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Throwing the newspaper back over the answering machine, she went about the business of forgetting Padraig Finnian.
Part Two
Chapter Eleven
Dr Ramsey – Session One
The neutral cream shades inside Dr. Ramsey’s office seemed to soothe her in a blanket of calm, much as they had always done. The carpet was nearly white, and the couches, the walls and the chairs were lustrous shades of cream with just subtle variations in the fabrics: a little stripe in the client’s couch, a plaid in four shades of pale on Dr. Ramsey’s easy chair. Everything in the room was perfectly executed to coordinate; the few accents were several large potted ferns and simple abstract paintings on the walls. Even the paintings’ muted pastels matched the color scheme that had been designed by a woman whose business was to offer her clients serenity when they might have little of it in the rest of their lives.
Sylvia Ramsey was as serene as her carefully appointed office. Her bulky body fit her loose clothes well: Birkenstocks, muslin pants and a pale blue silk tunic the same color as her eyes. She wore scant make-up on a pleasantly aging face, and her dark greying hair was tied at the neck in a neat bun. She was distinct in personality but an earthy, easy woman who looked as much like a grandmother as she did a psychologist. Shelby loved her. Not once during the two years she’d sought her counsel had the woman judged a thing she’d said. How could she not love her? She’d told her everything about her life with Clive Darcy, and the woman hadn’t freaked. That counted for a lot in Shelby’s world.
“Sometimes, I think you’ve been down the same roads I have been,” Shelby said in grateful admiration at the end of one of her sessions.
“In a way I have,” Dr. Ramsey replied. “But only because you’ve painted such a clear picture for me to see. What I have to do to understand you is to understand where you’ve been. If I haven’t been there myself, I need a pretty good imagination.”
Coming back after five years was easy, though once Shelby was sitting on the comfortable couch the feeling of panic that had driven her to make the appointment soon returned.
“You were almost frantic on the phone, Shelby. Tell me, what is happening in your life?”
“It’s such a long, sordid story…and to be honest, I don’t even remember where we left off. I think that’s where I’d like to begin.”
“I believe you quit coming after you ended your relationship with Mr. Darcy. The last entry I have in your file, you were quite pleased to be working at the coffeehouse with your friend, buying a piece of the business and starting a new life on your own. You’d worked for months to bring yourself to the point that you could leave the man.”
“Yes, that’s right. I remember that now.”
“So, do we begin there? Or is there something more current you need to talk about?”
“Both I think. You see I never actually broke with Mr. Darcy…not completely.”
“Oh?”
“I wasn’t living with him as I had been. I did break that off, but I needed money…” She laughed nervously, “Isn’t that always the case?” She blushed revealing this, as she would blush before when revealing sexual information to the therapist. “Mr. Darcy, rather Clive – I’ve called him Clive since I quit being his slave girl. Clive had assignments for me where I could earn extra money. The first was with another sadist, someone he knew from his kinky sexual underground. He explained my mission as having a dual purpose. He was quite sure that I would suffer if I went cold turkey off the masochistic sex. He said I’d have nightmares and obsessions. That if I tried to renounce that lifestyle, I’d end up unhappy. I disagreed with him. I was certain that I didn’t need his hard brand of sex or anything associated with it. But he was right. I began having nightmares and obsessions. I know now that I could have eventually come to terms with that…but I was still just twenty-three and naïve about the world and myself. I returned to him two months after our break-up, a month after my last visit with you. I told him I’d be interested in his plan…
““It’s a simple arrangement,’ he said. ‘The man has needs, you’ll meet those, surrendering to his fetish, nothing more than that. He has a wife he loves, a life he cherishes. He needs you only to satisfy this one troubling corner of his life. It’s not actually troubling for the man. He loves his sadistic nature as much as I do mine; he just has a few more complications and I have arranged to see his need is met. You’ll provide that for him.’
“And that’s it?” I asked the man.
“‘Almost.’ He smiled in that shrewd way he had and went on to tell me that the man, Greystoke, was involved in some nasty and illegal business with known criminals. Clive was investigating him for some government agency, although he didn’t elaborate about that, he never did. He needed me to find out as much as I could about Greystoke. When I had the chance I would pick up the raw details of his life, the comings and goings, his travel plans, names of people he spoke with on the phone, that sort of thing. It was potentially a long term assignment. Not much could be gleaned unless I was there often enough to win his trust. The man had no idea what Mr. Darcy’s business really was. I mean everyone knows the man is a philanthropist, that he has a number of large corporations under his umbrella, but his intelligence operation…the network of private spies, the government connections, Greystoke had no idea about that.
“So, I took the job. By then, I was salivating for the kind of rough sex that had me unable to break with Clive even when I wanted to for so long.”
Shelby was fidgeting and nervous, wringing her hands in the old-fashioned sense, retreating again to child-like behaviors – biting her lip, sheepish smiles – suddenly the same bashful girl that had first come to Dr. Ramsey some years before.
“Tell me about this Mr. Greystoke, Shelby.”
The question was logical yet her nervousness shot up like a feverish temperature. This was what she came to talk about, but at first the words did not come out all that coherently.
“I arrived at his house and he showed me to his private room. It was weird, frightening. A total stranger. I’d been with strangers before, but never alone. Never alone like I was then. Greystoke was younger than I imagined he would be, the kind of man who makes me instantly on edge. All I could think of was fucking him…and suddenly, he’s on me. He walks around me, stalking me, his eyes looking as if they are removing my clothes. I tried to run from the room but he pulled me back. He locked the door, pocketed the key, twisted my arms behind me and then threw me over the end of his couch and thrashed my ass with a tawse until he ripped my skirt to shreds and I was down to nothing but my panties. I almost came in that fury of emotion – although I don’t think he knew that.”
Shelby abruptly stopped talking, letting her mind regress deeper into the scene.
“‘That’s punishment,’ he told me. ‘You’ll get more anytime you defy me. I have paid good money to use your body, which means that I really don’t care what you feel about the situation. Darcy assured me that you were owned property, his to do with as he saw fit.”
“I agreed with him. It wasn’t true that Darcy owned me – at least as far as I was concerned. But I had to agree with the man. I suspected that Mr. Darcy had given him that kind of guarantee, so Greystoke would know to trust the arrangement.”
Shelby looked to Dr. Ramsey, expecting her to comment, but she was typically passive, a small smile to comfort her, then finally, “Do you want to go on?”
“I have to,” she answered, although she felt more shaky than ever. Screwing up her courage, her story continued. “Once it was clear that there was no turning back, Greystoke tied me into an intricate body bondage and suspended me from the ceiling, practically upside down, my hands behind my back. My sex was bared, in fact, I was completely naked with my sex splayed wide so he could do whatever he wanted with my pussy and ass. I hung there until every muscle in my body was screaming. He seemed to know this. Maybe I was beginning to get restless inside the ropes – I hardly cared by then – or maybe he just knew by instinct.
