Smoke Signals

by Catherine Gayle

  The stigma remained, whether I was actively engaged in that field or if it was well in the past.

  Razor reached for my hand and got to his feet. I took it, slinging the strap of my purse over my shoulder and tucking it tight against my body.

  “It’s all right if I come in with her?” he asked when we reached the nurse.

  She met my eyes. “As long as it’s okay with you?”

  I nodded. Maybe, if he was with me, they wouldn’t pry as much. Maybe they’d treat me as if I were any other woman, not a piece of filth. I doubted it, but allowing myself to hope, even if only for a brief slip of time, calmed me somewhat.

  “Right this way,” she said, waving an arm down a long hallway. She led us into a corner examination room and had me sit on a table that had stirrups on the end. I tried not to panic with the stirrups right there. This was a doctor’s office. They would only use them for an exam. It wouldn’t be like what I’d been through in the porn world. Even though my rational mind knew that if they put me in them, it was only for medical reasons and not to torture me just for the hell of it, there was something inside me that couldn’t get on board with that. My pulse was pounding so hard it was like a lion’s roar in my head. I could barely hear the questions she was asking, let alone figure out how to answer them. Maybe it was for the best that Razor was in here with me, after all.

  “Viktoriya?” the nurse said, and the way she said it made it clear I’d completely missed her most recent question.

  Too lost in my own thoughts. Trapped in my head. I swallowed hard and sent a panicked look in Razor’s direction.

  He took my hand and squeezed before looking at the nurse. “We’re here because Tori’s having pain during intercourse.”

  She flashed her eyes over to me. “What kind of pain?”

  I shrugged and shook my head, unable to find words. No doctor or nurse had ever bothered to ask that before. They’d always just made snarky comments like, “Maybe you should stop letting them use baseball bats inside you,” or, “I’d be uncomfortable, too, if I had a roomful of people watching and cameras capturing everything.” They seemed to think if I would just get out of the business, it would all go away. Like it was my fault.

  But since no one had ever asked, I didn’t know how to answer.

  “Stinging or burning?” she asked. “Or is it more like a cramp? Stabbing, clenching, throbbing? And how bad is it, on a scale of one to ten?”

  I glanced at Razor, and he nodded while rubbing his thumb over the same spot in a soothing manner.

  “Burning?” I paused to think. “Usually burns. And I get too tight, like stretch too much.”

  She scribbled some notes on the chart. “How bad is it?”

  “Different every time. Maybe five. Maybe nine or ten.”

  “How often does it get up to a nine or ten?”

  Almost every time. But I said, “Sometimes.”

  “It’s like her muscles down there are trying to keep me out,” Razor added.

  The nurse kept scribbling, not looking up. “All right. Let’s talk about your sexual history.”

  This was when she would start judging me. This was when everything would change. My chest suddenly felt too small to contain both my heart and my lungs.

  “How old were you when you first had intercourse?”

  “Sixteen? No, fifteen.” Probably too young.

  No reaction, but that wasn’t the question that would cause her to raise her eyebrows. “And how many partners have you had?”

  Now for the shock. Razor kept up smoothing circles over my hand with his thumb.

  “No idea,” I said, my voice thick. “Hundreds. Maybe more.”

  She didn’t look up, just kept jotting down notes. “Unprotected?”

  “No condom usually. I was porn star.”

  She nodded, as if it was something she heard every day. “So you were tested regularly, then? I think that industry insists on monthly testing, right? And you’re on birth control?”

  “I’m clean. Get shots for birth control.”

  “Depo-Provera?”

  “Yes.”

  For several more minutes, she continued asking her questions, never once making me feel as though I were a freak or an idiot for having lived the life I’d lived. The whole time, Razor never released my hand.

  “All right,” the nurse said. She stood up and handed me a paper gown. “I’ll go over all of this with Dr. Rodriguez before she comes in to examine you. She’s going to want to do a full exam, so I need you to undress completely and cover yourself with this. And I’m guessing that even though you’ve had STD testing done recently, she’ll want to do some more blood work just to be sure it’s not something like that at the root of your issues. I’ll leave you for a few minutes and then we’ll be back.” She ducked out of the room and closed the door.

  “Want me to give you a few minutes to change?” Razor asked.

  I shook my head. I didn’t want him to go. I didn’t want to be alone in this cold, sterile room. Not with those stirrups. “Stay,” I said. “Help me tie it.”

  “Okay.”

  I got up and made quick work of stripping off my clothes. Once I had the gown unfolded and in place, I turned so he could secure it in place for me. His fingers fumbled with the strings, but after a moment, he finished and rested his hands on my shoulders.

  “What’s got you so scared?” he asked.

  I shrugged and shook my head.

  “I can feel your heart trying to jump out of your chest, Tori, and you’ve been near panic since we came into this room.”

  I leaned back into him, not wanting to let him see my face. There was no chance I’d ever convince him I wasn’t scared out of my mind if he could look in my eyes. He immediately put his arms around my waist and held me close.

  He pressed a kiss to the top of my head. “Tell me. Let me know so I can help you.”

  “Fear makes no sense.”

  “No one ever said it did. Doesn’t stop us from getting scared.”

  “You’re not scared.”

  He chuckled. “I’m not scared of anything in this room, no. But there are plenty of things I’m scared of.”

  “What?”

  “Motorcycles. Driving over bridges. Clowns. Spiders. Failure. Letting my mom down.”

  “Normal things,” I pointed out. Well, most of them were. Motorcycles? I’d never heard of anyone being afraid of that. Anyway, my fears weren’t normal.

  “Maybe so. Still, for the most part, they’re irrational.” He tightened his grip on me, and somehow that helped slow my pulse. “So what is it?” he asked.

  I shook my head, but I said, “Stirrups.” A shiver raced up my spine even as the word left my lips.

  “Stirrups?” he repeated. I felt his head turn toward the examination table. “Mm-hmm. Well, I’ll be right here with you. I’ll hold your hand through the whole thing.”

  I couldn’t say that his reassurances made me feel all that much better about what was to come, but there wasn’t time for my panic to fully ensnare me. A knock sounded at the door, and the nurse poked her head in.

  “All ready?” she asked.

  “All ready,” Razor repeated.

  She and the doctor came into the room.

  “Okay, Viktoriya,” Dr. Rodriguez said. “Let’s see if we can figure out what’s going on with you, shall we?”

  They instructed me to lie down on the table, inching my ass toward the end of it as they settled my legs into the stirrups. My heart thundered. Only shallow, shaking breaths made their way into my lungs.

  Razor took my hand and held on tight enough I could feel it over the electrical jolts of terror pinging my body.

  I pressed my eyes closed. Only my body. It was only my body, and she was only a doctor, and this was only an exam. The words bounced around in my head, and I tried desperately to cling to them the way I was clinging to Razor.

  No use.

  She widened the angle of the stirrups, and the icy touch of
the speculum met my flesh.

  Breathe. Breathe. In and out. I found a spot on the ceiling and focused all my attention there. Nothing helped.

  My pussy clenched and clamped down, just like it always did, and the sharp sting followed. I blinked back tears of pain and frustration.

  Razor said something in my ear, his deep voice somehow getting through the fog. I couldn’t make out his words, but the sound of his voice helped bring me down. He smoothed my hair and kept talking, and somehow the breaths kept flowing through my lungs—shallow and shaky, yes, but at least there was movement.

  Finally, the doctor removed the speculum, and the pain began to ebb.

  “Get her out of the stirrups,” Razor barked at them.

  “She can—”

  “Just do it. Get her out of them.” He kissed the center of my forehead, just above the bridge of my nose. “It’s okay. It’s over now.”

  It might be over, but it was far from okay.

  Once I was free of the stirrups, they draped a blanket over my legs, and Razor helped me to sit. I expected he would go back to his seat near the exam table, but he didn’t. He squeezed onto the table behind me and ran his hands up and down my arms, allowing me to lean back against him.

  “Well,” Dr. Rodriguez said, looking from me to Razor and back. “It appears you have vaginismus.”

  Still in a daze from what had just happened, I asked. “What is vaginismus?”

  She took off her gloves and tossed them in a bin and then washed her hands. “It’s where your PC muscles—the ones at the opening of your vagina—have an involuntary physical reaction when something attempts entry. In some cases, it’s so severe that nothing can get through. In other cases, like yours, there’s more tightness than there should be, and it’s accompanied by a lot of pain. The good news is it’s treatable, and most women are able to go on to have a normal sex life after treatment. The bad news is there’s no way of knowing how long it might take for you to get to that point, and we might have to try a few different therapies before we find the right one for your situation.”

  “So where do we get started?” Razor asked. He sounded so eager.

  I wasn’t eager. I was dreading whatever it might be, because I was sure it would hurt. Everything that had to do with my pussy hurt, and it had for years now. Whatever she was going to suggest, I didn’t want to do it.

  The doctor smiled. “It’s really nice to see you have such a supportive partner in all of this. That’s going to help, along with a lot of patience on both of your parts.” She sat down across from us and jotted down a few notes on my chart. “All right, I think—based on your past—we need to start with a two-pronged approach. The first is physical therapy. There’s a therapist in town who specializes in these kinds of cases, so I want you to see her.”

  “And other part?” I asked, already trying to come up with excuses to avoid the first piece of her treatment plan. Would I like to be able to have sex pain free again? Of course. But did I believe for even one second that it was possible? No. Not at all.

  “The other part of the plan is that you need counseling. We don’t know exactly what causes vaginismus, but we often find that a traumatic event is involved. Given your past, I think it’s highly likely that you’ve experienced any number of traumas, and quite possibly a number of them have been sexual experiences. I think it’s going to be a necessary part of your treatment plan.”

  I didn’t want to see a counselor. I didn’t want to talk about the things I’d been through. It was difficult enough to tell Razor even the small bits and pieces I’d told him, but to tell a stranger? I didn’t think I could do it.

  “You could try a family counselor,” she said, oblivious to the panic rising within me, “but I think a sex therapist would actually be a better choice. And I think it would be best if you two go together, actually. It’s going to be important for your husband to truly understand everything you’ve been through and all the ways it’s still affecting you. And I’m not just talking about physical stuff. I’ve worked with several sex workers over the years—enough of them to know that no one comes out of that business unscathed.”

  This was just getting worse. “I don’t want counseling,” I insisted. “No therapy. None of it. I don’t need—”

  “No one’s going to make you do any of it,” Dr. Rodriguez cut in. “But if you want to be able to have a normal sex life, you’re going to have to do something. This isn’t likely to clear up on its own. Some women live with it for decades without realizing they can get help.”

  This wasn’t a kind of help I could handle, though. I shook my head. “No therapy.”

  She gave me a sad look before glancing over at Razor. “All right. I’ll go ahead and write down the information for those services in case you change your mind.”

  “Yes, thanks,” he said.

  He still wanted me to go through with it. He didn’t get it, and I had no idea how to help him with that. We were from two entirely different worlds, and I doubted we would ever truly understand each other.

  A FEW WEEKS passed, and I still couldn’t convince Tori to go through with the therapies Dr. Rodriguez had recommended. She’d been going to the studio for some ballet classes, and I’d been working out with Hunter and Dima to get ready for the season, but otherwise nothing had changed. She was still trying to convince me that her pain didn’t matter and I should fuck her in spite of it, and I was still bound and determined that I couldn’t do any such thing.

  The one improvement, at least in my opinion, was that Tori had stopped attempting to get things started while I was sleeping. She’d taken to trying to jump me while we were both fully awake, instead.

  I didn’t mind that she was throwing herself into it wholeheartedly. In fact, she’d started doing it while Hunter, Tallie, and Dima were around us sometimes, so that was only going to aid our cause in terms of convincing whoever needed to be convinced that we were in this for more than just a green card. The problem was that I was horny as hell all the time, now, and couldn’t do anything about it. I didn’t care how okay she told me it was—I would not be the one to cause her physical pain.

  It was the middle of August now, and a few of the guys with school-aged kids were starting to show up and get settled. School would be starting next week. With them in town, it meant there were a few more showing up at the gym…and getting on the ice with us. So far, we weren’t skating too hard. Mainly we just wanted to get our skating legs back, which was never easy after a summer off the ice. Ours had been a long summer, too, since we’d finished last season in the basement of the league and hadn’t even had a whiff at the play-offs.

  Anyway, now we’d added a couple guys to the mix. Jason Stewart, better known as Stewie, and his wife had three kids in elementary school. Mike Oslow’s oldest daughter was starting kindergarten this year. Ox was a guy I knew from my rookie season with the Storm, but he was new to the Thunderbirds this season.

  Andrew Nash showed up a lot earlier than the rest of the guys, too, even though he didn’t have any kids in school or any other solid reason to be in Tulsa in August…only he came without his wife. “The divorce just went through last week,” he explained. “Didn’t want to stick around Oshawa right now.” Drew was one of the team’s alternate captains. He’d been distracted as hell through all of last season, though. I supposed going through a divorce was a good reason to be distracted.

  “You never said a word all of last season,” I pointed out over a meal. “Had no fucking clue your marriage was on the rocks.”

  He shrugged it off, like it was no big deal. That was how things tended to go with the T-Birds. Everyone minded his own business. We had meals together and other things like that, but generally we all kept to ourselves. I was probably closer to Hunter and the team captain, Eric “Zee” Zellinger, than I was to any of the other guys, and that was only because we’d all played together in Portland for a while, and that team had always been more like a family. Everyone was all up in everybody else�
��s business. Constantly. A guy could hardly take a dump without someone else coming along to critique it. It was ridiculous…but I also kind of missed it.

  With all of them joining us, things were starting to feel more like they would once the season got underway. Regular workouts. Ice time every day. Meals together afterward. We were getting into a routine. As much as we might complain about the grind, there was no denying that we all liked having everything we needed to do laid out for us.

  After those three had been around for a few days, Dima came over to me as we were cleaning up in the locker room.

  “Can I come to your house? Is Viktoriya home?”

  He never asked to hang out. Not with anyone. Sometimes last season, he’d gone out with a couple of the other Russian players to do things, but otherwise we’d had to drag him along with us. Dima was not a joiner by nature.

  He had news about Tori’s mother. There wasn’t any other explanation.

  “What did you find out?” I needed to know before he told her. I needed to prepare myself for her reaction, at least as well as I could.

  He shook his head. “It’s bad.”

  “Bad as in she’s being mistreated somewhere? Or bad, as in she’s dead?”

  “Uncle says she’s dead. Killed over a year ago.”

  I nodded, keeping myself calm and cool on the outside, even though inside my heart was breaking for her. Tori was damaged enough already. This news was liable to shatter what remained.

  “Do I want to know how it happened?”

  He shook his head. “Better to not know. Better dead than living through what she did.”

  I’d been afraid of that.

  The other guys were all heading out to have lunch at a nearby sub and salad place. We explained that we had something else that needed to be done and left them to it.

  When we got to my house, Tori was already wearing her leotard for her dance class that afternoon, with a pair of yoga pants pulled on over it. She’d gotten up from the sofa when she heard me come through the door, but as soon as she saw that Dima was with me—and only Dima, not several of the other guys, as well—she collapsed back onto it. Like she knew he’d brought bad news.