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“Aw, hell. You know I didn’t mean anything against you. I just wish I could get him alone in a room, you know?”
I couldn’t meet his eyes because I knew he’d see the anger boiling just beneath the surface. There was a chance he’d think the anger was directed at my captor. But there was a chance, however small, that he wouldn’t.
“Emmie?”
“Yeah,” I said, acknowledging his empty threat toward my master.
I don’t know why I was angry. Bobby wouldn’t have a shot in a room alone with him. I knew I hadn’t just built my captor up in my mind as physically stronger than he was because of how helpless he’d made me.
I’d seen his well-muscled body many times, felt his weight on me, the strength of his grip. I knew. He’d rip Bobby to pieces, and I couldn’t decide whether that idea upset me or not. It upset me a lot less than the idea of Bobby hurtinghim.
“Alright, well, um . . . I need to really get going. But if you ever need somebody to talk to, you know where I am, yeah?” He was edging toward the door.
“Yeah.”
He looked at me another long moment before turning and walking off with his empty paper plate. His shoulders slumped. I had been right. He’d had a picture in his head about how his love would heal me or some other similar romantic bullshit. He’d be my rescuer. But what if I no longer wanted to be rescued?
One by one family members and friends trickled into the room to have a word with me, to tell me how much they’d missed me, how glad they were I was safe. If I needed anything . . . By the time they’d all paraded through, I was crying and couldn’t stop. I waited until they left, and then I got in my car and went home.
My mother had seen me upset and seemed to regret persuading me to come. I’m not sure if it was because some perfect, mythic Thanksgiving was ruined or she really felt bad. We never spoke of it.
That week I put in resumes at several places. My publisher called, but I had no intention to continue writing, at least not self-help books. “Maybe a memoir,” they said. I said, “Maybe,” but didn’t mean it. I was done. It was time to move on to something else.
The day of my next appointment with Dr. Blake, I sat in my apartment looking at all my stuff. The bookshelves with my books lining them, a couple bags of fan mail that had piled up while I’d been away. This was freedom. This was what I wanted, what I’d yearned for, for months. Or at least until I knew it wasn’t possible and I’d given up the hope.
I didn’t think I could ever do public speaking again. I wasn’t sure if I could write, at least not that sort of book anymore, the kind that changed people’s lives for the better and made them go after their goals and believe in themselves. All of it now seemed like pat phrases and cheap pop psychology. How had I taken my knowledge and boiled it down to such black-and-white simplicity?
Maybe I would go into research like I’d originally planned. Don a lab coat and stay out of the spotlight. As I rode the elevator up to the fifth floor for my session, I held out the fragile hope everything hadn’t ended for me.
“You look a bit better this week. I take it the journaling was helpful? Cathartic maybe?”
I nodded, a nonverbal lie. I looked better because I was employing thefake it til you make ittechnique, acting as if I were fine in the vain hope it would make it so.
I handed her the journal and stretched out on the couch while she flipped through it.
“This is more than I expected. I’m very pleased.” She said it as if I were a dog eager for a biscuit.
I didn’t care one way or the other about her approval, but I smiled anyway. It was easier to just go along.
If I went along and cooperated, she’d write me a prescription at the end of the session, and hopefully a combination of drugs and life itself would make me free of him. Happy.
I waited while she read and felt suddenly self-conscious. Though I hadn’t revealed everything, or even the most graphic things that had happened during my enslavement, it was enough. It was far more intimate a portrait of those days than I would share with anyone who wasn’t offering drugs to numb it all down to a pleasant fuzziness.
Finally, she closed the journal and looked up. “Thank you for sharing this with me. Would you like to tell me why it’s all written in third person, though?”
I don’t know why I said it, I just blurted the first thing that came into my head. “It’s not about me. It’s just a story.”
I was less shocked at having said it, and more shocked that it was true.
I had dissociated. Every sexual encounter I’d written as if it had happened to someone else.
I closed my eyes and went back, remembering, seeing his eyes, his hands on my body, not someone else’s. I expected to feel revulsion, fear, panic, disgust, but what I felt instead was much more disturbing. I felt the heat surge between my legs, the wetness of my panties, and full-on arousal.
I was barely there through the rest of the session, on autopilot, responding as the doctor expected, until the session was over and it was time to write a prescription. She scribbled something on the prescription pad and handed me the journal, telling me to keep up the good work and she’d see me next week.
I stopped off at the bathroom on the way out, ashamed of my physical reaction in the doctor’s office and what I was about to do, but I needed release. I locked the door behind me and unzipped my pants, letting them fall in a whisper to the floor. I leaned forward against the door, one hand pressed against the cold metal, anchoring me as I brought myself to orgasm with the other.
His face was in my mind as I came, stifling a moan. I pulled my pants back up, my fingers trembling as I buttoned them. I washed my hands in the sink. The soap smelled like the soap from my elementary school. I didn’t look at my face in the mirror. I didn’t want to see my eyes.
