucking his dick the next week because it happened to be there. For throwing his phone out my car window on the 101 when he told me he’d snuck a shot of my mouth on his cock because it was such a pretty sight. For pulling the car over and punching him in the face, then telling everyone what he’d done until no one would hang out with him any more.
People in my position—meaning people other people looked at—didn’t like Sneaky Petes taping fuck sessions, even if they told me nicely what they did and only did it for themselves. No. Just no. That was why phones were surrendered at Deacon’s place.
But still. I wasn’t focused on my rightness. My rightness didn’t hurt, and I was after full-bore self-immolation. So I did what I did every night at Westonwood: I chose a random incident from my life and turned it over in the dark. That night it was Owen. I didn’t have to punch him in the face. He’d been a harmless surfer with a huge dick and a permanent boner. I didn’t have to make sure none of my friends spoke to him again, or throw his phone out the window on the freeway. It was expensive to him, and I hadn’t given a fuck.
Somewhere, a toilet flushed. The pipes whooshed.
It was morning.
***
I didn’t tell my new therapist shit. She was just a bitch behind a desk who pretended to support my “healing process.” The fact that I’d never put my fist in her face was a testament to my healing process, but I walked out of there twisted in knots every time. I was sure she and the fistful of drugs they gave me were the source of my insomnia. I hadn’t slept more than a couple of hours a night since Elliot left.
“You’re not schizophrenic,” my new doctor bitch said. “You don’t suffer from narcissistic personality disorder. You have no history of compulsion.”
Her office was a museum of Native American artifacts. Dream-catchers. Masks. Beaded wall hangings and handmade blankets in frames.
“You’re saying there’s nothing wrong with me.” I wasn’t even hopeful, just killing time. We’d had that conversation a hundred times already. I didn’t know what she was waiting for me to realize, because I’d have the epiphany of the century if I knew.
“The whole idea of sex addiction is a way to impose cultural models to make normal people seem abnormal. Mostly, these normal people are women. If you’re not upset with your behavior, then there’s nothing to say what you’re doing is wrong.”
“Then you’re going to let me go?”
“What I’m trying not to do is pathologize your sexuality, but your mind is still not clear. Your memory is garbled, and I suspect you went through more in those stables than you’re ready to admit. You’re still prone to violence, mostly when men are in the room. I’d like to get to the bottom of it.”
Considering I usually lost my shit in the cafeteria at about three o’clock, she was right. It was a co-ed facility, so there were always men around. The only time men weren’t around was in that room with her.
“Do I need to be here for you to do that?” I asked. “Because you know, we’re supposed to get me back to functioning in society. This isn’t a whole thing where I’m walking out some healed person who can get a job and land a good husband, right?”
“You’re here. This time is for you. Think about it. I could buy you enough time to really get to the bottom of your issues with Deacon and your father.”
She presented it like a birthday cake. The luxury of the century. An indefinite amount of time at Westonwood Spa, with the mental equivalent of hot rocks and exfoliating rubs, with her inferences about my father, who I hadn’t mentioned to her, and Deacon, who was none of her business.
“And you walk out with what?” I said.
“I don’t understand your meaning.” She tilted her head, her pin-straight Brazilian blowout falling perpendicular to the earth while her face rested at the angle of inquisitiveness.
“I mean, we find some deep trauma in like, what two, three months, and you? It’s a lot of work for you.”
“It’s work I love. Helping you to heal yourself,” she said.
“Don’t you have some high-paying gig in Beverly Hills?”
“I have a private practice, yes. Where are you going with this, Fiona? Are you afraid I’ll abandon you like your last therapist?”
She should have known better. I’d cut her off the last time she’d tried to come down on Elliot for leaving, because I figured out that when he’d admitted to leaving to protect me, he’d only admitted it to me. I wouldn’t betray him, and more than that, I respected him. But there she was, with her patronizing little smile and her forearms on the desk, accusing Elliot of shit outside her sphere of fucking knowledge.
I hated her. Maybe I hated her because she wasn’t Elliot. Or maybe I hated her because I didn’t want to be there. Maybe I just hated her because she was hateful, and because she was trying to get me to hate men instead of her Brazilian blowout.
And fuck, I hated her Brazilian blowout.
Most of our sessions went like that. I just disagreed with whatever she said. She said the sky was up, and I insisted I walked on clouds. She told me I was sick, and I said I was fine. She’d tried to con me into agreeing that my father had molested me, that Deacon beat me in a way that was non-consensual, that in fucking whomever I wanted, I’d agreed to be degraded. She couldn’t get that the fucking itself wasn’t degrading. The intentional degradation was degrading. And hot.
I didn’t understand her. Why did she seem to care so much? Why couldn’t she just listen to my problems, decide whether or not I was sane enough to be questioned, keep my meds low so I didn’t feel like throwing things, and let me go? Surely the hospital didn’t need my family’s money that badly.
“It’s not about money,” Karen said one day at lunch. She was on a feeding tube and rolled her IV around with her. Mostly she was too weak to even get up, but when she did, she managed to find me. “You’re like this rare creature. Rich. Famous. Living in a fish bowl. How many of you are there in the world? And you’re in their chair. They can latch on to you and use you.”
“For what? It’s all confidential, isn’t it?”
&n
bsp; “Sure. But you know, over drinks? Who knows what they say at parties to get another client. Or to their own therapists. There aren’t any secrets. My last guy wrote a paper about anorexia and wealth, and there was a patient in the paper who sounded just like me. My lawyer couldn’t do anything.”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah. I don’t tell these fuckers anything anymore. I don’t tell anyone anything. Not even my friends.”
What had I told Elliot? Anything? Everything? Dr. Brazilian Blowout hadn’t gotten much more than evasion, but Elliot had gotten more from me before he split. I trusted him, but should I? I missed my fish-bowl friends who understood what to say when. I trusted them because they lived a shade of my life.
“It’s not all like Ojai,” I said. “You’ve been hanging out with the wrong people. Chill with me when you’re out. We’ll lay back. It’s all on the DL.”
“Really?”
“Yes.” I pushed my food around. What if Elliot told everyone about me? That I was a sex-addict celebutante who didn’t know how or why she’d stabbed the only man who loved her?
I didn’t care what people thought, but imagining Elliot at a party, casually talking about my problems without mentioning my name, people’s eyes going wide as they judged me—the scene I created bothered me. Elliot casually discussing my problems hurt in a way I couldn’t even pin down. It was him, how he felt.
Did he feel nothing?
Was I just a curiosity to him?
Did he leave because he couldn’t stand me?
I couldn’t tolerate the thought, and I couldn’t banish it from my mind. It played on a loop, and with each successive telling, he was more and more dismissive and contemptuous. I gripped my fork so tightly, the edge indented the flesh of my fingers. I pulled it away and looked at the brown-and-purple ridge it created. I ran my thumb over the skin. It was both numb and oversensitive.
