by CD Reiss
I said it, I meant it, things happened as predicted. That was what it was to have Deacon in my life.
“Hey, someone here?” Karen was behind me, toting her IV tower. The sun blasting through the windows made her look hollow.
I wanted to hold her down and force-feed her a cupcake. “Deacon.”
She stood next to me and peered out the window. We’d heard much about each other’s lives in the past weeks. I’d even have called her a friend at that point.
She leaned over beside me. “I can get you Halcion.”
“How?” I whispered back.
“Warren’s out for his sister’s wedding. He’s getting me something. I can put in an order for you.”
I looked at her skull of a face, blue eyes bulging without flesh to hold them in. She’d been so pretty when I met her.
“What is he getting you?” I asked.
“Something I need and they won’t give me.”
“Please tell me it’s not uppers.”
“I have a mother already.”
I dropped my voice to barely a whisper. “You don’t need diet pills, Karen.”
“Do you want the Halcion or not?”
Deacon gave the valet his keys and headed for the door. He buttoned his jacket and walked in that way only Deacon could, a mix of fierce intention and poise, a stew of dignity and ruthlessness.
“He’s beautiful,” she whispered.
“A thoroughbred.”
As if his inner GPS had a little red dot homed in on my location, he looked up at me as he crossed the drive. I put my finger to the glass. He smiled and held up a finger, pressing it against an imaginary glass pane between us. He got closer to the building, and when I could only see the top of his head, he disappeared from sight.
I hadn’t realized how anxious I’d been until I couldn’t see him. Like the hum of a car engine that didn’t bother you until it was gone, the thrum of my heart stopped and the pain disappeared. Karen put her arm around me because I’d put my hand to my mouth to hold back the tears.
“It’s okay,” she said, not even knowing why I was emotional.
“He’s not mad,” I said. “He still loves me, and he’s not mad.”
I would have said that nothing could disrupt his love for me. Not even a hoof knife twice in the chest. But seeing him smile and put up that finger, I realized I’d been crushed with worry. When that worry disappeared, the space it occupied was filled with joy. I hugged Karen, rattling her tubes, and she gave me a rare laugh.
“I’m just…” I started but couldn’t finish. “I can actually breathe without pain. I have to get used to it.” I threw myself onto the light grey couch.
Karen sat next to me carefully, so as not to disrupt her IV. “You’re relieved.”
“Yeah. I feel like everything’s under control again.”
“He did that with a look?”
“That’s us.”
“Maybe you’ll sleep now.”
“No. Just have Warren get the pills. I’ll pay him when I get out.”
Karen waved the idea away. “He doesn’t want money. He has plenty. He’ll ask for a favor or something. He just wants friends. He’s lonely.”
“Okay.” I craned my neck to watch the valet drive Deacon’s car into the lot.
“Aren’t you going to run down and see him?” asked Karen.
“Elliot wanted to meet with him first. I guess to make sure he won’t upset me. Which, I mean, I know he won’t now. So they’ll schedule a visiting time and, oh God, this is so great.”
I leaned back on the couch, and Karen sat straight up. She looked tired and wrung out. Her battle with food wasn’t going well. She said the only time she felt in control was when she wasn’t eating. She was defined by her refusal, and when she accepted food, she felt indefinite, sloppy, out of control.
I knew plenty about her life. Before Amanda died, we’d had a lot in common, between the drugs and the sex. Food wasn’t what should have made her feel out of control, but who was I to judge?
“I wish I had a Deacon,” she said.
“One day, you might.”
I felt like the queen of the ball.
CHAPTER 16.
ELLIOT
I had to get to Alondra, but I had to meet Deacon. Frances had offered to take the meeting, but protocol be damned, I didn’t trust her motives. Mostly though, after Fiona’s monologue about pain and pleasure, I found myself driven by an unprofessional level of curiosity again.
He wasn’t what I expected.
I’d expected a dirtbag in a wifebeater and camo. I expected a trashy goatee and a flashy car. Mostly, I expected to look at him and wonder how he could make a slave of a woman who could have any man she wanted.
But he wasn’t any of those things. He was wealthy, obviously. His jacket fit as if it was custom made, and his hair fell in a conservative drape. His face hadn’t been shaved in a day or so, but it was the style. He carried himself with assurance. I couldn’t see the valet’s position, as he was behind the hedge with someone else, but Deacon seemed to sense his presence. He didn’t concern himself with the valet until he was close enough to hand over his keys. Deacon seemed at one with the space around him, at peace and in control.
I knew the patients looked out the east window to see who was visiting, and when he looked and held a finger to the upper floor, I knew he must have seen her. In that gesture, much of my curiosity was sated. Another tangle of emotions took its place.
“Mister Bruce,” I introduced myself as he approached reception. “I’m Dr. Chapman.”
“Nice to meet you.”
We shook hands. He looked me in the eye. Two gentlemen trying to protect the same woman, probably from each other.
I led him to my office and showed him the chair in front of my desk. In a last millisecond decision, I didn’t sit behind the desk but in the chair next to his.
“I notice an accent,” I said.
“I’m Afrikaner. From the south.” He said it with a thick Dutch accent. I could almost hear the k. “I grew up on a farm about two hundred clicks outside Queenstown.”
“I’ve never been.”
“To Queenstown?”
“To Africa.”
He smirked, and I felt like an ignorant American.
“How long have you been in Los Angeles?” I asked.
“A few years. Business takes me back every few months, to the DRC mostly. Not home.”
“May I ask your business?”
“I run a photography agency. Photojournalists working in risky assignments. We hire photographers, buy ransom insurance, track them down if they don’t check in, liaison with embassies, negotiate terms of release, this sort of thing.”
“Terms of release?”
“When they’re kidnapped. The authorities are as useless there as anywhere else.” He said it with cold aplomb, as if reminding me of something I had forgotten.
“Ah,” I said. It wasn’t a question, but an opening for more. It was a hole in which the other person was supposed to pour information, and it usually worked.
In the case of Deacon Bruce, something else happened. “How is she?”
“Without betraying a confidence, she’s better. She came in confused. She’s gotten her bearings, and she’s managing. She’s still struggling with her memory of what happened that night.”
He nodded.
“I assume you remember?” I asked.
“I tripped and fell.”
“You always so clumsy?”
“I get my coordination from my mother’s side. Dutch, you know?” He smiled ruefully, and I knew I wouldn’t get anywhere with him. “I’m concerned about Fiona. She’s not violent. Feisty, sure. And strong. Very strong. Almost impossibly so. It’s not like her to snap. I want you to know, I want her out of here as much as she probably wants out, but I’m not going to push for it. If you think my visit will cause her stress before she’s ready, you need to say so. I have no problem staying away until she’s ready.”
>
“I honestly don’t know when she’s going to be ready. And I’m going to be honest about something else.”
“Please.”
“I’m concerned that she attacked you because she was harboring some anger toward you. Apparently there was a violent incident?”
He smiled again and leaned back in his chair to one side, as if tucking himself in a corner to get comfortable. He was almost laughing.
The mockery burned me as much as the fact that I had to explain myself. “I’m not talking about anything associated with consensual—”
“This is something she told you?”
“I can’t explain further. She came in here with a cracked molar and nerve damage to her wrist.”
He pressed his lips together and nodded. Though I sensed a bit of guilt in the expression, it wasn’t defensive. It was remorseful and sad.
“Fiona and I have certain rules, and the rules are there for her safety,” he said. “Hurting her for breaking them defeats the purpose, don’t you think?”
“So she did break some rule?”
“These rules aren’t arbitrary.”
“I understand.”
“I’m sure you do.”
From his tone, I could tell he was sure I didn’t understand at all, and he was right. I didn’t. Not one bit.
“Fiona needs to channel her energies,” he said. “What we developed together does just that.”
“What’s in it for you?”
“Are you psychoanalyzing me, Doctor?”
“It’s hard to resist.”
He laughed. “All right,” he said, sitting straight in his chair. “I’ll give you a gift for your honesty. South African farms are far removed from each other, and when I was younger, we had so much privilege, it never occurred to us to protect them. Until, of course, the situation in my country changed. There were too many unemployed young men for the government to deal with, and these young men, they were angry. They were angry at families with money and land. So they gathered in groups and went into the farmhouses and took what they wanted. The farmers were armed usually. My father was, but he was a peaceful man. Of the seven men who came into our house, he shot only one in the leg. He paid for his kindness with his life. My brother was locked in the basement while my mother and sister were badly abused. Our workers… the people were beaten bloody. Two died. I’d grown up with these men. They were my friends.”
“Were you there?”
“I was in Queenstown on business, and one of our foremen came in the morning to tell me. He was covered in blood. By the time I got there, it was too late.” For a moment, he stared into the middle distance.
I didn’t interrupt with any of the hundred questions stewing.
“What happened right after is irrelevant,” he said. “But I am serious about protecting what’s mine.” He smiled, and his smile ended the discussion. He was very shrewd, very self aware.
Plying him further seemed like a waste of time. I was already missing a meeting at Alondra. More small talk would force me to miss an appointment with a patient.
But who was I kidding? Sure, I needed to get out of there, but I’d already assessed whether or not he was a threat to her. What was at the front of my mind, what made me react in ways I didn’t understand, was that he loved her. I couldn’t pretend to understand how their relationship worked, but when he said her name and asked about her, when he looked at me as if deciding who I was in her life… He cared about her more deeply than I understood.
“Let me talk to Fiona,” I said, standing. “Then I’ll get back to you.”
“Thank you for your consideration.”
When he stood, I saw him slow for a second as he shifted. He’d been stabbed in the chest almost two weeks before with a wide, thick blade, yet he’d shown no signs of injury until that moment. Even then, it was so slight I knew no one who wasn’t trained to observe people would have noticed it.
“You’ll be restricted to the grounds,” I said. “And I’m sorry, but you’ll have to be supervised.”
“Of course. Wouldn’t want her to crack another molar.”
He didn’t seem the type to joke over something so serious, but the fact that he had sent a chill up my spine.
CHAPTER 17.
FIONA
I skipped lunch to sit at the window. Karen went down to sit in front of a plate of food because she had to, but no such requirements were made of me. I could stare into the grey winter sky and wait.
Deacon was everything to me. What a sad turn of events that someone with a perfectly functioning brain, identified as gifted in third grade, should let her life revolve around a man for her sanity; an unreliable, overcommitted man at that. Worse than a doctor or a cop, there were times he couldn’t be around, and I was ill-equipped to deal with them. But that was my fault, wasn’t it? A strong woman would have been able to manage during his absences without fucking around, without pissing him off, without breaking every single rule.
But what other man would tolerate my needs? Who else would work with them instead of fighting them? What other person could help me function the way he did?
The goal, once I got out of there, was to either remove Deacon from my life or make sure he didn’t leave Los Angeles all the time. Or something between those impossible poles.
I shifted in my chair. The pain in my right wrist ran to my inner elbow. I’d been leaning on it for too long. When Deacon had pinned it against the wall, it had hurt.
But the day he’d showed me how to hold my arms for a knotting, he said that it wouldn’t hurt. I’d only realized later that I’d damaged it, so I had to be extra mindful of where the ropes fell before I went into subspace.
He’d knotted me, that time after he returned. The last time. A simple shrimp tie during play, and I’d cringed when he moved my arm.
That was off. If he’d damaged my arm when he pinned it, it wouldn’t have hurt until later.
I rubbed my arm. It might never heal. He was very serious about the wrists. Would he have pinned me? Even in anger? And had he held my arm long enough to really injure it?
The soup of questions didn’t confuse me, but as I dug into the memory of what happened, it became clear.
***
His breath falls on my cheek, and a pain in my arm runs from my wrist to the sensitive side of my bicep.
“You did not let someone else knot you,” he says from deep in his throat. He’s naked, stunning. He pins me to the wall, the friction making the open skin on my ass scream.
Regret. Pounds of it. Miles wide. Regret to the depth of my broken spirit.
“I’m sorry.” I am. I’m devastated and ashamed.
“Why?”
My wrist hurts. He’s pressing it so hard against the wall, as if I’d leave, as if I’d ever turn my back on him. Yet I want to get away, to run, to show him that I can abandon him the way he abandons me.
I wiggle, but he only presses harder and demands, “Why?”
“Get off me!”
“Tell me why!” His eyes are wider, his teeth flashing as if he wants to rip out my throat. “Why?”
“I need it!” The words come out before I think, and they’re poison to him.
Before I expect it, he grabs my jaw, and I feel pain where his fingers press. He looks into me, cutting through me with his eyes, and I want to curl up into a blackened char of desiccation.
He lets me go, and I fall to the floor.
***
I almost missed Deacon come out of the building. The valet handed him his keys, and he took them without moving his face from the window. He looked concerned. I didn’t know if he could see me since I’d leaned back in the chair, thinking about the last time we’d been naked together.
He stood still, looking up at me. He wouldn’t move out of the driveway until I acknowledged him. It was all over his face and posture. I leaned forward and put my finger to the glass. Seeing me, he smiled and put up a finger.
He needed me.
CHAPTER
18.
ELLIOT
I used to be happy at Alondra.
Maybe I was freakish to think of it that way. It was impossible to explain how working with such troubled people made me content, but the small victories looked so large. Then I went to Westonwood, and wound up feeling as though the small victories were the same no matter who the patients were. I felt as if the world was full of too much pain to soothe.
After I left Westonwood then went back, I didn’t want to be anywhere, and I wanted to be everywhere. My discontent flourished in a garden of anguish and brokenness.
I’d left my chaplaincy at Alondra and put away the collar. I put off ordination over God’s sadistic torture of his only son, and subsequent torture of millions of people, because what was the point of salvation if you still existed at the whims of God and man? What was the point of faith if you were still subject to suffering? I understood all the theologies, but I didn’t see why I had to align myself with it. I understood the idea of God as compassionate observer, healer, and strength. Those were all nice ideas. But why choose to stand by them as partner? Why become a mouthpiece?
My mentor, and old horse who never wrote down a sermon in his life, told me I was scared to wear the collar, and though he said it kindly, as if it was totally normal, I’d stormed out of the office.
He was right of course. A step away from becoming a man of God, a commitment I’d always wanted to make, and I ran like a coward. I had no excuse besides fear and an unwillingness to conquer it.
I dried myself after my shower, putting my day together in my mind. Therapy, then a session at Alondra, paperwork, and a quick meeting at Westonwood to discuss scheduling. I couldn’t do this for long. I couldn’t hold down two jobs. The commute was deadening. Alondra had to go and Westonwood had to go, but I needed them. Everything I was doing, I was doing for the wrong reasons. I was proving to Jana I could do what I wanted by being at Alondra, and I was sating some indefinite hunger by being at Westonwood. I still didn’t know what I wanted.