Mutual Release

by Liz Crowe

  But a raw kernel of anger had taken seed in her brain. She looked away from him again and the words poured out of her like so much evil, poisonous smoke. “Let’s see, he was fond of blowing his wad between my tits. I had these impressive D-cups by then. He was a little obsessed by them. He’d make me lie on the desk and he’d jack around on himself to get hard or whatever, then I had to scoot down so he could come all up on my neck. He liked me to suck on him but could never come that way, he claimed. And, of course, the all-American doggie-style rape. That way was the worst. I don’t know, the angle or something. And the edge of the desk would bruise my hip bones. And he took forever, loved to pound, you know, whatever. But he used condoms, every time, so ya can’t really be too mad, I guess.

  “And I let him. I let him scare me, call me his little slutty girl, and threaten to tell my mom I’d seduced him. Finally, when he tried to ass-rape me, I ran away. A girl’s got to have some boundaries, after all.” She stood up, teeth chattering and brain boiling with emotions she couldn’t even name. “I let him, Evan. So I am that girl. I am that slutty whore my mom insisted I was. I get it. Thanks for making me relive it all so I can make sure I know it was my fault for not making him stop.”

  By the time she reached the end of her speech her voice was high, screechy, and her head pounded. The room closed in. The waxy candle stench made her want to retch. Her eyes burned, and she’d swear she could smell him, that fucking disgusting cologne coiled in her nose. She gripped her elbows and sank to the floor, deep in the nightmare with no way to escape.

  “Don’t fucking touch me,” she muttered when she sensed him hovering over her. “I mean it. I’m not worth your effort.” Dragging her fingers through her hair as her throat closed up and the room went black, she tried to get a breath but the more she tried to gulp fresh air, the more fetid it got all around her. Pinpoints of pain made her focus. Her foot ached, her hips were sore, her neck creaked, but a burning, searing, indescribable agony was centered between her legs. Where she’d had such excitement, such sweet, tingly anticipation, now hurt so bad it was as if someone was stabbing her there with a knife. Or a grown man was raping her, repeatedly, without bothering to stop and make sure she was properly lubricated, or no longer a virgin.

  Acknowledging the whole aftermath of the conversation with her mother was a little fuzzy, she remembered a few things with crystal clarity. The woman who’d given birth to her had screamed and called her a slutty, skanky whore for “stealing” Bart from her. Amy’s lawyer father had helped her get declared as an emancipated minor after taking her to the police department to file charges. That enabled her to apply for and get social services, including food stamps and Medicaid. And also lead to the final scene with her mother, in the police department when she’d stood with Bart, who had the unbelievable gall to deny it all. She shook her head, dispelling another, even scarier buried memory. Shivering, teeth chattering, with the pain nearly splitting her in two, she sat, knees pulled up to her chest, and relived every wretched moment – reaching for the elusive scene her brain would not let her access.

  When he touched her shoulder, she jerked away, not even aware where she was anymore or why she even cared about anyone. Eyes dry but her throat burning with unshed tears, she rocked, and realized the strange moaning noise was coming from her throat. “Go away, Evan. I mean it,” she ground out. “I will never forgive you for making me relive this. You… y-y-you don’t understand.”

  He knelt down, but she refused to look at him. His hand on her arm was warm, soothing, but she couldn’t settle; the usual calm he inspired would not break through the total freak-out she was having, no matter how many times she told herself to get a grip.

  “Julie,” he said, his lips near her ear. But even that made her want to jump out of her skin and run screaming down the street. “Listen to me. You don’t have to look at me, but you must listen.”

  She shook her head, buried her face in her knees, wondering if she could ever get back to that amazing place where she’d been – where Evan was here for her and she was happy. But he kept talking, in his low, monotone voice and finally his words broke through her web of agony.

  “I am sorry this happened to you. And if you tell me who this guy is, even give me part of his name and where I can find him, I will go there, cut his dick off with a pair of rusty scissors and feed it to him one small bite at a time. Do you hear me?” He ran his hand down her hair. “No girl should ever have to think that being attacked is her fault. I want to fix it. I can fix it, at least here.” He touched her neck, rubbed gently, bringing a small measure of relaxation to her. But she gripped her legs tighter.

  “Please, just leave me alone. Please…”

  But he stood, pulled her up, and she let him. She shook so hard her teeth were chattering, but she was not about to fade, didn’t want or need him to hold her up. She couldn’t rely on him. It was stupid to count on a man for anything. He held her hand and kept tugging her until she was folded in his arms, his whole self encompassing her, keeping her safe.

  “No.” She shook her head but pressed her face into his shirt. “I can’t. I won’t let you do this to me.”

  “Shh…” he soothed, kissing her hair. “C’mon. Let’s sit. I want to tell you a story.”

  “I can’t take this, Evan. I’m sorry. I’m not the woman you think I am. I’m…”

  He drew her down to the lounge, sat and pressed his lips to hers, cutting her off. She kept her lips shut to him but finally let him part them, accepted him, but her arms stayed at her sides. They were too heavy to lift. The entire secretive burden of her whole life pressed down on her, made her feel dull and lifeless, even as she responded to his tender caress. He sat back up, brushed her hair off her face. She allowed herself a few seconds to feel cherished and protected by this incredible man. Then shoved that fantasy out of her exhausted brain.

  They sat side-by-side, thighs touching. “Story, remember? My turn.” He smiled, turning her core to jelly again and pressed her back onto the lounge before walking around to sit on the other side. “I have – had – a twin, a sister. Her name was Olivia. We were obviously fraternal twins but looked so much alike when we were toddlers everyone took us for identical. We were inseparable.” He propped on his elbow and kept running his fingers through her hair, picking up strands of it and looking at it as if admiring spun gold. She sniffled but lay still, the sensation of being crushed by gravity, by the weight of her own bullshit of lies rendering her immobile.

  Evan’s eyes were dark, serious. His brow furrowed in a way she’d only seen once. It made her want to press her finger there, to smooth it away. “We hit teenage years and grew apart, as you might expect. She was a dancer. Hit the ballet floor when she was seven and never looked back.” He smiled, ran his thumb over her lips. She just lay there, listening. “Then one day, when we were about a third of the way through our senior year of high school, my mother became the guardian of the son of her good friend. The boy’s mother had died of cancer and his father never acknowledged him. So we got a new family member, from England. His name was Damian.”

  Evan took a long shuddering breath. Julie narrowed her eyes. She could pick up on the anxiety coursing through him as if she were experiencing it herself. The black smoke filling the space between her ears for the last hour or so began to clear. She put a hand on his leg. He stared at it, seeming to break out of a daze, then looked at her, surprise clear in his eyes.

  “So, Damian sort of took over our lives. He was – is – good-looking, charming, with that Brit accent all the girls love. My mom and dad were totally enthralled by him and his stories of life in London. And he was a class-A adult ass-kisser. That guy knew how to work the grownups, from my parents to the principal of the high school. He could be holding a lit joint behind his back with one hand and convincing any adult questioning him that he was busy feeding the homeless or in the middle of finding a cure for cancer. They all fell for it, every fucking time.”

  He gritted his tee
th. Julie sat up, touched his jaw where she could see him clenching it. Her fingertips barely grazed his skin, but he shivered and gripped her hand, clutched it to his chest.

  “Olivia was fragile, in her way. Her ego was easily bruised, but she was the most devoted athlete I’ve ever known. Her sport was ballet, but it was just as hard as anything I ever did, and I was captain of two varsity sports. She had this audition that year, about two weeks after Damian moved in actually, for some New York ballet school. She worked her ass off, lost a ton of weight she couldn’t afford to lose, and then, just like that, she met Damian and everything changed.”

  Julie put her other hand to his face. Her need to touch him was so urgent she refused to resist it. He leaned into her palm and kept talking. “She got in, actually made the cut, got the coveted offer. But by then he was so deep in her psyche, had her convinced she was the light to his dark, the only thing keeping him sane and grounded…”

  He stopped, shook his head. “So after spending her entire life working to dance in New York and being offered that opportunity, she ended up at Michigan, with him. His mother’s life insurance paid for his tuition, and he was a brainiac, got in with no trouble. I left for East Lansing and spent nearly four years ignoring them completely. After the first summer, I never even went back except when I had to at the holidays. I worked, went to school, ended up at Northwestern for law school. While I was there, I… um… started exploring this side to me that I want to share with you. I met a guy who pulled me deeper into it, but he proved to me Damian’s way, the shit he did, was completely wrong.”

  He let go of her hand, stood up and started pacing. The raw anger was rolling off him in visible waves. Julie sat, quietly. “Damian was an abuser. A rapist, actually. He attacked a woman I was… um… with the summer before I left for college. He couldn’t stand that she chose me as her Dom and not him so he beat her up and raped her. But she wouldn’t press charges.” He stood at the window, pressed his palms against it, and was quiet for so long Julie thought he’d decided not to say any more.

  But he kept talking, in a low voice, so she got up and stood at his shoulder, her hands on his back. He shook some but kept going. “I got a grip on myself, shook off the potential inner abuser, learned what I’d been doing was headed in the wrong direction. The clubs we went to taught me something even more important.” He turned so fast she stumbled back. Gripping her hands, he stared hard at her. “I was a sub, twice, to two different women. I mean, we switched, but for the most part, I was learning what to do to make sure my future partner felt the way she was supposed to – protected, above all else.”

  She smiled, flushed, and looked down at the floor.

  “But my last semester, while I was in the middle of messing around with one of my professors who was an experienced Dominatrix, Olivia showed up at my house in Chicago. She probably weighed seventy pounds, and was dying of self-imposed starvation. By the time we got her to the hospital she was already fading. And the doctors had to tell me she’d been raped, repeatedly, and had such injuries to her… her…”

  His voice broke. Without thinking, Julie pulled him close. “She died after she told me what he did to her. To her beautiful mind and to her perfect dancer’s body. What that fucking asshole did, pretending to be a Dom. And I let her go.”

  He sucked in a breath, lifted his face from her shoulder. His eyes were bright. “I’ve been trying to find him ever since. But he keeps slipping out of my grasp. My dad died, left me a bunch of money. I quit the law firm and the woman who was my last playmate. Bought the brewery. Made an appointment to meet with a new distributor. And so… here we are.”

  “Evan.” She turned away from him, clutching her arms again. “This is just… I don’t know.”

  He came up behind her, turned her slowly, and leaned in for a long, mind-blowing kiss. When he finally broke away, she was weak in the knees all over again. But the compulsion to spill everything was too strong. She took a breath and spoke.

  “The only sex I have ever had was forced on me, or used to manipulate me.” She held him away from her, determined to finish this fucked-up conversation. “Since Bart stole my virginity and my mother convinced me I was a dirty whore, I stopped caring or wanting anything but to be in control of everything around me.” She could feel his eyes on her, boring into her soul. “You should know I fucked around with a college professor who claimed he’d help me get into grad school. But that went so bad on me I dropped out before I even got my Bachelor’s degree. I am proud of nothing I’ve done so far with men, Evan. I guess you’ve figured that out by now. Because right after, I found the want ad for the Dawson job. And now,” she held out both hands, her heart heavy with certainty that he would reject her, “here we are.”

  He tilted his head and looked at her, confusion in his eyes. “But I thought James was… I mean, you were married, happy for a while, you said.”

  “Yeah, we were.” She stepped away from him. “But he had zero interest in fucking a woman. I gave great blow jobs, he was pretty good with a vibrator and… well… we liked each other. After the first time, in his office when I proposed my plan to him… well, he needed something from me, and I needed money.” She blew out a breath and sat, dismayed by his shocked expression. “So, yeah, I married a gay guy for his bank account. After I let a dirty-old-man professor fuck me so I could get into Harvard. Which worked out great, as you can see. Nice, huh?” She wiped her arm across her nose. “So let’s just put out the candles, and go to bed. Our flight’s pretty early in the morning.”

  “Uh, wait.” He looked dazed again. “I gotta process this a minute.”

  She frowned at him, welcoming the anger that started to fill her chest. “Evan, my story is so convoluted and fucked-up, you really shouldn’t bother.”

  “Julie, I’ve spent the weeks since you told me about James being gut-deep jealous of the man, ready to rip his balls off because he… because you let him… fuck.” He sat heavily on the lounge across from her. She ran her hand over the soft suede, nervous, finally coming face to face with her own sick reality. “I’m relieved,” he said softly. “One of the things about this dynamic between us – the bit about you being mine and all mine – it sort of applies to all the men in your life before me. I have been puking sick over the fact that any man had ever touched you. Now I know one was a monster who ruined you as a teenager, one you tried to use but he failed you, and the other was never a real man to you. I’m so messed up in the head I don’t even know what to say, how to explain it.” He rubbed his eyes.

  “Yeah, so I was a teenage rape victim, a clichéd horny co-ed, and a beard. Yay me. Let’s just cut this off now. I am not interested in you fixing me or whatever it is you think you can do.” She couldn’t understand it herself, but at that moment she needed space. As badly as she wanted Evan’s lips on hers, his arms around her, his body alongside hers, she needed to get the fuck away from him. It was the oddest, most disturbing dichotomy she had ever experienced.

  He needed her. She knew that now. She wanted to help him heal from the horror of his sister’s death. But she was terrified at the same time. The grave responsibility for another person’s emotional well-being was one thing. But this, this connection he kept referring to, it was real and meant a whole hell of a lot more than just helping him through an occasional rough moment or memory. He needed her, body and soul.

  “I’m not ready for this.” She stood, tripped backward, but reached the bedroom and slammed the door shut, before sliding down it, already crying, already missing him, needing him so badly her skull pounded. All the more reason to end it before it started, she justified.

  He spoke through the closed door. “I’m sorry, Julie. I’m so sorry you got hurt. But you may be right. We may be… too much… even for each other. Good night. I’ve got the alarm set.”

  “No,” she whispered to herself. “I love you.” But instead, said, “Okay. Thanks for everything. Good night.”

  Chapter Seven

  The per
iod between Thanksgiving and Christmas provided a blur of activity Julie relished. The holiday drinking season was hands down their busiest. And when her sales manager up and quit two weeks before the craziest week of the year, she was stuck, right and proper. And it meant longer hours which translated to time she would not have at home thinking about what she’d lost by rejecting Evan and all he had to offer.

  “Fuck me six ways to Sunday,” she muttered under her breath, noting the stacks of sales reports she had to process before quitting for the day. In lieu of going to the trouble of hiring anyone, she’d taken on all the sales management tasks. Her staff practically pressed themselves into the walls to avoid being noticed when she would stomp down the halls. She didn’t care. Having come so close to giving everything up, to letting a man take the one thing she had left – control – she felt a need to compensate, to grip everything around her even tighter. If there were a way to become even more of a control freak, she was there, diving into it, swimming around in it. And becoming even more of a giant bitch because of it.

  She bit heads off, got shit done, went out to check on her biggest and best retail clients, heard complaints. Then went back to square one – biting heads off. Back to sleeping about four hours a night and forcing her body through harder workouts and less food, unable to even contemplate anything but ways to avoid thinking about Evan. To his credit, when he’d called her a cab at the airport, after a soft, wistful kiss, he bid her goodbye and had not contacted her since.

  She’d catch herself staring at one of the empty Big House Brewing bottles she kept on her desk, until one day she swept them into the trash, smiling with evil satisfaction at the loud shatter. She’d laid her head down on her hands, heard her stomach grumbling, felt her sore muscles complaining. The ache that had developed in the middle of her chest expanded, reminding her of the phantom pain she’d had sitting on the floor of the suite after telling Evan about the rape.