K. Bromberg - Bend

I held out my hand. “Don’t need it.”

He shook two into my palm. I kept my hand out then spread my fingers wider. He shook out two more. I kept my hand out.

“That’s plenty,” he said.

I threw them to the back of my throat and swallowed. One caught on the back of my tongue, releasing a wave of sour and bitter, but I took it all.

“Would you like to sit?” He put the bottle back and slid the drawer closed.

“Is that a question? About what I like?”

“It’s a suggestion phrased as a question.”

A padded leather chair in soft green and worn dark wood sat to my left. I touched the brass studs that kept the leather attached and sat down. Doctor Chapman sat behind the desk, settling his right elbow on the arm of the chair. I didn’t know if I was supposed to start with questions about what had happened or why I was there. I didn’t know if I should rattle off a list of what I remembered and didn’t, or ask just how much trouble I was in, or when Deacon was coming to get me out.

But he saved me the trouble. “Can you tell me the last thing you remember?”

I stiffened. My mouth locked up. I couldn’t tell him. “When can I leave?”

“Do you think you should leave?”

“Do you think I should leave?”

“It’s more important to know what you think,” he said.

“It’s more important for you to know what I think, and it’s more important for me to know what you think. So you first.”

He rubbed his upper lip with his middle finger, an odd gesture, then dropped his hand. “You’re here for your own protection, at the great expense and effort of your family. I have seventy-two hours to report on whether or not you’re a danger to yourself or others.”

“How am I a danger?”

“You don’t remember?”

“You know I don’t.”

He put his elbows on the desk and looked right into my eyes. I wanted to know what he saw, other than what everyone saw—a party girl with a permanent smile and spread legs. A balls-to-the-wall princess with an entourage and two wrecked Bentleys in the garage. But more than that, I wanted to know how old he was. He looked so young and so wise at the same time.

“If I tell you why you’re here,” he said with that gentle voice, “I want to warn you, that you’ve probably blocked it because it’s painful to you.”

“Okay.” I didn’t believe him, but I let him think I’d blocked it. The reason I didn’t know was because I’d been drunk or high. Whatever sweet chemicals I’d taken had kept my neurons from connecting.

It must have been bad, and I could never feel guilty about it because I didn’t remember it. I’d had a drunk driving accident. I’d given someone bad pills. I’d been gang-fucked and dumped in an alley. I’d killed some random paparazzi. One of the entourage had turned on me. All the things Mom had listed as a fear and Dad had implied with his look.

“You’re making me nervous,” I whispered even though my headache abated.

“Do you know Deacon Bruce?”

I heard his last name so infrequently, sometimes I forgot he even had one. “Yes.”

“Do you remember what he is to you?”

“Yes.” I refused to clarify further. He was my safety. My control. The hub on the wheel of my life. Without him, the spokes didn’t meet.

And he was coming for me. All I had to do was stall.

“It would help if you told me the last thing you remember.”

“I don’t remember anything.”

“Do you remember going to the Branwyn Stables yesterday?”

“I haven’t been to the stables in years.” As if the back of my face had a surface all its own, it tingled. A corset tightened around my chest. I was going to cry, and I had no idea why. “I need you to just tell me, Doctor.”

“Call me Elliot.”

“Fucking tell me right now!”

“Can you stay calm?”

I swallowed a golf ball of cry gunk. “Yes. I’m fine. Yes.”

Seconds passed. He watched me as if casually observing a churning barrel of worry.

“I’m fine,” I said. “You can tell me. I’ll be cool.”

“We don’t know what happened exactly. There are details missing. Mister Bruce isn’t well enough to be interviewed.”

I tried to hold myself together, but my fingers gripped the edge of the chair. He saw my knuckles turn white. I knew it, but I had nowhere else for the tension to go.

“Go on,” I said.

“There are some things that are known for sure, and some questions. If you remember any portion of what I’m telling you, please stop me.”

“Is Deacon okay?”

He cleared his throat and looked away before turning back to me. I realized he didn’t want to tell me at all, and that barrel of worry filled up with panic.

“You stabbed him in the chest.”

I woke up strapped to the bed with a brain full of fog. Then they took me to a room with a balding doctor and a nurse whose face I couldn’t make out through my drug-induced lethargy.

The doctor clucked and groaned as he read things off to the nurse. I could barely sort through what he was saying, and I could barely remember what had happened a few hours ago. Had I attacked someone? The therapist? I’d apologize. He seemed nice. I hoped I didn’t hurt him. What had he said to make me freak out? Something about something I did. The reason I was here.

I was in incredible physical shape—I knew that because suspending a woman from the ceiling in rough hemp ropes took hours of work, days of practice, and stamina and strength from both parties. And Deacon, Master Deacon, did not fuck around. I had to get off the flake, reduce the alcohol, and sleep eight hours a day, even if they were when the sun was out. He’d had to watch me sometimes to make sure I ate right, stretched, and stayed off substances, but it was worth it.

Except I was here.

Had Deacon been away?

If he’d been around, I wouldn’t have done whatever it was I’d done to land in Westonwood. He’d come and…something. Something was wrong. Something about Deacon. I couldn’t find the specifics, but it was something huge and upsetting. My heart beat faster when I tried to think of it. I got impatient with the nurse as she moved my wrist and said a bunch of gibberish as if I wasn’t there. She was keeping me from thinking the things I needed to think. Facts lay a layer under the sand, and I was trying to dig them up, but the bitch kept taking my shovel.

The doctor looked at my teeth and poked a molar. A shot of pain cut through me, and I pushed him away so hard he crashed into a tray of torture devices.

Fucking meds. I was going to have to detox again. Once I was curled up in my bed again, I would get the itchy skin, the broken lethargy, the attacks of consciousness that cut into my thoughtless reflections on my sensory space. I’d spent a lot of time trying to get away from my thoughts. Most of my days, actually. I had it down to a science. I never thought about a damn thing.

Or more accurately, I thought plenty and drowned it however I could. When the therapist had told me I’d done something so terrible, such an anathema to me, and I didn’t have a substance or an orgasm to drape over the news, I did things without thinking. My determination to be good had gone out the window, and I’d lunged for that lying doctor. I remembered being hauled away screaming, strapped down, and I remembered the injection.

It wasn’t until I woke up secured to the bed in a mental ward that I knew what it was like to be distanced from my brain. I could separate the drug thoughts from the real-me thoughts. The drug thoughts were blank and foggy, and the real-me thoughts were black holes where information should have been. Things floated by as if someone was changing the station from a comedy to a thriller to a terror fest to colored bars that went eeeeeeee.

I’d stabbed Deacon.

No, it was a lie.

You know it’s true.

Not.

Yes.

Not.

You did it.

Never.

I turned my head. Nothing in that room could upset me, because the space was absent of stimuli. The room was still grey, still bathed in light, and in the corner, a silver disk got lost in the vents and alarms dotting the ceiling.

A camera.

If I screamed—and I believed I could—they’d know, and they’d come for me. Or not. I wasn’t ready to find out.

I’d been strapped to beds for long periods of time, usually with my legs spread farther than they were now, often with my knees bent. When I was left in that position, it was so I couldn’t press my legs closed and give myself an orgasm. By the time Deacon came in, I was wet with anticipation and ready for anything he dished out.

In the hospital, my ankles and wrists were bound so I couldn’t hurt myself. I was wet all over again. I tried to close my legs and couldn’t. And no one was coming to slap or fuck me. Not even one of Deacon’s friends. Not even Debbie. I wasn’t strapped down so I could stew in my own lust. I was strapped down because after Elliot had told me I’d stabbed Deacon, my mind had gone white hot.

Fuck.

Even as I got angry at myself over this forgotten thing, I felt the bloat of arousal.

You’re swelled, kitten.

Swelled didn’t mean horny. That was easy enough. Swelled meant I needed it. Sex. Hot and dirty fucking. Masturbating couldn’t stop a swell. Rubbing my cunt on the pillow, vibrators, dildos, eggs, none of them chased away a swell. Only penetration, anywhere, by a warm-blooded man, took care of it. Until that happened, I couldn’t function.

It had never been a problem. I took what I wanted, made no commitments, found willing participants wherever, whenever I needed it. I was on three forms of birth control, for fuck’s sake. I got tested weekly. I wrapped it up. Past that, my first priority to a swell was getting rid of it, and I was mindless in my pursuit. For Deacon, it became a challenge—to know when I would need it, predict it, and put me in a position where he could withhold penetration. He created the unique torture of being tied in knots, naked, cunt out, ready as he tugged the rope and I begged him to take me.