Forbidden: A Standalone (10 page)

I was about to get up and just go figure it out when I decided to give in to impulse. I slid my middle finger over my clit.

I gasped. The shade slapped against the window again, and something fell. I’d forgotten how good that was, how electric. My finger and my clit reacted at the same time, and I was blindsided by it.

The bathroom door opened. I jerked my hand up and opened my eyes.

Mark, the orderly with the tattoo, said, “Whatcha doing?”

“I’m in the bathroom, asshole.”

He stood there, taking up the doorframe. He had Jack’s paper towel in his hand, a few yellow petals poking out. “Bedroom door was closed.”

“Maybe you know why now?”

“Sure do.” He still didn’t move

My eyes drifted where they always did when I felt that constant throb between my legs. He had a cock, and if it wasn’t hard, I’d be a monkey’s uncle. I could take that thing. It would have to be a secret for all of how many hours? I’d go to my session, clear shit up, get rubberstamped, and get the fuck over to Deacon, aye-sap.

“There aren’t cameras in the bathrooms, are there?”

He looked me up and down, eyes lingering on my bare legs and the triangle where they met. “On the doorway. Everything up to the toilet.”

“Too bad. I was feeling like a fuckdoll.” Newly emboldened, I stroked my belly with an extended finger.

“Five minutes, pretty thing.”

“Three’s all I got.”

He winked at me. “Stay right where you are.” He clicked the door shut behind him.

I had twenty minutes. Maybe I could be two minutes late to the session. I had no idea who reported lateness or at what point they’d come looking for me. I wasn’t interested in getting found with Mark.

I sat back and let my fingers rediscover pleasure. I didn’t think about anything, just focused on what I was feeling. I teased the swell out so that when a real living, breathing cock entered the room, I could get the job done. I needed it, and with every pulse of need, I shifted my finger over my clit. Sweet, overwhelming delight. Thoughtless anticipation, the tremble of life, a precipice into the chasm of forgetting.

And he was back.

“What did you do?”

“My buddy’s at the monitors.” He closed the door. “Get down, psycho.”

He took me by the back of the head and pulled me to my knees. I yanked his waistband down and pulled out his cock. It smelled antiseptic and stung my tongue when I licked it.

“Oh God, yes, you little fucking whore. Take it all.”

I looked up at him, making my eyes big and wide. I let him slide his dick over my tongue and down my open throat. He held me there a second longer than I thought I could stand it.

I stood up. “Just fuck me. Use me. I’ll be your horny slut. Your fuckdoll whore.”

He turned me and pushed me against the toilet. I braced myself on the tank. He got a condom on while I stared at the tiles. I hoped he didn’t try anal. That was always nice, but I wouldn’t come without help, and I suspected he wasn’t a big helper. He jammed it in my pussy and held onto my hips, pumping in and out. I angled my body so his shaft rubbed my clit, and I felt the orgasm coming.

“Oh, fuck you, you little rich slut. You like it like this, don’t you? You like it when I fuck you like this.”

“I’m a whore. Fuck me like a whore. Yes, fuck me like a rich little whore.” I knew I was saying the right things. They turned me on, and they made him slam me harder. I felt the swirl of my climax.

Everything was there. Skin on skin. Tick. Prone, exposed to a stranger. Tick. No commitments, no intimacy. Tick. A little risk thrown in for good measure. Tick, tick, tick.

There was the thing I’d forgotten.

The boredom. The space between the hunt for sex and the orgasm, and even the orgasm, half the time. Tedious.

I wanted to come and get it the fuck over with. The seconds in between were not savored but reviled. They were an unworthy means to a worthy end. His grunts were annoying. His dirty talk held no meaning. I didn’t want to look at him, so I bent over. He thought I was a slut, so he called me a slut. Boring.

I pushed against him. “Harder, fucker. Bury it. Break it off.”

He slapped my ass and pounded me. “Shut up, bitch.”

His balls slapped my clit, and his dick plowed against it. I was going to come. I felt it in my muscles, and when they tensed and clenched, it was a release, not a joy. Just a job well done.

He came with an
oof
, and I rolled my eyes.

He stroked my back from neck to ass. “Baby—”

“Get out. I have shit to do.”

“Why’s it gotta be like that?” He got the condom off and rolled it up in toilet paper.

I stood up. “How else should it be?”

“You don’t want me to be nice?”

“You thought you were the one using me? Funny.”

“You some kinda weirdo?”

“You’re in a mental ward, dude. Come on. Get the fuck out of my bathroom.”

Condom stowed in his pocket, pants zipped, girl disinterested, he got the hint and opened the door. He was almost out, but being a man, he needed the last word.

“Slut.”

“L
ast session,” Elliot said. “How do you feel?”

He looked relaxed, clean-shaven, happy. I hadn’t realized how troubled he’d looked during our last session.

“I’m okay. Are you going to let me go?”

“I can only make a recommendation. After this session, I’ll type it up, and we’ll meet with Frances and your lawyer. Give me an hour after we’re done. Your mother and lawyer are already here.”

I sit on the couch. “Are we doing hypnosis again today?”

He shrugged. “Sure, if you’re up for it. I’d like to try to find more recent memories. Track back to the last thing you remember.”

I laid back. “We tried this before.”

“Maybe things have changed.” He sat next to me and got out his pen.

I wished I could have met him under different circumstances. When he was a seminarian, before I was a happy little fuckdoll, when things could have been kind of normal. That absurd sense of humor would drive me insane while my affluenza frustrated him.

“Things have changed,” I said, though I couldn’t define them.

“Keep your eyes on the tip of the pen.”

***

Are you relaxed?

I am. I feel a freedom I hadn’t felt before. I feel hopeful and generous, sweet and melancholy. Emboldened and encouraged, ready to start a new journey, a life after this incident.

I want you to think about the ride here, to Westonwood. Can you remember that?

I don’t. It’s not even a blur; it’s blank.

Go back a little further. To the stables. You were given a shot. Do you remember the pain in your arm?

The black goes grey, and I feel something in my arm, as if I’m being poked with a rigid finger. I feel something else, a pounding in my chest, a confusion that I’m separate from. I can’t tell what’s happening, besides the feeling of being restrained.

Go back further. Before the shot.

I don’t want to. I feel the resistance binding me to my forgetfulness, the comfort of not knowing. If I lean into it, just a little, maybe I can see what happened without feeling it. Maybe I can observe coldly, like a reporter noting facts for relevance, not profundity. If I let myself accept that fear, I’ll know. So I relax into where the rope of my fear pulls and binds me, dropping into some unknown graphite-colored place in my head. I expect to go back in my memory a minute, two minutes, half an hour, but intuitively, though I can’t tell the whens and wheres, I know I’ve gone back further.

His breath falls on my cheek, and a pain in my arm runs from my wrist to the sensitive side of my bicep.

“You did not,” he says from deep in his throat. He’s naked, stunning, the stink of sex and blood on him. He pins me to the wall, the friction screaming against the open skin on my ass.

Regret. Pounds of it. Miles wide. Regret to the depth of my broken spirit.

“I’m sorry.” Am I? Or am I just saying it?

“Why?”

My wrist hurts. He’s pressing it so hard against the wall, as if I’d leave, as if I’d ever turn my back on him. Yet I want to get away, to run, to show him that I can abandon him the way he abandons me.

I wiggle, but he only presses harder and demands, “Why?”

“Get off me!”

“Tell me why!” His eyes are wider, his teeth flashing as if he wants to rip out my throat. “Why?”

“I need it!”

The words come out before I think, and they’re poison to him. Before I expect it, he slaps me in the mouth. He lets me go, and I fall to the floor. When I look at him, he’s cradling the lower half of his face as if he can’t believe what he’s done. He’s slapped me plenty, but not in anger. Not without me halfway in subspace and high on dopamine. Never outside a scene.

But that’s nothing compared to what he does next. The ropes of my fear try to pull me away, back to safety, and I let them.

What is it? What does he do?

I must have been silent too long. I must have watched Deacon’s face, frozen in my memory, for a second too many. The sense that he is going to do something terrible is all I have, but I don’t remember what it is. When Elliot asks from the present what Deacon does, I stay to see it.

“I’m sorry,” Deacon says.

I don’t say anything. My face hurts, and I taste liquid copper. We stay like that forever, or time is stretched in my memory. This is the moment I can tell him it’s okay, or the moment I can be angry, or I can have a reaction that will make him not do what he’s going to do.

But I don’t do anything. Not a word or gesture.

He walks out.

I don’t know why there’s a finality to it that I haven’t ever felt before, but there is. When the bedroom door clicks behind him, that’s it.

I want to wake up. I don’t want to observe my emotions, even as a time-traveling bystander.

You’re fidgeting.

Pinkerton Pinkerton Pinkerton

Okay, on three, you’ll wake rested and happy.

Amanda’s next to her hot pink Bugattti. Pinkerton, before it became the assassin of the 405. She tips, holds herself straight, smiles at me. Oh, no. I don’t think so.

One.

I snap the keys from her and give them to Charlie. I open the passenger door in the front, even though it’s her car. Let her sit in the back. I don’t want her puking on Charlie when he’s driving.

Two.

I’m not in the mood to die.

Three.

***

“You associate those two things,” Elliot said. “Amanda dying, and Deacon hitting you.”

“He hit me all the time. It was a turn-on.”

“Hard enough to break a molar?”

I heard him shift in his chair. I wanted to sit upright, but my body felt like the inside of a broken egg.

“Did you usually sit in the back of Pinkerton?”

“If Charlie was driving and it’s Amanda’s car, I should be in the back. That’s just social mores. But Amanda got aggressive when she drank too much, and she was doing God knows what else. I just didn’t feel like worrying about her having a psychotic break while Charlie was driving, because it wasn’t like he was in much better shape.”

“And Deacon hitting you?”

“He left. That was the painful part.”

“Why did he leave?”

I sighed. It had been the sore point between us. Our thing. “He went away for a few days to hang a show in San Diego. And I swelled, so I needed to fuck, and I got it where I could. I tried not to. I tried to be good, but I failed, okay? And he found out, which was lying on top of cheating. I packed my shit and left. That was the last time I saw him. Until the stables, which I still don’t remember.”

“So you feel responsible for him leaving?”

“I was. We stopped sharing and fucking around. We agreed.”

“I think you need some therapy after you leave here. I don’t think you’ve worked through your feelings. We haven’t had time to touch on anything in your past.”

“Sure, Elliot. Sure.”

“And I know you don’t have access to the outside world in here, but the press is being unkind is probably the nicest way to put it. You’re going to need somewhere to go to talk about it.”

“I’m sure I can find someone.”

“It’s been nice talking to you, Fiona. I’m pretty sure I know what you think of yourself, but I want you to know that you don’t have to believe it.”

I twisted around until I could see him. He looked the same as always, relaxed and confident, middle finger on his upper lip as if he couldn’t think without it.

“Believe what?” I asked.

“That you’re useless.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You’re sensitive. You’re bright. You’re brave. Can you believe that?”

He pissed me off. He had no right to tell me about me, not after three days. But if I argued with him, if I put him in his place, it would be another reason to let me rot in that grey room.

“Thanks, Doc.”

He stood and opened the door. “I want you to remember that when you see your mother. She’s in visiting.”

M
argie caught me in the foyer, on the way to the visiting room.

“Have you seen Mom?” I asked.

“I have no idea what she’s doing here. I told her to stay home. Jonathan’s a wreck over his girlfriend, and Theresa’s no better. They’re mad at Dad, but won’t say why, which is fucking typical Drazen bullshit. You sure you don’t want to stay in here?”

“I’m sure.”

“Between you and Jonathan, the press is going apeshit.”

“Fuck them.”

“I wish I could get myself committed. “ Her phone dinged, and she tapped it. “Hang on, this came from the prosecutor.” She scanned the email. “Provided you’re cleared to leave here, you agree not to contest the charge and waive the preliminary hearing. We accept aggravated assault. Community service. I’m inclined to tell him to fuck off. Deacon’s denying it all, so bail and a grand jury appearance is my guess.”

“What does the press want?”

“They want you turning on a spit.”

“Take the plea.”

“As your attorney, I wouldn’t advise it.”

I shrugged. “I’d rather not have this over my head. Or have Deacon change his mind after I see him and beg forgiveness. Just take it and be done. A little community service won’t kill me.”