Page 143 of What Goes Around

When I started touching myself intentionally, the dreams stopped. As if my mind no longer needed to ambush me in sleep. But what worked wasn’t tenderness. It wasn’t affection or imagined love.

If I tried to picture something soft, consensual, romantic, vanilla, my body stayed inert. Nothing happened.

The only way I could respond was through imagined force. Being overpowered. Controlled.

Denial became more exhausting than the shame. I needed to understand what was happening to me.

So I started researching.

At first, it was clinical. Trauma responses. PTSD and sexuality. Articles written by therapists. Studies about survivors whose arousal patterns didn’t match their values or conscious desires. Words like conditioning. Survival response. Rewiring.

Then I went deeper.

Forums. Anonymous posts. Personal essays written by women who sounded terrifyingly like me. They talked about rape fantasies, about needing imagined force to feel arousal, about hating themselves for it until someone finally named it for them.

I read kink pages. Educational ones. Boundaries. Consent frameworks. Essays dissecting fantasy versus desire.

That was where I found it.

Consensual non-consent.

Rape without it actually being rape. A controlled, negotiated illusion of powerlessness. Choice given away deliberately, not stolen. Safety built beneath the fantasy like a net.

It wasn’t about wanting to be hurt.

It was about reclaiming the moment where control had been taken and rewriting it with consent.

It took time to accept that this didn’t make me monstrous. It made me someone who adapted to what had been done to her. Five years of sexual captivity doesn’t disappear just because time resets. It embeds itself. It changes the architecture of desire at a fundamental level.

I thought about therapy. Briefly. But what would I even say?

That I remembered five years of sexual slavery from a life no one believed existed? That I was twenty-two, technically a virgin, yet carried a body shaped by violations that had never happened in this timeline?

So I stayed silent.

This was one more thing I handled alone.

My fantasies lived safely in my head, controlled, contained. No risk. No unpredictability. No one else involved.

Chapter 45: The Wedding

Age 22.

The church smelled like old wood and lilies, sunlight filtering through the stained-glass windows in soft, colored fragments. Everything was calm. Peaceful. Exactly the kind of day Payton deserved.

I stood to her left as one of her bridesmaids, hands folded around my bouquet, watching her hold Thomas’s hands.

In this life, I wasn’t Payton’s maid of honor.

Mia was.

She stood just a step closer to Payton, attentive. Moments before the ceremony began, she had leaned in, gently straightening the edge of Payton’s veil. She gave Payton’s hand a brief squeeze before stepping back into place.

Payton had smiled at her, grateful.

In my last life, when we all went to UVU, Mia had joined our circle later. Friendly. Eager. She and Payton had grown close quickly. She had wanted to be Payton’s only best friend, and there had been friction when I was chosen as maid of honor instead of her.

In this life, circumstances shifted. I was still friends with Payton, but Mia had become the one she leaned on most. The one who knew the seating chart by heart. The one who handled the last-minute details without being asked.