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I can’t talk or move, and I’m as swelled as I’ve ever been. I’m deep in subspace, surrendered to my arousal and my master as he uses me like a doll to teach Martin shibari.

Deacon, whose hands I know even if I can’t see him, pulls on a rope, and I swing back and forth like a pendulum. I hear Martin leave as, in my mind, the color of my cunt streaks the air in an arc, the shape of heaven. When I wind down to a small slice of a circle, Deacon put his hands on my shoulders and stops me.

“He is not to touch you, ever,” he says, running his hands down my prone body. “He has no control. I’m dropping him when I get back.” He pulls the rope from my mouth, leaving me with a taste of hemp.

“Yes, Sir.”

“You look beautiful.”

“I feel… God, I feel everything.”

“How are the ropes?”

“Fine, Sir.”

He stands between my legs in a button shirt and jeans, looking at the angles of my body. “You’re the most perfect model I’ve ever had.” He puts his hands on my stomach and rests them on my breasts. He strokes the points of my nipples, ending in a pinch and a pull on the rings. “Every time I fuck you, I want to possess you. Your pleasure, your pain. Look.” He yanks on the nipple rings, and I strain against my bonds. “How sweet to control you with two pieces of metal and some rope. Do you want me to fuck you?”

“Please.”

He slides his finger along my slit, the backs of his fingers on my clit. “Open your eyes.” He puts two fingers in me, then three, and my eyes flutter open. His hands are instruments of desire. “Look at me.”

I do. He’s backlit against the window, and his gaze on me is like ten hands. He takes his fingers out of me and licks them then brushes his thumb over my lips.

“Who do you taste?” he whispers, but his voice has the command of a shout.

“I taste us.”

He puts four cunt-soaked fingers down my throat, then slides them out and grabs my jaw, pressing my tongue down with his fingertips. He leans over and speaks in my ear, saying the words he always says before he fucks me, sending me to a place where I surrender all anxiety to him.

“Empty your heart, my kitten. Empty your mind. Open your eyes. Who do you see?” His fingers slide out of my mouth and rest on my throat.

“You,” I croak.

“Are you empty?”

“I am.”

“Release your body to me. I have you.”

He pulls out his dick with his other hand and puts it right at my opening.

“I could watch you all day,” he says as he slides in. I groan. “And I might.”

He pulls his cock out and presses it against me. His grip on my jaw is tight and painful, and when he slaps my breast before yanking on the ring, I feel a surge between my legs. He slaps again, each one a sting of love.

I am outside myself, in pleasure and pain. He is gentle, for Deacon, even when he put his cock so deep in me it hurts. He doesn’t move, using the gravity of the suspension to keep the pressure on. He yanks on a rope, then another, until I am upright. He puts his hand back on my mouth and shifts until the whole of my weight is on him. He’s in so deep, not moving, not thrusting, just digging.

“I’m staying like this,” he says. “Inside you, until I let you come.” Drool drips between us, landing on his stomach. “You’re a little whore, kitten, but you’re my little whore. Do you understand? I own this mouth. I can fuck it with my hand until you drool. I own this ass, and I’ll put a hook in it when I like. Your cunt is mine to fuck with anything I want.”

I agree in spittle and grunts. I’m so close, but he’s moving so little, it could take forever.

He pulls his hand from my mouth and draws it across my cheek, leaving a trail of drying spit. “You’re my prized possession.” His thrusts get longer and stronger. He puts his nose to mine as I shift further and further from conscious. “Say it.”

“I’m yours.” He knows something about the surrender of ownership, the delegation of will, it turns me on, and the pressure of pleasure is near explosive.

“Again.”

“I belong to you.” I gasp between every word. He’s so strong, so real, and I feel as if I’m made of foam. “May I come, Sir?”

“Say it.”

“I would die without you, Deacon.”

“Do you want to come?”

“I would die.”

I feel him smile against my cheek, and I think of how we’d started and what we became. Back in that blank room, my fingers rolled over my sore, aching clit on the toilet of the solitary room in a mental hospital.

FIONA

A
 meal with a little cup of meds came through the flap in the bottom of the door. It was the usual gourmet shit, eaten on the edge of my bed. I took my meds and slid the tray back out. I’d had two meals in that room, one with eggs and another with a sandwich. I’d masturbated twice more, but the last time, I couldn’t come because of the pain.

I spent most of the time sitting on the edge of the bed, wondering when they’d let me out. I slept. I thought about my life, everything in it, and all the rotten things I’d done. I’d stolen Amanda’s boyfriend in high school, luring him away with the promise and delivery of a blow job. I’d played it off, because who wanted a man who could be taken away so easily? And the time I fucked Kevin Hartneick and made him cry when I didn’t want to anymore. Or inviting Gary Adelstein to join Evan Fronet and me in bed, even after Evan objected. Or my first anal, just before I turned eighteen, when Gary held me down over the kitchen table while he and Evan fucked my ass until I cried like a little bitch.

Afterward, I’d wept on Evan’s shoulder, because it had been my fault, hadn’t it? I’d hurt his feelings, and I’d wanted that threesome, right? That’s what he said when he pushed my mouth onto his cock later that night—that we were even, and I’d gotten the threesome I wanted. If I’d just relaxed, it wouldn’t have been painful, and they wouldn’t have had to hold me down.

In the white room in Westonwood, there was nothing to distract me. I couldn’t even fuck myself. All I could do was stare at that toilet and that little sink and think,
my fucking God, what have I done?
What have I done? What have I done?

When I’d had that hoof knife in my hand, it was the first time in years. I was cleaning Snowcone’s sole. It was already pretty clean because Lindsey cared for my horse more than I did, but I got at the loose frog. My hands blistered, and I was crying.

In that room, with nothing but the toilet to tell, I rubbed my hands. There had been blisters. I saw the little rough brown spots where they’d been. I’d been holding that knife that day. Of all the shitty things I’d done, all the backstabbing, heartbreaking, coldhearted shit I’d done, the worst was hurting Deacon.

In that room that had been stripped of everything sensory, I smelled the stables, the manure and dander, the sharp sting of hay. I heard the scrape of the hooves as I cleaned them. Snowcone, so good, so warm, had taken a minute to remember me. I’d been afraid he’d kick me, so I sat where he couldn’t reach. The fear was there, right in the rib that always hurt when I thought of how he’d kicked me last time.

I thought over and over about how I’d abandoned him. How intolerant and hateful I was to dump my responsibilities on Lindsay.

I remembered that night. The dark, the crickets, the fear, the anxiety, the self-loathing. I’d been dead sober. And sad because Deacon and I had broken up. The sharp pain in my wrist reminded me of the breakup, and I thought to myself that I deserved it. That pain was mine. I’d brought it on myself. I scraped too hard, thinking about it, and Snowcone let me know I’d ventured into unacceptable territory by shifting in a way that made me jump.

When I did, I noticed someone behind me, and I sat bolt upright.

It was the door of the white room opening, and Frances walking in.

I didn’t remember how many days I’d been in there, if I’d been hopped up on meds or if it had been half a day without meds and just me and the boredom. But I felt changed by the white emptiness, sent through some kind of process that had changed me enough to remember what I’d chosen to forget.

Though I knew it was Frances, I was muddled, somehow still in the scene at the stables, and Frances became the person who’d surprised me. As if propelled to act out the memory, I stabbed her twice in the chest with the knife of my imagination.

ELLIOT

J
ana was cutting open a head of broccoli when I got home. I was nine minutes late, and I hadn’t called. I only called if I was ten minutes late, and by the time I turned north on LaCienega, I knew I’d make it inside my no-call window.

And I didn’t want to talk to anyone.

“Hi,” I said, kissing the top of her head. “How was school?”

“Fine. And your day? How was it?”

“Fine,” I said. Fine meant I’d only been slightly beaten down by the events at The Alondra Clinic, where my skills were useless against the constant barrage of suffering. Cushy Westonwood, where the psychic pain had a different cause and the same result, was a cakewalk. “How did the testing meeting go?”

“The fourth-grade teachers want more latitude.” I flipped through the mail as she spoke. “The parents’ association thinks it’s a great idea. But when their kids’ scores are low and they can’t get into middle school, who gets in trouble?” She pointed at herself with the knife.

I still didn’t want to talk to her or anyone, but it looked as though it would be an okay evening. “And Mary Queen of Scots? Did you talk to her?”

“No.” She chopped broccoli with a slap. Mary was the head of school, and Jana wanted more control over admissions.

“You should talk to her.”

“I did. Your Westonwood experience wasn’t on your resume.”

I hadn’t meant that. I meant she should talk to her boss about what she wanted out of her job.

“You must have sent me the old one by accident,” she said.

Freud would have said it was no accident. He would have said I’d known damn well the one piece of experience Mary wanted to see wasn’t on the resume I told Jana to forward. What did that say about me?

“I thought you had an updated one, sorry.”

“I had a thought,” she said, sliding the knife over the cutting board. She glanced at me flirtatiously.

“Really?” I pushed her hair from her neck. She had a lovely neck.

“If you went back to St. Paul’s, you could reorganize the discernment committee.”

“No,” I whispered. I didn’t want a committee of good Episcopalian laypeople to decide my future. That last step needed to be mine and mine alone.

“If they approve you, you could get ordained. You could have something steady.”

“That’s not a reason to give your life to God.”

She set down her knife, and I felt her jaw tighten against my lips.

“You complain about suffering and God, and then you go to Alondra where there’s nothing but suffering,” she said. “It’s like you’re sticking your face in it out of spite.”

I pulled away. I wanted to talk about baseball, or the state of the garden, or traffic patterns at rush hour. The last thing I wanted was an exegesis on earthly suffering. “There’s suffering everywhere.” Fiona, my little countertransference case, flashed on the screen in my mind. Her suffering was nothing like mine, and of a different grade than any I’d seen.

Jana picked up her knife. After tapping it on the cutting board once, as if releasing her negative feelings, she smiled. “Do you want the spicy sauce with the chicken? Or the mustard?”

“Spicy is fine.” I headed to the bedroom to change out of my work clothes.

Jana called to me as I walked. “You were late. I was worried.”

I pretended not to hear her. I didn’t know why I was so grouchy. Traffic. Low blood sugar. Overwhelmed. Late getting home. Jana’s dresser drawer was half open, which made me nuts, and the light in the bathroom was on. Normally those things didn’t bother me, but that evening, as I took my jacket off, I walked a razor’s edge.

The phone rang. It was Frances’s extension from Westonwood. She had no reason to call me. I’d taken an indefinite sabbatical, and the paperwork was all in order.

“Dr. Chapman?” she said.

“Hello, Dr. Ramone.”

“I’m sorry to bother you.”

“It’s fine.”

“Your patient, Fiona Drazen, says she remembers what happened the day she was brought in.”

I wasn’t supposed to be moved by curiosity or anything else. A therapist was simply a vessel for what the patient found important. Curiosity made the therapist’s desires more important than the patient’s, and that wasn’t acceptable.

Except damn, I was curious.

“Really?” I said. “That’s interesting.”

“She’ll only tell you though.”

I sighed. I didn’t mean for it to be audible, because though one might assume it was a sigh of resignation, it was a sigh of relief.

FIONA

I
 don’t know how long I was in there, but I was peeled off Frances, given a shot of something, and left on the floor. That would’ve sucked shit out of a dead dog’s ass if whatever was in that needle hadn’t made me care about exactly nothing. I was high as a kite, living between sleep and wakefulness, completely aware yet unable to control my own thoughts or body. At least the pain of arousal was gone, like a candle snuffed with spit-wet fingers.

Over and over, I went back to the moment I’d attacked Deacon because I’d been frightened. I discovered details, scents, sounds, and I found peace in it. I’d done it as some sort of reaction to the night, not out of anger. Not in some Machiavellian vision of sharp premeditation. It was just some crazy shit where I was startled and stabbed him.

A little voice piped in through the scene.
Who does this? Have you ever heard of this happening before? Why would this make sense?

But that voice didn’t want me to be happy. That voice was my father with his critical disappointment and my sisters with their distaste.

No, fear made the most sense.

“Fiona.”

I came around enough to feel the hard floor beneath me, my cheek on cold linoleum.

“Fiona.”

That voice again. Soft putty. The thick fat at the top of the cream jar.

“Doctor,” I said with a chapped voice.