Until now. Until Edward.
Just as suddenly, the urge went away. I took a sip of wine. “Yes, I did think of things I could tell you. Some of them even true.” I smirked at him like a smartass because I couldn’t help myself, but I quickly dropped the expression because it wasn’t who I wanted to be all the time anymore. Not with him.
“I thought of things,” I said, honestly, “but I didn’t prepare them because I figured there was zero chance in hell that your next session would ask the same thing of me precisely because I had three months. You’ve always preferred to keep me on my toes. Edward.”
My breath shuddered through me as I waited for him to respond. Sincerity was foreign to me, and I didn’t know how to wear it. It felt as unusual on my tongue as the cotton panties felt against my skin. Both should have been more comfortable than they were. I wondered if either would ever feel natural.
“It seems I’ve kept you on your toes once again, then, doesn’t it?” His tone was authoritative but not malicious. His own brand of sincerity. “Unprepared is exactly as I prefer, but I’m also glad that you’ve let yourself think about things you could talk about. I’m sure the right account will present itself now.”
I already knew which one it was. There was only one that I was even close to being ready to discuss, and it was going to be a bitch to tell. I’d even tried to explore it in my diary, but couldn’t get myself to recount the details—the parts that mattered. But I’d wanted to. For the first time ever, I’d wanted to. And I wanted to now.
God, this was exactly like therapy, wasn’t it? I supposed it was beyond time.
I pulled my knees up and bent them to the side underneath me as I searched for where to start. “After…” I paused, wondering if it was best to stay far away from the story I’d told last time since he hadn’t approved of the ending, but there was no way around it. That ending was this beginning in every way, shape, and form.
I looked Edward directly in the eye. “Okay, it was a shitty thing I did—sleeping with the guy’s dad. It was vengeful and disgusting, and I knew it, even as it was happening. It wasn’t comfortable or even fun. It definitely didn’t make me feel sexy or wanted or like I’d won anything, but I’m not going to expand on that or try to make myself a victim with that part—even though, let’s be real here, the guy had been around me my whole life. I’d been friends with his kids. I should have been like a daughter to him, and when I showed up at his door, it did not take one tiny bit of convincing for him to try to get in my pants.” In fact, Jack probably even thought he’d been the one who seduced me. “Which is kind of disgusting all on its own level and somewhat predatory, but my point is, I was culpable, and I was of age, so it was what it was.”
“Just because you put yourself in the situation doesn’t mean that you have to carry all the blame. It certainly doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be allowed to have feelings about it.”
His words surprised me so much that it had to be written on my face.
Edward dropped his arm from the couch and leaned forward, and I knew it was a cue to listen, to really listen to what followed. “Last time, I didn’t approve because you told me this only to boast,” he explained. “You wanted to shock me. You acted proud, and we both knew that wasn’t honest. This is honest. This is what I want you to talk about.”
Who was this guy?
I stared at him incredulously. “But you think that fucking him made me a slut, right?”
His cheek ticked at the word slut. “It doesn’t matter what I think. It matters what you think.”
Classic. Turn it back on me.
“Did you really want to be a psychologist instead of a businessman?”
“No.”
“Could have fooled me.” Not for the first time I wondered what he was getting out of all of this. He wanted to break me, sure, but that was as much a part of his rivalry with my father as it was about me, and he’d suggested he liked to do this with other women too. Did it turn him on to watch women examine their wounds? Because he liked being a sort of hero to them? Or because he wanted to use their pain against them later?
There was a possibility it was both.
It made it hard to want to continue on. What if I bared my soul to him, and all he did was hurt me with whatever he learned? I could feel iron walls threatening to close around everything inside of me, pushing him out.
The thing was, I already expected him to use my pain to hurt me. To break me. He’d not only told me he would, but he'd also admitted to being sadistic. And he’d wanted to kill me. This wasn’t supposed to be an easy alternative—it was supposed to be terrible.
I expected it, and I’d accepted it. And maybe I was a bit of a masochist, because I wasn’t completely opposed to taking the ride.
So, here I was, buckling in, preparing for the roller coaster.
“Well, I did think it made me a slut. I felt dirty and...used...and...stupid.” I’d never articulated the words, and they came slowly as I began to understand the blob of feelings that had painted this time in my life. I had a sudden flash of me on my knees, taking Jack’s cock in my mouth while he spouted on about my lips and my eyes and my breasts. “Cheap. I felt cheap. But also like I deserved it because I’d done it to myself.”
I shook my head, throwing the memories of the night with Jack out of my head. “I carried all of that with me when I went back to Berkeley. Dirk was there, wanting to talk, maybe even get back together, and that just made me feel worse so I—”
“Why?” Edward interrupted.
“Why did it make me feel worse?” It was another blob I had to examine. This one was particularly hard to look at. “Because I didn’t deserve that. I’d dumped him. Over the phone. For no reason other than that I thought my old crush liked me. And then, instead of trying to repair my relationship with him, I went and fucked an old guy. He’d been nothing but decent to me. Decent and kind. The first guy who ever had, really. When I was with him, he’d made me think that maybe I was better than the way other people before him had made me feel, and then one summer away from him, I proved that I was exactly what I’d always been told I was—only worth the value of my body.”
“That wasn’t what the summer proved.” He let that sit in the air for a minute. “I’m curious to know why men before him led you to feel that way, though.”
“I’m sure you are, but that’s not what I’m talking about right now, Edward.” It came out more defensive than needed, but he didn’t call me out.
I thought about the other thing he’d said. “I guess the summer hadn’t proved that. It had been one night, but the baggage from that felt heavy, and I hated it so much—hated myself so much—that I couldn’t even look in the mirror anymore. I certainly couldn’t put that on someone else, someone good. So I avoided him, and threw myself into things that made the self-loathing more tolerable. Random hookups. Drugs. I did a lot of coke. Some ecstasy. I drank. A shit load. I was smashed all the time that semester. I don’t even know how I passed any of my midterms.”
Actually, I did know how I’d passed some of them. I’d paid a girl to write my papers for western civ and I’d let my economics teacher masturbate on my breasts. Thinking about it now made me feel nauseated.