Caught in the Middle

by Kira Barker

  It didn’t shut up when Simon threatened to beat me until I stopped glowering at him, it didn’t shut up when he gagged me and went to town on my quivering thighs and tits, “until I gave him reason to stop,” meaning I’d just have to clap my hands behind my back, signaling that I’d had enough and we could finally end this farce.

  But it did quiet down when he finally realized that I really needed an outlet tonight, and nothing short of maxing me out would do. For the sake of hitting that spot exactly and not pushing me too far, he re-tied my hands so that they were by my sides and I could give him signals—up for more, and down for slowing things a little. And because he took pity on me, he told me to just go ahead and come if I could, but for each orgasm he would hit me harder and more frequently.

  I made it through five rounds of that, although I sobbed through the fourth and pretty much screamed myself raw at the escalation after that last climax hit, but that was also the point where that dam inside of me broke that I’d shoved all my misery and grievances behind, and suddenly I was free. And it wasn’t just that I didn’t feel like any of that wasn’t suffocating me any longer. No, it was an almost physical high that swept through me, made me feel as if I was floating—soaring toward the sun. I was free, and everything was great, and even though the cane coming down on my inner thigh hurt like a motherfucking red hot poker, it felt so fucking amazing that I could have remained right there until the end of my life, happy forever.

  That high lasted maybe two minutes, and then it was suddenly over. I crashed right down onto the bottom of reality, and if Simon hadn’t been there to catch me, I might also have physically tumbled off the bench I had been kneeling on when my entire body went slack from one second to the next. And then it was all too much and I started crying uncontrollably, confused about my reaction and unable to stop myself or even tell him that I was really feeling okay, but this was just happening and I didn’t know how or why. Simon just held me, rocking me in his arms, cooing all kinds of soothing endearments to me that I barely heard over the sounds coming out of my own body. Unlike me, he seemed better equipped for handling this, whatever it was, and when I finally accepted that and just let go, I eventually quieted down again.

  I had no idea how late it was by the time I slid off his lap and landed, quite painfully so, on my ass, but outside the sky was pitch black, and the sun had still been up when Jack and I had made it to the house. I tried to ignore the mess I undoubtedly was, my eyes sore from crying, my muscles hurting from exertion that had nothing to do with the cane. Simon smiled at me gently and reached up to push a wet strand of hair off my face, and that gesture alone was enough to make me sniffle all over again. As much as I longed for basic human contact, I suddenly couldn’t stand his touch, drawing in on myself, but he didn’t look surprised about that, either.

  “I don’t feel comfortable leaving you alone like this, but if you need some time on your own, I can go downstairs and leave the door open. Just call if you need me, okay?”

  I nodded, insanely grateful that he seemed to pluck my desires right out of my brain before I could even become fully aware of them myself, then curled up in the middle of the floor while he left me to myself. I just continued to lie there, hugging myself, and waited for the world to fall back into place, which it did, one little piece after the other.

  Simon returned after a while but didn’t approach me when I didn’t react, instead cleaned up around me except for the spot I still occupied. When he was done, I was ready to join the world again, at least as far as hitting the showers. He was reluctant to leave me alone in the bathroom, but when I told him that I really needed a few extra minutes to gather myself, my voice hoarse but calm now, he nodded and promised to wait for me in the kitchen.

  I spent an obscenely long time just standing under the hot spray of the shower, waiting for my misery to return, but it was gone now, swept away in that overwhelming tide. Slowly but surely, my mind ground into gears, and by the time I toweled myself dry, I felt vaguely like myself again. My body was aching all over, and I had to admit that I looked kind of beat up. I spent a few minutes with a small hand mirror, counting the welts the cane had left on my legs, ass, chest, upper arms, and even one on the sole of my right foot. I counted thirty-seven distinctive marks, three of which had actually broken the skin and where scabbed over now, and I was sure I would feel all of them keenly by tomorrow morning.

  If I hadn’t been so fucking tired, I would have glowed with pride and maybe high-fived myself. True, it all was a little insane, but considering how bad I’d felt before coming over and how relieved and at ease I was now, I would have gladly taken it all over again. And I would hardly have come, hard, a complete five times if I hadn’t gotten a massive physical whammy out of it.

  As I found out as soon as I shuffled into the front of the house, stupidly only wearing a tee and shorts that left half of the welts on my thighs uncovered, Jack begged to differ.

  While I’d procrastinated in the bathroom, I’d already heard the low murmur of voices, but I hadn’t paid attention to them, too concerned with myself. And now my mind was on autopilot as soon as I smelled food, suddenly realizing that I hadn’t had anything to eat since breakfast, and microwaved pasta was exactly what the doctor prescribed. So I didn’t really notice that Simon was hovering in the kitchen, looking pissed off while trying hard to hide it from me, while Jack was leaning against the back of the sofa, obviously waiting for my reappearance so he could finally get the comforting on that he felt was the solution to everything, and what I should have gotten all along.

  One good look at the welts crisscrossing my thighs, next to a weirdly shaped bruise developing on my upper arm just below the end of the sleeve of my tee, and he went ballistic, reigniting the fight I’d clearly been oblivious about the entire time.

  “What the fuck is this?” Jack called out as he came after me, and when I didn’t react, still zeroing in on my food, he grabbed my arm, if gently, and pulled me around so that he could see the back of my thigh better where the light hit it directly. Pivoting on my foot made me put too much weight on the welt down there, making me hop ungracefully and curse under my breath, which didn’t help de-escalate the situation. And because I still hadn’t gotten that pasta and Jack was the only thing standing in my way, it was the obvious thing to pull out of his grasp and tell him to go fuck himself so I could finally get food into my rumbling stomach.

  What followed wasn’t pretty, and about two minutes in I’d all but forgotten about the steaming pile of junk food on the counter.

  “What the fuck did you do?” Jack shouted, gesturing in the general vicinity of my exposed legs while glaring at Simon.

  “I did exactly what she wanted me to do. What she needed me to do,” Simon tried to explain, his voice pressed with frustration, but Jack would have none of that.

  “Are you fucking insane? Those are fucking welts! Welts! That’s what, like, second-degree assault?”

  Simon was too stunned by that accusation to find a quick reply. He was staring at Jack, and that was about the time my mind finally rerouted brain power from foraging to actual higher brain functions. Turning slowly, if a bit gingerly, I looked at Jack, maybe still a little slow on the uptake.

  “Just look at you! You’re completely traumatized! Who the fuck does this to someone they supposedly care about?”

  Simon did another eloquent fish impersonation, so I decided that it was about time to tear Jack off his high horse.

  “The only one who’s traumatizing me is you with the shit you’re spewing right now,” I spat, and after a last, longing glance at the cooling pasta I rounded on him, full force. “I’m hungry, I’m fucking tired, and the last thing I need right now is your idiotic, misguided sense of chivalry. Fuck off, and take your sanctimonious bullshit right out the door with you!”

  I don’t know what made me say that. In all fairness, I really wasn’t up to running my thoughts through any kind of filter, but that wasn’t the whole of it. I didn’t like
him going after Simon in the first place, but Jack’s accusation didn’t just hit him squarely in the nuts, but socked me a good one on the return. Anything that went down in the playroom was consensual, and with this scene in particular, I could have stopped it at any single second. Simon had hit that mark perfectly, and if my addled mind hadn’t completely flunked out on me during the scene, he hadn’t derived any sort of pleasure from it himself. He’d done it all because I wanted him to, he’d let me take charge and had just delivered what I’d, quite loudly, begged of him. So if Jack thought this was assault, it wasn’t Simon’s doing but at least partly my own.

  And, even worse, if by whatever upside-down logic it was still all his fault alone, that simply meant that Jack had so little faith in me that he saw me as the victim who was too stupid to even see what was going on when it hit her in the face and kept defending her abuser to her last breath. That made me feel dirty and weird, and suddenly a hell of a lot more insecure than ever in my life before, and I hated Jack for being the cause of all that.

  I was too out of it to voice all that, but I think he could read it right off my face as I stared at him, quivering with rage. If I hadn’t cried myself into exhaustion, I might have started bawling right there again, but somehow I managed to hold myself together.

  Maybe if it had just been me and Jack, we could have hashed this out right there, but Simon took that moment to regain his voice, and everything went to hell.

  Shouting ensued. I think we all said some things that we didn’t really mean, but reason went flying out the door pretty fast. Jack clearly hadn’t expected to be met with any resistance, let alone me and Simon joining forces—something that never happened in the few fights we’d had over the years—and it only took another couple of minutes before he turned around and stormed out of the house, shouting over his shoulder that if anyone stopped being so fucked in the head and would care to see reason, he was bunking over at Kara’s, because there at least he wouldn’t have to watch firsthand how I let Simon beat me to a bloody pulp.

  After that, I really didn’t need that pasta anymore, and the very thought of it was enough to make me want to hurl. At least that was a convenient excuse for the dark mass churning in the pit of my stomach.

  Simon did his very best to run interference now that he could and do some damage control, but he looked shell-shocked himself, and I knew that I wasn’t helping when I kept insisting that I was fine, while inside I felt like a huge part of me was dying a slow, painful death. He tried to insist that I stay over for the night, but now more than ever, I needed to be by myself and left half an hour after Jack had vacated the premises. As I made my slow and painful way over to the train station, I had the sinking feeling that somehow, things would never be the same.

  Chapter 12

  I was too exhausted to remain awake for long that evening, but that didn’t mean that I slept through the night or that my rest actually left me feeling rested. I was almost happy when my alarm blared me into wakefulness, if not alertness, and I quickly dressed before hitting the bathroom, trying to avoid a repetition of last night should Marcy, for whatever reason, pass me in the hallway.

  By the time I left the house, I felt marginally more like myself, but that wasn’t an improvement. All that tossing and turning at night, the least cause for which had been physical discomfort, had given me time aplenty to think things over. I still wasn’t ready to take any crap from Jack¸ but doubt had firmly settled in my thoughts, making me second-guess pretty much everything about my relationship with Simon.

  Who in their right mind let another human being do something like this to themselves? Who in their right mind wanted to do that in the first place?

  Rationally, it was only too easy to reduce everything to endorphins and physical reaction, and what before had fascinated me about the mental side of it now scared the living shit out of me. It had only been a few weeks, and already people noticed a change in me? I didn’t want to change, and what kind of good could come out of driving a wedge between me and my oldest, closest friend?

  It was hard to focus on work that morning, which just added another item to my ever-growing list of reasons why I should at least break this off, if not have myself checked into a mental facility—if I ever ran out of shifts that I could slave away in the ER, which would hopefully be never. With less than two weeks remaining in my rotation, I really had to keep up working at top performance, and nothing would get between me and snatching up that fellowship I’d applied for. With just one more rotation at another hospital left to my residency, I needed it as much as I wanted it. I was, all my sudden insecurities aside, the best trauma surgeon for the job, and any day now someone would be approaching me with that contract to sign—I just knew it. With that new level to my career, I wouldn’t have time for idle fancies like my dysfunctional sex life, anyway, so I might as well cut all ties to that right fucking now.

  My resolve wavered when I returned to my locker after my shift, only to find five missed calls and a whole slew of texts from Simon. There wasn’t much of his usual arrogance remaining in any of them, and the last couple sounded downright anxious, washing away my conviction to tell him to go fuck himself like a sand castle in the rising tide. I barely had the energy left to text back that I was okay, and then I went home to another night of barely dozing off, followed by hours spent staring at my ceiling, scared and alone in the dark.

  The next day it was seven missed calls and even more texts, which I fended off the same way.

  On Thursday I finally made myself return his calls, not just because part of me felt sorry for Simon, but also because there was that annoyingly ingrained need now to cancel our session. Simon sounded cautious throughout the entire conversation and accepted my rain check without a hint of surprise or annoyance, but I hung up as soon as he tried to actually talk to me. I asked him to give me a little more space, though, and Friday came with just two texts and no call.

  None of which were from Jack.

  With each day that passed that I didn’t hear from him, the iron grip around my heart tightened a little more. Thanks to the wonders of modern social networks, it was easy to verify that he was, indeed, still alive, and when I made up an excuse to call Kara to stealthily find out if he was still crashing at her place, she happily divulged that she and Jack had pretty much screwed the entire night after our fight. She was still seeing that Dan guy, but things were winding down, and it really was so convenient that she didn’t have to rely on him to get her rocks off. In short, everyone should have a Jack.

  Only that I felt like I’d somehow lost mine.

  I made it through the weekend somehow, thanks to coffee and a couple of supplements that probably would have screwed up my next drug test had anyone forced me to piss into a cup that day, and Monday rolled in much to my rising dread. A week had passed and that should have made a difference, but I still felt as raw inside as before, even though my skin had healed completely.

  And then it was Tuesday, and when I opened my eyes that morning, a full hour before my alarm would go off, I felt like crying for an entirely different reason.

  There was no sense in putting this off any longer, so I got up, showered, dressed, and made breakfast. My cereal tasted like cardboard, but I forced myself to empty the entire bowl. Only twenty minutes had passed, but I still got ready and left, figuring that maybe someone else might be happy to get off work a little early and spend the day actually enjoying themselves.

  A couple of years ago I’d tried taking the day off, but that had been worse. Routine was the only thing that helped, and today I was glad for every second I could be on my feet, occupied even though I felt like a zombie. I knew that somehow I would make it through the day, and then everything would be okay for another year.

  My plan was working all right, until when at 3:27 p.m. an ambulance came screeching up to the ER, carrying the victim of a car crash. She was in her late twenties, long, dark hair, light skin where it was even visible between all the blood, and bec
ause the universe was out to get me, her husband arrived just in time, their little girl crying in his arms, to shout after us that someone had to save her mommy.

  I barely managed to step back from the OR table and wrench off my face mask before I started to hurl, and it happened twice more on the way over to the locker room, where I dragged myself into the last shower stall at the end of the row, still in my scrubs and cap, and turned the cold water on full.

  Zoe found me there an undefined, endless time later, my knees drawn to my chest, staring at nothing. I looked up when I heard the door fall shut behind her, just as she was rounding on me.

  “What the fucking fuck just happened in there? Are you sick? Knocked up? Because you better have a damn good explanation for not only running out of the OR, but threatening a patient’s life with almost puking your guts all over her!” Then my state registered and her blonde brows drew together, anger slowly turning into concern. “What the fuck is wrong with you, Slater?”

  And wasn’t that the question of the month?

  Yet for this time only, I had an explanation. One I hated to give, but I knew my boss well enough not to feed her any bullshit, even though I’d avoided talking about this with anyone here in the hospital so far.

  “My mother died today, twenty-six years ago. She was twenty-nine, and she had terminal-stage brain cancer. She committed suicide, drove her car straight into a tree. She looked exactly like that woman did. I was five.”

  A little more tension leaked out of Zoe’s posture, but she didn’t go, nor kick me out of the hospital straight away, but just shut off the shower before she hunkered down in front of me.

  “You need to tell me shit like that so I can be prepared. Why didn’t you take the day off? You have enough free days on your tab to force the hospital to close down if you demand to be paid for them.”