Lust

by Leddy Harper

  No matter what the voices said, they didn’t stop my memory of the night before from flooding my head. They didn’t stop the weakness I felt and the hatred that consumed me once it was over. I sat through the first three sessions of the day in a quiet haze, consumed with my own thoughts and demons. It was a good thing none of my clients had noticed, and if they did, they didn’t say anything about it. Instead, I sat in my chair and tried to listen to their pitiful stories of how they weren’t able to talk to men, or how they couldn’t seem to be intimate without crying. I took my job seriously, and usually spent more time helping them deal with their issues, but I couldn’t that day. Today, as I recited my practiced responses to their cries, all I could think about was how Ivy had been able to draw out the shadows that I had kept locked away for years.

  I had a very bad feeling that Ivy would continue to lure them out until I was suffocating in the obscurities. Something in the dullness of her eyes spoke to me, and I couldn’t identify it, nor could I ignore it.

  I checked my watch repeatedly once it turned twelve o’clock. I even left my office door open starting at twelve thirty in the event she arrived early. I wasn’t able to accomplish anything as my eyes moved to the small waiting room just outside the door every thirty seconds, willing her to show up. I questioned myself on what I was doing, but I couldn’t find an answer. I may not have been a typical therapist, but I still had rules to follow.

  I was only allowed to engage in sexual relations with a client when it was part of the plan. And it could only be for that reason—to help them overcome their issues. It would have been unethical to engage in any relationship with a patient outside of the limits set for therapeutic reasons. So my newfound obsession and fear of Ivy concerned me. It was one of the reasons I knew I should’ve ended it. The other reason was personal, but just as important.

  At one fifteen, I finally gave up. Assuming she wasn’t showing, I packed up my briefcase and headed out. I didn’t want to stay there in the event she did show up. I took it as a sign that I shouldn’t be helping her. I locked my door and headed outside, but was immediately stopped in my tracks.

  Ivy was sitting all alone on the curb in front of the building. If it had been raining, it would have been the same scene as the first night I had met her. I had seen many patients over the years, thousands even, but none like Ivy. She made me curious, intrigued, scared, and worried.

  Letting out a lungful of air into the wind, I walked to her, setting my case on the pavement and taking a seat next to her. I waited quietly until she acknowledged me, which was nothing more than her looking at my black shoes. She was wearing tight black pants and another baggy tank top. It made me wonder if that was all she had in her closet or if she just simply liked to be comfortable.

  “I was waiting for you inside. I didn’t think you were coming so I decided to leave.”

  “I was trying to find the nerve to go inside. Your office makes me uncomfortable.” Her voice was soft and slightly shaken as though she was scared of something. If my insides had a voice, I was sure it would sound much like hers at that very moment. Nervous and scared—no, petrified of the mess she could turn me into.

  “Why does my office make you uncomfortable?” I almost laughed. In the twelve years I ran my practice, not once did someone tell me the atmosphere was anything but relaxing and easy. If it wasn’t, I was sure I wouldn’t have been able to help as many as I had. In fact, I would have probably been out of business.

  “It’s too clinical and sterile. It reminds me of the therapists I was forced to see when I was younger.”

  Well shit… There it was. It was a necessity for a client of mine to have a typical form of therapy. It was the only way I could work with them. But most of the time, their interactions with other therapists were generally introduced to them as adults. Ivy’s admission to seeing professional help when she was younger meant all of my previous assumptions of her might’ve held some merit—the ones regarding child abuse. I realized I had two options. Either refer her to someone more qualified for mental illness, or stick around long enough to find out just how fucked up she really was. The smart decision would have been to refer her and walk away. I was a smart man. The decision should have been easy.

  “Well, where would you like to do this at?” I checked my watch. “I have some extra time this afternoon, did you still want to talk today, or did you want to start again maybe tomorrow?” I didn’t even wait for her answer before I spoke again, mentally kicking myself in the ass. “There’s a pond around the back of the office building. A bench, too. I’m sure it’s more comfortable than the parking lot, and it’s not at all clinical or sterile.”

  Without looking at me, she nodded her head. We both stood up and I waited for her to follow me before walking around the building to the pond in the back. In the years I had been at my office, I had never ventured back there. I could see it clearly from my window, but never felt the desire to sit on a bench and watch ducks swim around in what I would assume was a disgusting, slimy body of water. It reminded me of stale bath water and I wanted nothing to do with it. Which made me question myself even more. Why would I suggest going back there? It was a question I was sure I’d never find the answer to. Ivy was the reason, yet that only added more questions to my already confused mind.

  “We should probably come up with some kind of plan for you. That’s usually what happens at the beginning. But before we can do that, I need to know things about you first so that I can accurately find the best path for your success. Can I trust that you’ll be honest with me this time?” I asked with more irritation than I meant to expose.

  She nodded, looking at the grass below her feet. I hated that she couldn’t look at me.

  “I need more from you, Ivy. I need you to speak to me. Answer me with words and not just head movements. Give me the truth when I ask; no more lies. No secrets, no silence. I need these things from you in order to help you. You came to me for a reason, and I cannot do what you need me to unless you give me something.”

  Her eyes finally moved to mine, and in them, I saw a woman on the verge of breaking. A woman on the edge of giving up, waiting desperately for someone to pull her back to reality. I saw someone so lost and disconnected to the world around her. I could’ve been looking into my very own eyes.

  “What do you want?” she asked me, sounding so helpless.

  Her question was simple enough, yet it held so much more for me. It sounded as if she wasn’t simply asking what information I needed from her. It felt like she was asking me what I wanted. For the first time in my life, the hidden answers to her question scared me. I shook my head and blocked them out. Knowing they were only there because of something she made me feel. Something I had no business feeling.

  “Your eyes,” I whispered. I hadn’t planned on saying that, but staring at the mixture of grey and red left me with nothing else. “I have never seen anyone with eyes like yours. Are they natural? I mean, are they real, or contacts?”

  She quickly moved her eyes from mine and stared off into the distance.

  I touched her shoulder, causing her to slightly jump in her seat and look back at me.

  “Real. They were blue when I was a baby, but they faded. I don’t remember how old I was when they finally settled to this pathetic shade of blue.”

  “Grey,” I corrected her.

  She laughed without smiling. “Yeah, that’s a fun way of saying blue that lost its color.”

  “What about the red?”

  Her hands tangled in her lap as she bit on the corner of her lip. The motions said something to me. It told me that everything I assumed of her were both right and wrong all at the same time. It made me desperate to peel back every layer of her until I had her bare in front of me, giving me everything she had. Everything she was.

  She took a deep breath and answered. “Head injury when I was younger. I was too young to remember most of it, but I remember being told as I got older that it was blood that leaked into my corne
a… or something like that.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Five or six.”

  “What happened?” I asked, needing an answer to that question more than anything else.

  “I don’t remember.”

  That was a lie. Even if I couldn’t tell by the way her eyes darted away from mine, I would’ve been able to tell by the change in her tone and the sudden stiffness in her body. I knew immediately that it was a lie, and could deduce on my own the real reasons.

  “What were you doing right before it happened?” I’d get the truth somehow, someway.

  “Taking a bath.”

  That was the truth, and it told me more than anything she could have said. It confirmed my assumptions of her being abused as a child.

  “Did you slip and fall?”

  She shook her head.

  “I need real answers, Ivy,” I pressed.

  “No, Cade. I didn’t slip and fall. It wasn’t an accident.”

  “I thought you couldn’t remember what happened,” I goaded her.

  “I do. I remember it all.”

  My head was spinning. She was finally telling me the truth, but I wasn’t sure I was ready to hear it. I had dealt with victims of child molestation often in my line of work, but there was something different about Ivy. If only I could figure out what that was.

  “What happened?”

  “You wouldn’t understand,” she said, looking back out at the ducks in the water as one tear slid down her cheek. I wanted to wipe it away, reach out and remove the pain, but I couldn’t. She wouldn’t understand. I knew that because I didn’t understand. I couldn’t comprehend the need to make things better for her outside of what I could do professionally.

  “I may not understand on a personal level since I have never gone through something like that myself, but I do see it in my patients enough to understand from a different standpoint. I think you may be surprised by how better you’ll feel when you finally do open up and talk about it.” Despite my words of encouragement, I really didn’t want to hear the details of her abuse. But I had to remain professional and stick to what I had promised her… that I’d help her in any way that I could.

  “What is it that you think you know? Because I can assure you that whatever it is, you have no idea.”

  She was angry. Her tone went from desperate to pissed off in a matter of seconds. I didn’t know what to do about it. For the first time in my entire career, I was at a loss for words. I needed her to remain calm if we were going to get anywhere, but things with Ivy never stayed calm for long.

  “Then please, enlighten me. If I have no idea what you went through, explain it to me.”

  She shook her head, but kept her eyes on mine. “Tell me something about you. You want me to open up and tell you everything that has ever happened to me, but I know nothing about you. Tell me something.” She needed to trust me. It was common for people as guarded as Ivy.

  “What would you like to know?”

  Every patient did that very thing—ask about me. They felt the need to know information about the person they confide things to, and I give it to them. Well, I don’t give them everything. I give them enough to comfort them and earn their trust. Other than that, no one knows anything about me.

  “What made you decide to be a sex therapist? Out of all the different areas of therapy, why sex?”

  I had been asked that question by so many people I could’ve had a script for my answer. I could have recited the same thing over and over again. “Do you know that the leading cause of why relationships fail is because of sex? People grow bored of monotony. The longer two people live together, the more comfortable they become with one another and the thing that suffers the most is their sex life. One or both partners start looking for that sexual spark again and find it in others. When people cheat, it’s rarely platonic. When people cheat, it’s to fulfill a sexual need that they are no longer getting with their partner.”

  “But you don’t treat couples. You treat people that are fucked up like me. People that have problems and aversions to sex.”

  “You’re right, because I feel I can be of more use to people like that. Even people with issues regarding intimacy still long to be married. They still want to achieve their happily ever after. People like you are at a higher risk of a failed marriage. You may find a guy that makes you comfortable in the bedroom and you open up to him. But at some point, he will grow tired of your insecurities surrounding sex, and he will go find that security somewhere else. It’s a shitty thing to hear, and I hate saying that to my clients, but it’s the truth. I don’t treat couples because it tends to be more of an individual issue. So I treat the individual. And I don’t treat married people because of my method of treatment. Sometimes I’m required to touch, feel, and participate in things with my clients that would be considered cheating if they were married. And there is nothing I hate more than cheating.” I hadn’t planned to say that last part, but it came out anyway.

  “Do you ever plan to get married?”

  “No,” I answered honestly.

  “Because you love your job too much?”

  I should have said yes. She had given me an easy answer and all I had to do was agree with her. That would have been the smart thing to do. But as I stared into her eyes, I couldn’t bring myself to do that. The trance between our eyes left me unable to lie. She was seeing me; it was as if Ivy was seeing my very soul. “No. It’s because I disagree in the idea of marriage. The whole thing is a sham. To think two people can stay together until the end of time is a ridiculous notion. Marriage makes taxes easier. It makes having a family easier. But it’s still asinine, nonetheless.” I usually kept my opinions regarding marriage to myself. People like Ivy that believed in marriage and wanted it didn’t need to be burdened by my cynical beliefs about it.

  Her eyes widened on her face as she stared at me in disbelief.

  “But… you just got done saying all of those things about marriage and why you do what you do.”

  “Just because I don’t agree in marriage doesn’t mean others don’t. I respect their opinions on the union of two people until death do they part, but it isn’t something for me. I don’t push my beliefs on people; it’s simply what I, and I alone, believe. You’re more than welcome to believe differently. Most people do.”

  “So you never want a family, either?” She seemed shocked by my confession.

  I didn’t know how to answer her. The subject of a family was something I went back and forth on constantly. I answered her as truthfully as I could. “I don’t necessarily want a family. But if for some reason I wound up with a kid, I think I’d be okay with that. But I wouldn’t marry the mother simply because I knocked her up. I wouldn’t share a house with her, either. I would do my job as a father and take care of my kid. I have no issues with a family. Only with marriage.”

  She looked back out at the pond and began to bite the inside of her cheek. Something was going on inside her head and I needed to know what it was. I was tired of answering her questions. She didn’t need to know anything else about me. I needed to know about her.

  “Now, tell me, what happened that night?” My question surprised her.

  She turned to look back at me and I watched as her eyes glazed over with fresh tears.

  “What is it you think happened?” She turned my question back around on me.

  “I have no idea. I want you to tell me that without any assumptions.”

  She began to bite her cheek again. “No, I need to hear what you think happened.”

  I shrugged my shoulders and gave it my best shot. “Well, you said it wasn’t an accident, so I can rule out a slip and fall on wet tile. You said you were in the bathtub, so I think it’s safe to say you were probably nude. With your fear of being looked at or touched in a sexual way, I would probably assume you weren’t alone. Maybe a family member was in there with you. Am I right so far?”

  She nodded, not taking her eyes from my mouth as I sp
oke, never making eye contact.

  “I would assume it was a male.”

  She shook her head and the sensation of vomiting took a strong hold on my stomach.

  “Who was it, Ivy?”

  “My mom,” she whispered and her face looked pained.

  I gasped and went to say something to her, but she cut me off before any words could have been uttered.

  “It’s not what you think, though.” Her hands went back to twisting in her lap as she nervously looked down at them, no longer looking at me. “She didn’t touch me or make me do anything. It was quite the opposite. I wasn’t allowed to touch myself in any way. She wouldn’t allow me to wipe after using the toilet, or clean myself in the bathtub. So when I took baths, she would sit in there and watch me to make sure I wasn’t touching myself. That one particular night, I was really irritated down there. Looking back on it now, I probably had a yeast infection or something caused from not wiping after going pee. But I apparently scratched myself in the tub and she saw. The next thing I knew, she pulled me out by my arm. The momentum of it threw me into the wall. That’s all I remember. She told me the next morning that’s what would happen if I were ever touched. From then on out, I had spots of red in my irises. She said it was caused by touching myself. No other explanation was given. Nothing else was ever said of it again.”

  I was taken aback by the words she had expressed, surprised that she had finally decided to confide in me and unsure how to continue with my questions. I didn’t want to scare her. I wanted her to continue releasing the words that she had tried to bury down deep. It was as if she had finally found the key to unlocking them, and once they were set free, there was no stopping them. She looked at me and seemed just as surprised as I was by her declaration.