by CD Reiss
“I’m hitting the bar, can I get you something?”
“I’m good, thanks.” I patted his shoulder and headed for her, crossing half a ballroom without acknowledging another soul.
The Thing got more vocal, hiding in the voices of the guests and the strings of the musicians’ instruments.
I could smell her from farther away than normal. Apples. No matter which perfume she wore, she smelled of the first bite of an apple, breaking taut skin with teeth, juice dripping down my chin. She was the satin skin and the crisp meat of the fruit. She was the hard seed and the tenacious stem.
I found her.
Ronin.
Laughing.
Arm around her shoulders.
He’d touched her. He’d had her. He’d licked the apples off her skin and touched her body. He wanted her again. Of course he did. She was beautiful and sexy. Any man would want her. I was filled with an unreasonable fury. A foul grimace in my soul. A call to action lubricated by rage.
I headed for them, bumping into a woman from pediatrics. I excused myself, and when I turned back, Ronin was gone.
In the seven steps to my wife, I came to some sort of sense.
Ronin was not a threat.
On the flip side, I was losing my fucking mind.
Kissing Jenn first was a delay tactic. I needed a moment to reduce my pulse rate. It didn’t work. When I kissed Greysen’s cheek and she slipped her hand in mine, the animal threatened to burst out of his suit.
I always desired her. Every minute. But this?
I wanted to drag her out by her hair, respecting the norms of privacy only because I wouldn’t be able to finish in the middle of the ballroom. I wanted to squeeze her flesh, mark her in bruises, leave streaks of semen on her. Make the Thing scream in horror and curl up in a ball far away.
I couldn’t live like this anymore.
But I was in a public place.
The suit was who I needed to be.
The suit was armor against the horrifying sight of the animal.
I didn’t look at her. Didn’t touch her. I focused on the distance between us and the eyes of a hundred people. I listened to Bob Abramson talk about money and bullshit, concentrating hard enough to make a decent show of being civilized.
In the dark, during the fundraising video, she leaned into me, taking my hand. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing.”
“Caden.” My name was more than a statement. It was a comment on how well she knew the animal, and how well she loved it.
If eyes could listen, hers did, gazing at me in the darkness. I couldn’t lie to her for much longer.
The entire invite list was watching the video. The bar was empty. The hallway lights were dimmed. The kitchen staff moved constantly and quietly to set up the buffet.
I laced my fingers in hers. She had a gold band we’d gotten out of expediency. No big sparkling rock. No sign I’d ever courted her properly before marrying her.
My father always said a man didn’t skip steps if he wanted to do something once.
I slid my cheek to hers and whispered in her ear, “I want to destroy you.”
Her hand tightened in mine so tightly I could feel our bones. Her glands must have fired, because the apples and the perfume melded and became something so uniquely her my balls ached—but not for simple release. For something more. An agreement of ownership.
Waiting wasn’t an option.
Pulling her by the hand, I headed for the hallway.
“Caden,” she said when we were away from the event, “slow down.”
I didn’t. I couldn’t. I pulled her down the carpeted steps to the lower level, stepping over a velvet rope at the bottom. The lights were out in the hall. Three doors led to three empty event rooms.
“What’s with you lately?” she asked.
“Are you saying no?”
“I’m asking a question.”
I backed into one of the rooms and pulled her in. It was dark but for light coming from under the doorways on each side. The Thing cowered in the shadows, emitting fear like a pheromone. Good. I walked in deeper, eyes adjusting quickly enough to avoid the tables and stacks of chairs on wheeled dollies.
“So am I.” I faced her. “Are you saying no?”
“What are you hoping I’ll say yes to?”
“I’m going to bend you over one of these tables and fuck you so hard walking’s going to hurt. Are you saying no?”
“I’m not. But I want to know what’s going on with you.”
“Pull your dress up before I shred it.”
Scaring her wasn’t my plan, but there was fear in the air. I had no choice but to breathe it in.
The fear didn’t come from her. As she pulled her dress over her waist to show me her thong and the lace edges of her stockings, she bit her lower lip. The fear I detected was in the shadows.
I stepped behind her.
The Thing was going to watch me.
I pushed my hand up between the fabric and her skin, taking a nipple. I twisted it. Pulled. She leaned into it.
“Does it hurt?”
“Yes.”
“I should stop?”
“No.”
I pushed her into a table, bending her sharply. When she tried to get up on her hands, I shoved her down by the base of her neck. Her earring fell over her jaw and clicked against the table.
I forgot about the Thing. Forgot about how much it wanted her. There was only Greysen and me in a dark room with our suddenly elastic boundaries.
I leaned down and bit her trapezius as it tightened. Right at the base of her neck, clamping down until she jerked, and I growled in my throat, holding her still.
The whirlwind gathered and the Thing wept.
I claimed her inside and out, and the whirlwind stopped.
Chapter Seven
Greysen
I ached when I woke. From the bottom up: My feet from the shoes. My trapezius muscle from a bruising bite.
I bent over the bathroom vanity and ran my fingers over the bite bruise. It wasn’t too bad. The skin was a shade redder. It looked like a mild hickey. My eyes were ringed in black. I hadn’t bothered to take off my makeup. We’d had sex twice again at home, if you could call it sex. More like he took my body and made it his own, giving orgasms and taking them as if they were a marital right. I’d collapsed into unconsciousness.
I wiped the bluish-gray mascara stains from my face.
My body wasn’t a marital right, of course. My body was my own, and I could refuse him at any time. Caden knew that. He must have, because even after we got home, he checked on me.
Twice, the mask of determination snapped off, leaving a man who looked disconcerted.
Twice, he asked me if I wanted to slow down or stop.
Once, I said I was fine. Once, I begged him not to stop.
Both times, his brutality returned like a Halloween mask on an elastic string.
I should have made him stop, but I couldn’t.
Why?
Was I threatened? Did I believe he’d hurt me worse if I did? Would he?
No.
“No,” I said into the mirror. “He wouldn’t.”
How did I know? Was it the orgasms he gave me? He’d acted as if my pleasure gave him power. Every orgasm drove him to greater intensity, and each increase in passion drove me deeper into a sexual fugue.
I trusted him. One, he was a doctor, and a great one. It didn’t get any safer than that. Two, he wanted me to want what he did. The checking in told me that much. He wanted consent. Needed it as much as I did, but I didn’t think… no, I was sure he hadn’t planned the last two rough encounters, so he couldn’t have asked ahead of time. He was getting the idea to hurt me in the moment.
The pain.
Next time, I should stop him when it hurt. When he bit me. When it was uncomfortable.
I should, but I wouldn’t. Morning Greysen, with her mascara running down her face and a bite mark on her neck, knew it wasn’t oka
y to cause your partner pain or discomfort during sex. Dr. Greysen Frazier knew it was okay as long as it was coupled with consent and clear boundaries.
She knew it had a name.
I tossed the mascara-streaked wipe into the trash and went downstairs before I could say the name to myself.
* * *
Caden was at the stove, making breakfast. My favorite.
“Pancakes!” I fist pumped quietly. “Pow.”
I kissed him and he looked down at me, mask gone. Just my husband. He moved the spatula to the other hand and squeezed my shoulders while he flipped the cakes.
“I have nothing today,” he said. “What about you?”
“Session in the morning and that’s it. I was going to go work out. Maybe. I don’t know. It’s still kind of weird, all this time to myself.”
He laced his fingers in mine, nudging the disks around pensively. “You said a big rock didn’t go with army green. What you wore last night would have been stunning with a ring.”
Pulling his arm off my shoulder, I put my left hand next to his. “We match. That works for me.”
He shut off the stove and jerked the pan until the cakes slid. “Do you miss the service?”
He deserved my honesty, but there was more to the question than a simple lament for a job I didn’t have anymore. He was the reason I’d left five weeks before instead of forty years from now.
But I couldn’t lie to him or myself. “Sometimes.”
He shifted the pan back and forth on the burner so the pancakes would skate around.
He picked up the plate and looked right at me for the first time that morning. His gaze landed on the bite mark. Reflexively, I covered it. He put the plate down and moved my hand away.
“Broken blood vessels,” he said. “You have some abrading to the skin.”
“It’s fine.”
“Does it hurt?”
“Only when you touch it, so don’t.” I picked up the plate. “I’m starving.”
I kissed him and went to the table. He’d set it with silverware and glasses, and as I draped the cloth napkin on my lap, I took a second to acknowledge that he didn’t usually set up an elaborate breakfast. He cooked for me as often as I cooked for him, but this was a step beyond.
As if he was trying to get back into my good graces.
For the pain. For the roughness. For the use of my body.
There’s a name for this.
We made love that afternoon.
And by “made love,” I mean we fucked passionately and considerately. We used our mouths for pleasure. He eased into me with grace, touched me where I liked to be touched, made sure I came long and hard before he did.
The bite mark was gone the next day, and though I didn’t forget about the self-doubt it had revealed, I didn’t think about it much because I didn’t want to.
Two weeks passed.
I picked up two more clients from Ronin, which pretty much filled my schedule. I seemed to have a gift for counseling and medicating PTSD. Go figure. My military life was of use, and as that became apparent, I missed it less and less.
One night, as I was coming out of the bathroom, I caught Caden looking into an empty corner. I say “caught” because when he heard me, he jumped as if he was doing something wrong, then he passed me to go into the bathroom without saying a word or touching me.
He usually found some way to touch me.
The last lack of affection had ended at the fundraiser where he’d fucked me on a banquet hall table. Brutal sex after days of growing emotional distance. And boom, fixed the next morning as if nothing had happened.
Was he having an affair?
I felt every pulse of blood through my veins, hot with sparking electricity at the thought of his body touching another woman’s.
I breathed through it, telling myself nice things about trust and the basic goodness inside my husband. It worked to clear the room of the noise, but the hum of possibility remained in the corners, cowed but not killed.
* * *
I didn’t have time to see Jenn’s show. Not really. I had an emergency session with a new patient who hadn’t slept in a week. His wife had called me in desperation. He was having aural hallucinations and she couldn’t tell if it was the exhaustion or the PTSD.
I met him, wrote him a script, and didn’t have a place in my schedule to see him until he started crying. A grown man. A soldier. Six feet tall and two hundred pounds of muscle, weeping in my office.
And I got upset when my husband was a little distant.
I handed the patient a tissue. He cracked his neck and got on with it. Maybe I needed to relax on Caden a little.
Deciding I didn’t need lunch on Wednesdays, I fit him into my schedule. Then I got a cab to 57th Street while it was still daylight.
“Here!” The driver pulled over in front of the Kadousian Gallery.
From the street, I saw Jenn, in baggy overalls and Vans, animatedly talking to people I couldn’t discern past the glass’s reflection. Rows of painted masks hung on the walls.
Jenn saw me and opened the glass door. “Hey!”
We hugged, and she introduced me to her guests. Tina Molino of Mt. Sinai’s Psychiatric Division, and Dylan Coda from the VA Hospital in Newark.
“I’m sorry I’m late. I had an emergency.”
“I was just telling Tina she works in the same hospital as your husband.”
Tina was almost six feet tall with a black bob, white skin, and red lipstick. She looked like Snow White. “I was hoping to meet you at the fundraiser. Caden St. John is quite a star around the doctors’ lounge.”
“Careful. His ego can get to the size of a blimp.”
“You trained him well.”
“War makes men humble.”
“Nice segue.” Jenn held her hand out to the rows of masks and began the tour. “All of these were made by vets as part of the NEA’s Creative Forces program.”
* * *
I was halfway down the block when I heard a woman’s voice calling my name.
Tina scurried toward me. “Hey, I wanted to talk to you. Do you have a minute?”
I looked at my watch. “I have about eleven if there’s no traffic uptown.”
“It’s enough.”
We went into the little coffee shop wedged between a FedEx and an office building. We had our coffee in ninety seconds and seats on the window ledge in five more.
“Okay. Jenn told me you’re an officer and an MD specializing in PTSD in vets.”
“Kind of fell into it. But yeah.”
“Do you like it? I’m trying to hurry so I don’t keep you.”
“Do I have to answer quickly?”
“Take your time.” She sipped her coffee, leaving red lipmarks on the plastic top.
“I’m from a military family. I enlisted at eighteen.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah. It was the only life I knew. Then I met Caden, and he wanted to go into private practice. So I left the army and came here with him. I thought I’d never feel right as a civilian, and New York… my God, there’s no place in the world more overwhelming.”
“That’s the truth.”
We tapped our coffee cups together.
“Helping these men and women… they’re broken, but working with them makes me feel like I’m home. I love it.”
“That’s…” She shook her head in appreciation. “I’m glad to hear that. We’re tackling a mental health unit to serve the military and—here’s the newish thing—civilian contractors. Anyone who’s worked in war. We’re financed by Darren Gibson, and I think I may have an opportunity for you.”
Chapter Eight
Caden
Greysen spit toothpaste into the sink. When she ran the faucet, the Thing spoke inside the gurgling water. When she took the water in her mouth and her lips tightened and moved when she swished, my inner cold ran boiling hot.
She spit the water, and the Thing dispersed into the air vents, the fogged mirror, the space
between my feet and the floor. It snaked around my wife’s voice when she spoke. “She wants to talk to me about creating a treatment protocol for PTSD in vets. Then she’s thinking of maybe expanding it to the general population. Kids and adults dealing with trauma.”
She shook excess water off the brush and popped it into the cup. I didn’t know how much longer I could last.
She was wearing a big T-shirt and underpants. Her feet were bare. Her nipples were hard. She was talking about Tina’s offer to design programs at the Gibson Center, which wasn’t really an offer but more of a suggestion to talk more. She was overwhelmed. She hadn’t been in professional life very long.
“When I was promoted before, it was all forms and steps,” she said. “Now it’s fuzzier, you know?”
Sure. I knew.
“I thought you had a full schedule.”
“I’m thinking I can squeeze it in.”
There were reasons she shouldn’t. She’d push herself to exhaustion. No one was here to give her limits. There was no ceiling or walls on what she could accept. This wasn’t the army.
She crawled onto the bed and flopped into a sitting position with her back against the headboard.
The reasons she shouldn’t do too much were easily explainable, but if I explained them, she’d fight me. I didn’t want to fight. I didn’t want to get angry, or I’d lose it again and hurt her. I didn’t want to feel anything. I wanted this deadness, needed it to dampen the fear and anger.
“What do you think?” she asked.
“Did she tell you the salary?”
“No, I mean about…” She spread her legs.
I’d made love to her two nights ago and had barely kept myself from hurting her. I’d had to keep my hands on the bed and let her ride me. The Thing had been watching. If I touched her now, I would tear her apart to get rid of it.
I ran my hand inside her thigh and stopped.
The sense I wasn’t alone was worse when I touched her.
“What?” She pouted.
“Touch yourself.”
She bit her lower lip and slid her fingers under the crotch of her underwear.