Forbidden: A Standalone (25 page)

“I’m sorry,” she blurted. “For accusing you. But you’ve been distant, and that was where my mind went.”

I stepped close to her, raising my hand over her breast without touching it. If I lowered my hand, I’d feel the nub of her erect nipple under the silk. I’d draw my hand down the fabric until I got to the hem, then I’d reach under and find out what was happening beneath that nightgown.

“I’m sorry too,” I said. “I’ve been distant. You’re right.”

I didn’t lower my hand. If I admitted I had another woman on my mind, the fact that I’d never actually laid a hand on her would be utterly irrelevant. I’d cheated emotionally. If I told Jana that, how deeply would it hurt her, standing there in her pink silk nightgown before a roaring fire?

If I touched that tit, I would fuck her and fuck her hard. I would think of Fiona, and that wasn’t right. She’d put on that nightgown for a difficult evening. I couldn’t take her with a clean conscience, and I couldn’t refuse without leaving her.

I put my hand in my pocket.

She swallowed. “There’s someone else.”

“No, but...”

“But what?”

“But there may as well be.”

Was that cruel? Was there an easy way to do this? Was there ever a good time to tell someone that your heart had been looking for someplace to land for a long time, and the fact that it had landed with someone inaccessible didn’t mend the unhappiness?

“What does that mean?” Her lower lip quivered.

I wanted to take it back, fuck her senseless, and break up with her later during a convenient little fight that I’d engineer. But that was the coward’s way out, wasn’t it? “I’m sorry.”

“You want me to leave?”

“You’re a beautiful woman. You’re smart and caring, and… It’s not you, it’s—”

The slap on my cheek rang my bell. Of all her fine qualities, I hadn’t counted a left hook among them.

“You are a fucking prick,” she said, finger pointed. “You’re a drifter. You haven’t been able to hold down a job since you walked away from your discernment committee. You don’t talk about it. You don’t talk about anything. You only start all this weird fucking dirty talk. You spank my ass in the bathroom and expect me to what, enjoy that? And now you have the nerve to tell me how ‘beautiful’ I am? And that’s what? Prelude to a break up?”

I noticed that her nipples were no longer making peaks through the fabric of the nightgown. We were doing it, right here, right now, breaking up. It was the right thing, the only thing, and it felt like hell. “I’m sorry.”

“Well, guess what? Maybe I’m not interested in a guy who’ll bring gang bangers to the house. Maybe I’m not about to let my kids hear you tell me what you’re going to do to my pussy by the refrigerator. You’ve changed, Elliot. I don’t know if this is a phase or what, but you’ve changed.”

“And you haven’t.” I tried to stop myself but couldn’t. “You’re still a sheltered, scared child.”

“You’re just pissed off you couldn’t fix me. This is not my failure. It’s yours.”

Everything we needed to say to each other had just been said, but it would go on all night. The beginning parts had gone down easier with a dose of uncontrolled rage.

She stormed into the bedroom, slamming the door. I looked at the ceiling, my hands still in my pockets. She was right about everything, and I was too. None of the obstacles between us were insurmountable. We could work on all of it, stay together, and be happy-ish. But I wasn’t willing to climb that mountain. It seemed a long, hard slog for a peak overlooking a view I didn’t care to see.

I poked at the fire, moving a log so it would go out sooner rather than later. I didn’t feel good about what I was about to do, but it was honest. I stood, replaced the poker, and went into the bedroom to do what I should have done months ago.

FIONA

I
 walked back from breakfast drowsy with contentment after a night of non-Halcion-aided sleep. I was leaving. A few hours more, and I was free. Free to deal with my family’s shit. My father and his proclivities. My mother and her constant terrors. My brother’s dead girlfriend. The media.

Deacon.

I was done at Maundy. It had been a chapter of my life, and it was time to move along and control myself, my desires, my dreams. My plan was to focus on riding. I’d maybe train another horse, maybe do some coaching. I couldn’t do that with Deacon allowing me a life driven by my cunt. When that thing was at the wheel, every other life’s desire went dark.

“Hey,” Mark called. He was in his street clothes, torn black jeans and a black sleeveless Metallica tee. “You owe me. I got ten minutes.”

“You know I can’t get money from here.”

“I ain’t talking about the money.”

I rolled my eyes. “Fine. Let’s get this over with.”

As I kneeled on the bathroom floor and took his cock down my throat while he called me names, I was kind of relieved. Once I got out of Westonwood, I wouldn’t make deals like that anymore. Blowjobs weren’t currency. I could say no like a normal person and find some other way to pay for what I needed.

Mark wouldn’t appreciate the fact that he would be the last stranger who grabbed my hair to hold my head still so he could come on my face. That was all right. He didn’t need to know. I needed to know. I had control over my shit.

I wiped his jizz off my eyelid and looked in the mirror at the queen of her domain, master of her universe.

FIONA

T
he grounds never seemed so huge as when I was looking for my brother and couldn’t find him.

“Warren,” I said, approaching a small group of guys, “have you seen Jonathan?”

He looked me up and down, as if assessing more than a lost sibling. “I think he went past the gate for a smoke. Come on, I need to catch up with him too.”

I followed him past the treeline.

“So,” he said, “I hear you’re getting out today?”

“Yeah, I just have to run upstairs and change. I wanted to catch him before second sessions.”

“He’s around somewhere.” He peeled the chain link back for me.

“Hey,” I said from the other side, “can you kind of look out for him? Make sure he doesn’t lose his temper over stupid shit?”

He slid through. “Sure. He’s all right, that kid.”

“Yeah, he is.” I walked on, scanning for the kid Warren spoke about as if he wasn’t close by. “I don’t see him.” I skirted the edge of the creek. “Maybe he’s back in his room?”

“Jonny?” Warren barked, getting ahead of me. “How’s the Halcion panning out?” he called back to me.

“Great.” I followed him. “Thanks for it.”

“Good.” He put his arm around me. “You know, you owe me for that shit.”

“How much do you need?”

“I have money.” He looked at my lips and down my shirt, flicking his tongue over his top lip.

Shit.
“Warren, I’m not interested in that kind of trade. Can you think of something else?”

“Sure.” He wove his fingers in my hair.

I dropped my arm from his waist and leaned away.

He balled his hand into a fist, grabbing my hair, and pulled me to my knees. “I can think of something else, but it’s not what I
want
, okay?”

“Ow! Warren! Stop!”

He threw me onto the ground, and my cheek slapped onto a layer of wet leaves and rock. I tried to scramble up, but he used my forward motion to get my pants down, sliding them to my calves. I screamed, but it came out as a grunt since the wind was still knocked out of me. He threw his weight on top of me and clamped his hand over my mouth.

“Scream.” He was breathless himself, holding my mouth with one hand and wiggling his dick out with the other. “Maybe your brother will come. He’ll walk away when he sees his whore sister getting it up the ass. Then how’s that release gonna work out? You caught here doing what you do?”

I shook my head. I felt the skin of his cock against my butt cheek. “No,” I said into his hand.

“I don’t hear that. Not from you. You had it in your ass so much in Ojai I can’t believe you ever sat again. I’m moving my hand. You scream, and I’ll tell them you wanted it. Ain’t nothing to me if I have to stay.”

My fingertips gripped the soft earth. My ass was already sweaty from being pressed against him.

“I’m moving my hand,” he said.

I groaned, not agreeing to anything. He slipped it away.

“Please don’t,” I said.

“There’s some shit Daddy can’t pay for.” He put his dick between my ass cheeks. I tried to get away, but he yanked my hair back. “Stay still and take it, you little whore.”

With that, he jammed himself forward, missing my ass. Undaunted, he adjusted and pushed himself inside. My face contorted. Tears fell. My breath went out of me.

“Oh, you’re so fucking tight for a slut.”

“Warren, it hurts. Please. Lube me or something. God, fuck.”

He pulled out and pummeled me again. “I like it dry.”

He hitched my hips up. I was crying as he bore into me.

“I hate you,” I growled through my tears. “I’m going to get you for this, you fuck.” My face was inches from the ground, so close my breath bounced back into my face.

A caterpillar crawled from under a leaf, his body curling around the edge, changing its shape with as his teeth ate it slowly.

“How much Halcion you got in your blood?” He pounded relentlessly, shredding my ass. “That’s mine. I paid for this fuck, little slut. Yeah, take it all the way. You love it in the ass like this. All whores want a dick in their ass. Say it.”

“No!” Fuck him. He wasn’t getting consent. Not for anything. Not for one stroke.

He put his hands around my throat. “Am I not fucking you hard enough?”

He tightened his grip, and the edges of my vision darkened as he beat my asshole with his cock. I only saw, in a pinpoint of light, the little caterpillar eat his way across a leaf. I waited in the center of my pain for that caterpillar to grow his wings and fly away.

ELLIOT

R
ight about lunchtime, I thought about Fiona. I thought about where she was in her day, when she was being released, how she was getting home, where home was, and who was taking her. I thought about her over my sandwich, and pushed it away not because I felt full but too dissatisfied to eat.

Our final good-bye gnawed at me. After I’d told Lee about my eternal night with Jana, as we negotiated the emotional parts of our breakup, I mentioned the almost kiss with Fiona.

“You’re kidding,” she said, her face white.

“Almost, but we didn’t.”

“
We
didn’t? No, no, you do not put it on the patient when you—”

“She’s a grown woman.”

“—clearly crossed a line—”

“Nothing happened.”

“—taking advantage of her—”

“Come on, Lee. She’s gone. It’s over. I’ll never see her again.”

She slammed her hands on the desk. “Do not absolve yourself of responsibility. I am stunned, stunned at what’s gone on.”

“You’re losing your professional countenance.”

“I’m livid for her. The fact that you can sit there and make lame, embarrassing excuses for totally inappropriate behavior sickens me. I know I’m your therapist. I’m supposed to sit here and ask you how you feel about what did or didn’t happen, but I don’t care how you feel.” Her face was beet red, fists clenched, her unborn baby getting cortisol by the quart. “I’m enraged for the entire psychiatric community.”

“Then fuck the psychiatric community entirely.”

I’d walked out in a tight ball of anger, unable to see past opening my car door, getting in it, and turning left out of the lot. Right. Right. Left. Straight. Around the corner to Alondra, where I sat with my sandwich, wondering what Fiona was doing in her last hour before release.

I couldn’t see her. Lee had been right, if unprofessional in her delivery. The therapist and patient had a relationship based on the therapist’s power. By using that power inappropriately, I’d broken a wall that had been erected for a reason. A good reason.

I crunched up my paper wrapping and told myself I wouldn’t see Fiona again. I exited the lunch room to get to the paperwork I needed to finish before I went home to my empty house.

Minutes later, with the paperwork undone on my desk, I got in my car. Naturally I was going home. I was too distracted to fill in little boxes and put together sentences coherent enough for insurance companies and government agencies. As a matter of fact, I thought, as I turned south on the 110 instead of north, I didn’t think I could ever do that work again.

As I went west off the exit, deep into Rancho Palos Verdes with its exclusive horse-and-pony enclaves, lawyers’ mansions, actors’ estates, winding roads around nature preserves, and of course, facilities for the mental health of the very monied, I thought I could do better than that paperwork. So much better.

As long as I kept my hands off the patients.

FIONA

I
 couldn’t cry.

If I cried, I wouldn’t stop. They’d see me and ask me what was wrong, and then everything was a crapshoot.

If I cried and managed to stop, I’d have puffy eyes, and they’d ask me what was wrong. Then I wouldn’t know what came next.

So I didn’t. I put my head down and walked to my room smiling at everyone I knew. I didn’t slow down. I acted as though I had to pee. As though I’d be back in a minute to say good-bye. My ass felt as though I was in the middle of taking a crap, and fuck if I didn’t feel blood dripping down my leg.

But fuck it. Maybe I was rushing because I had my period.

Right?

I got into my room and snapped the bathroom door closed behind me.
Do not motherfucking cry, or you’re not getting out of here.

I had to breathe. Just breathe.

Warren had pulled out of my ass and slapped my butt cheek. He’d said, “Thanks, Fiona,” as if I’d only told him “no” a hundred times to fulfill his little rape fantasy.

“Fuck off, Warren.”

“Aw, come on.” He’d tucked his dick back into his pants. “You’re being a poor sport.”

I’d been kneeling at that point, my pants still around my ankles, and the front of my shirt was covered in leaves and dirt. When I’d looked at him, I thought about what I would do to him when we were both out. I smiled.