Void

by Cassy Roop

  His door was cracked open and I saw him sitting at his desk, doing what looked like paperwork. One hand held up his head, while the other wrote furiously on a piece of paper. I took a moment to just look at him. Really look at him. I loved the way his dark hair fell over his eyes giving him a mysterious look. The strong structure of his jaw gave him a deeply masculine appearance. The broadness of his shoulders filled out his dress shirt, nearly exposing the deeply chiseled muscles he hid beneath the fabric. I smiled when I remembered how great they felt just as my hands explored his back, feeling not only his strength, but his deep need to be inside of me. Although he tried to go slow, to savor the moment between us, I felt the tension there and the lurking of his urgency beneath the surface.

  As if sensing I was watching, he looked up to find me staring at him from the doorway. I did something I didn’t think I had ever done before.

  I blushed.

  I was caught ogling my man and he smiled knowing it.

  Smug bastard.

  Throwing the pen on the desk, he rose from his chair and made his way towards me. My heart pounded furiously, in sync with each step he made in my direction. Not saying a word, he reached for my hand and pulled me inside his office and closed the door behind us.

  Standing there in the middle of his office, he let go of my hands and placed them on my hips pulling me closer to him to where our bodies touched. Heat began to simmer just below the surface, but we didn’t once take our eyes from each other.

  “Hi,” his voice was deep, heavy with all the pleasure I knew he could supply to me.

  “Hi,” I managed to reply. The heaviness of the way we left things this morning fell to the wayside as I saw the glimmer in his eyes, which no doubt matched my own.

  “God, I’ve been wanting to do this all fucking day.”

  And then his mouth was on me, seeking, devouring, and quenching his own thirst for me while relieving me of my own for him. He tasted sweet, like candy mixed with hints of coffee. My skin bathed him in as he took control of the kiss, dipping his tongue deeper into my mouth. My arms uncontrollably reached up and wrapped around his neck, tugging on the hair at his nape with my fists, on instinct. There was something damn near primal about our connection, and I didn’t know if it were something natural or the fact that my heart, mind, and body were all fully invested in him. When I was with him, I never wanted to close my eyes, fearful that if I did, if I blinked, he would disappear.

  When he finally released my lips, I struggled to stand upright as my breathing labored to catch up in my lungs.

  “I needed that,” he stated, smiling at me and dropping one more kiss on my lips. He led me by the hand over to the couch in the corner of the room and gestured for me to sit down as he sat next to me. He laced our fingers together, and I absorbed the warmth of him.

  “Care to tell me what happened this morning between leaving Link’s place and you dropping me off at Lexie’s?”

  I could see the hesitation in his face. He didn’t want to tell me, but it had been eating at me since then.

  “I don’t want to share you anymore.”

  I sighed. It was exactly what I had expected him to say. What do you do when your heart belongs to two people? What do you do when you are faced with the ultimatum of having your heart ripped in two? I knew Andris. I could see him, feel him, and even be with him out in the open. I existed in his world more than just a few moments of bliss in the privacy of the bedroom. But I also never felt more alive than I did when I was with Link.

  “Andris…”

  “Nicola, please, just…just listen for a second. I’ll never be able to spit this out if you don’t. What if I introduce you to him? What if you meet him and see that he is not what you need? Will you see then that you are exactly what I need?”

  His hands trembled with nervousness as his brows furrowed together. This normally strong man looked pale in comparison to the one I was used to being with. There was a child-like hesitation about him, like a kid who had done something wrong, yet was trying to hide the truth.

  “Just promise me something.”

  “I promise, Andris. You can tell me anything. It isn’t going to change anything.”

  “Nicola, I’m falling…fuck…no, I have fallen in love with you. I just need you to promise that you aren’t going to run in the other fucking direction once you meet him.”

  “Seriously? He couldn’t be that horrible. Are you afraid that I’ll run away from him based on his appearance? Or his attitude? I’ve seen and heard some pretty bad shit in my life, Andris. I don’t scare easily,” I chuckled, trying to lighten the mood. He looked up and his eyes were filled with torment. I wanted to grab him and pull him close to me. The vulnerability radiating off of him truly had me concerned.

  “No. I’m scared you’ll run away from me.”

  “Andris…”

  I was interrupted by the sound of Andris’s intercom buzzing and he excused himself to go and answer it.

  Run away from him? Why would I run away from him? Wouldn’t it be Link that I should be concerned with?

  “Dr. Gunn, could you come out to reception? There is a concern about a patient and Dr. Lewis needs your assistance,” Laura Lee’s voice said, sounding a little shaken up.

  “I’m on my way.”

  He came back over to the couch and reached for my hand, leading me towards the door with him. When we got there and before he opened it, he turned around and kissed me once again. Not long enough to satisfy me, but long enough to put his heart behind the action, telling me with his lips what his voice was hesitant to say.

  “I’ll be back soon. If I’m not back by the time of your appointment with Bradley, his office is the fourth one down on the left. You can wait here in case I am able to come back.”

  “Okay.”

  He left the office and I closed the door behind him, leaning my head against the heavy wood. I concentrated on my breath for a few moments, trying to get up the courage for what I was about to do.

  With determination, I pushed away from the door and made my way to his desk. I didn’t know exactly how much time I had left before he would return, so I needed to act quickly. I searched the top of the desk first in hopes that what I needed was in plain sight.

  No such luck.

  I began frantically pulling open the drawers of his desk, making sure to glance up every other second to be sure that no one was walking in. My hands trembled as a bead of sweat trickled down my spine.

  Pens.

  Notebooks.

  Candy.

  I started getting frustrated until the last drawer produced the pad of paper I was looking for. Several of them, in fact. Without any hesitation, I grabbed them and shoved them into the oversized purse I brought with me today before I had the chance to change my mind. I barely had enough time to place them there and practically sprint my way back to the couch in the corner before a knock sounded at the office door and in walked a middle-aged man.

  “Andris?” He called as he stepped inside.

  “Oh, my apologies, Miss. I was looking for Dr. Gunn.”

  My chest heaved from my mad dash to the couch. He looked at me strangely and a hint of panic began to engulf me. Did he know? Could he have any awareness that I was only seconds ago doing something completely immoral and illegal?

  “He had to go to reception to help one of the other doctors with a patient. He should return any moment.”

  “Ah, I see. You wouldn’t be Nicola by chance, would you?” He asked as he walked closer to me. I hugged my bag to my side, being sure that he couldn’t peek through the top to see the contents inside. When I arched my brow at him slightly, his face softened and it instantly put me at ease.

  “I’m Dr. Bradley Chambers. I will be taking over your care in place of Dr. Gunn.”

  “Oh, yes, of course,” I replied as I stood up and extended my hand to him. He accepted my hand shake as a way of introduction. Except for the few brief moments when he first walked into the office, I fe
lt a sense of ease around him. Comforted in a strange way. Normally, I never reacted to people upon introduction, just stood there stoically as they sized me up and down.

  “If the patient in the lobby is who I think it is, you can rest assure that Dr. Gunn will be away for a while. We can go ahead and venture down to my office for your appointment if you wish.”

  “Um, yes. Okay. Let me grab my things.”

  I reached for my bag and my jacket, draping the coat over top of the opening to my bag, trying to hide my indiscretion as we left Andris’s office and walked down the hall to Dr. Chambers’ office. The atmosphere inside his office was different than Andris’s. Where his was clean and masculine, Dr. Chambers’ was warm and welcoming. There were pictures of his family on the walls as well as drawings from what looked like his child clients. ‘I love you Dr. Chambers’ was written in messy crayon on the majority of them.

  “Have a seat wherever feels comfortable, Miss Forbes.”

  “Thank you, Dr. Chambers.”

  “Call me Bradley.”

  “As long as you call me Nicola.”

  “Deal.”

  I took a seat in one of the plush chairs in front of his desk, needing the space of his desk between us. I could tell this man was morally strong and I felt the need to keep my sins from corrupting him. His smile made me feel relaxed, and the tone of his voice made me feel at ease.

  “Please know, Nicola, that anything we discuss here in my office stays between you and me. That includes Dr. Gunn. He has informed me of your relationship and I have no intentions of discussing anything that you and I talk about, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “This is the point of the appointment where any normal psychiatrist would ask you ‘how you feel’ or ‘what do you think about this or that’, but I’m not going to. I’ve read your file. I know you have been coming here for quite some time, so I won’t bore you with semantics. What I do want, though, is your honesty.”

  I nodded my head even though it was a lie. How could I be honest with him? How could I tell him that a fucking mob boss was blackmailing me into doing something I never wanted to do, in order to protect the two men I loved? My once steady and uneventful life had become a soap opera overnight. I had more money in the bank than I have had in years. I had deep feelings for not only one man, but two. I had one who fed my bodily cravings, and the other who fed my soul as well as my body. I felt connected to both of them, like there was some unknown force linking us together.

  “Obviously you have had a breakthrough in the last several weeks. I’m to understand that your relationship with Dr. Gunn is your first. Sometimes patients with your condition can feel overwhelmed once their trigger hits, or enters their life. Is this the case with you? Am I to assume that Dr. Gunn has been your trigger?”

  “Yes,” I replied as my voice cracked from the acknowledgement. It wasn’t that I was embarrassed or scared to admit it, it was just so new to me to admit it to someone else.

  “Before Andris, it was like nothing meant anything to me. My only true distinguishable emotions were extreme happiness or sadness, and that was only due to recognizing the same reactions in people over and over. Subtler emotions never even crossed my radar. I had no empathy, I couldn’t care less that I was hurting people.”

  “Yes, with your profession, no?”

  Wow. EVERYTHING must be in my file.

  “Yes. I’ve had very high profile clients. Some with wives, children. Men of God. It doesn’t matter. When it comes to sex, I think people have elective alexithymia. The want to shut off the feelings, only, I never had that luxury. I was cursed with the inability to feel.”

  “You weren’t cursed. Your light was never switched on. In order to feel or experience emotions, sometimes those emotions must be exposed to you. From your file, I read that your parents were never around. You were left in the care of nannies and even sent to boarding school at an extremely early age. You must have felt abandoned, alone, angry.”

  “I felt nothing for those people. They left me with nothing. I lost the only home I knew. I had no friends. I was completely unsociable as a child. People thought I was weird. People thought I was crazy. I was turned on to pleasure when I was approached by a stranger in a dark alley. He paid me money to do things to him. I was hungry, so I did it. That is how I became an escort.”

  “I see. Although you may not have noticed it at the time, or even now, Nicola, but I think that by the way you were treated as a child, you shut off the emotions within so that you couldn’t allow anyone else inside. The people who were supposed to love and nourish you gave you nothing. They were just as void of emotion as you yourself felt. That has a huge impact on a child.”

  “The doctors said it was from infancy. I never cried or fussed.”

  “So your parents claimed. Even as infants, we have instincts. You probably cried, yet it didn’t help you, so eventually you stopped crying because you knew it led to nowhere.”

  Years of therapy. Years and years of vacant talks and half-hearted discussions with doctors about why I was the way I was and Dr. Chambers was the first person to ever insinuate that my parents could have been responsible for the vacancy inside me. Throughout my life, I always thought I was the fucked up one. I thought that I was genetically made to be void, yet all it took was this one meeting with Dr. Chambers to flip the parameters into the completely opposite direction.

  “I take it this is something you are considering. Dr. Gunn was the first one to recognize you for you, Nicola, not you Jericho. He was the hand that flipped on the switch that turned your emotions on.”

  As I felt tears begin to sting the back of my eyes, something that felt completely normal, yet still entirely foreign to me, I tried to think back to the first time I met Andris. That is when I realized that Dr. Chambers was wrong.

  “No. It wasn’t Andris. I mean, he ultimately is responsible, but when I first met him, I didn’t know his name was Andris, nor the fact that he was a psychiatrist.

  “You met him as Sinclaire.”

  My head snapped up.

  “What?” I asked, feeling slightly panicked that he knew about Andris’s alternate life outside of the clinic. To my knowledge, no one knew of the arrangement except for Andris and Link, and Cardinelli after he had Andris followed. Now to hear that one of his employees and colleagues knew about it too concerned me. He must have noticed the fright behind my eyes.

  “It’s okay, Nicola. Dr. Gunn knows that I know. I’m assuming you have met Link?”

  Fucking hell. How many times was he going to surprise me in one session? When I hesitated, he reassured me once again that is was okay and that he knew.

  “Yes and no. I’ve been in the presence of Link and…and I’ve been contracted with him for a few weeks now to offer my services, but I have never seen his face. The only thing I have seen is the back of him in silhouette. Our sessions require for me to wear headphones and a blindfold.”

  “Yes, of course. That is the general arrangement that Link makes with his conquests. So was it Link that you felt helped ignite your emotions, or Andris?”

  “I—I’m not sure. Technically, I met Andris first and felt something from the very second I found him at my door, but the first real feelings or emotions I felt were when I was with Link for the first time.”

  “I see,” he replied as he wrote down notes in my file.

  “You have feelings for both men. That must be difficult.”

  “It is. I feel awful for wanting Link to feel something for me other than sexual, especially since Andris has expressed that he doesn’t want to share me with Link anymore. But I don’t know if I could give up either one of them.

  “Even if it meant you never got to see Link’s face?” He asked, arching an eyebrow at me.

  “I—yeah, I guess so. I just got the ability to feel all these things that were once completely foreign to me, I’m scared of not having them anymore.”

  “That’s understandable Nicola. It is natural to attach
yourself to something or someone who gives you what you were deprived of as a child.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Love.”

  Was I just attaching myself to Link and Andris because they were the first two people on earth to actually make me feel, or was I truly in love with them?

  “Go easy on him, Nicola. When, and if, you do meet Link, go easy on Andris. You are the first woman I have ever seen him step out of his comfort zone with. You must be one very special lady.”

  Yeah. One that will destroy everything.

  I’VE PACED MY OFFICE for hours. Talked with Bradley for another hour, and even went to the bathroom thinking I was going to throw up a few times. It’s a good fucking thing I kept extra clothes at my office because I had completely sweated through my other dress shirt. One would think I was an addict going through withdraws. In a way, I guess I was. I had relied on Link as my substance for so long, that no longer having him in my system—no longer having him by my side to shield me from my own self-consciousness—is hard to take.

  All the patients were gone for the day. Laura Lee left the office a long time ago yet, here I still was, only delaying the inevitable. I had never once wanted to introduce anyone to Link. Never thought that I would ever have to.

  But I fucking love her. Everything, from her perfections to her imperfections. I took pride in being the man to make her feel. It gave me something that I had lacked all of my life due to my shitty father.

  It gave me confidence. It gave me the ability to think that, for once, I truly was good enough for someone else. Nicola made me look past my insecurities. She made me want to be a better man by just being in the same room. She made my dick swell in ways no other woman had. I have become completely insatiable in regards to her.

  That is why I am so fucking terrified that after tonight, she will not want to be with me anymore. She will take one look at Link and run in the opposite direction. If she does, I don’t know what I will do.

  Then there is Cardinelli, breathing down my back. Taunting me over Nicola. Telling me that he will have her and that she would rather be with a man who could not only take care of her monetary wise, but sexually. He was like my father in many ways—knowing how to play on my own insecurities to the point that I was left doubting myself all over again.