Forbidden: A Standalone (12 page)

“Dad was right. I’m too inexperienced. I would have had my finger on the judge’s pulse if I’d known better.”

What she was saying hit me like a slap.

“No,” I said.

“I’m sorry, Fiona. I tried, but you need a better lawyer. It’s not fair to you.”

“Not fair to me? I’m here now with nothing and no one… I don’t have Elliot, and now you’re leaving? What am I supposed to do? Margie, how am I supposed to make it? Don’t leave me.” My hands were flying. I was screaming.

Margie was trying to grab my hands and shush me at the same time. “Calm down.”

“Stay, and I’ll calm down. Stay with me.”

“I can’t. It’s not the best—”

“Don’t leave me! Don’t leave me! Don’t leave me!”

When I tried to hold her close, hands on me pulled and tugged. There was a floor under me, and shadows in the light, and voices in all kinds of timbres and shades of gentleness. There was a discomfort in my arm like a stiff finger pushing against me, and soon after that, the hands relaxed, and everything went grey.

---------

use

FIONA

I
 often drifted off into a trance-like state that reminded me of the hypnosis sessions I used to have with Elliot. I fazed out in the evenings between dinner and lights out while I sat in front of the TV, watching the ocean waves on a loop, and I let my mind do whatever it wanted.

While I thought about nothing, in a cotton-candy medicated haze, the cardboard cone of my rage was hidden under the pink tufts of sugar. In the ten days since Elliot left, they’d changed my meds and I’d run the gamut from zoned out to acting out.

Too much slap, not enough tickle.

I missed Elliot and his cold professionalism, the little tics and movements he used to funnel his emotions, the promise of his naked body under his clothes. He’d been gone twelve hours before I started entertaining vivid sexual fantasies about him. I didn’t need him for anything. In the heat of our non-relationship, I didn’t need him to set me free or call me sane, so I didn’t have to block out the thoughts. Since I’d rediscovered the feel of my fingers on my body, I’d entertained thoughts of him at night once, twice, three times after lights out, falling into a sleepless daze with my hands cupped over my cunt.

My favorite fantasy was so chaste it set my clit on fire.

I’m in a coffee shop on Charleville, the one where I could get a buttercup, which was a drip coffee with butter. I’m alone which, in and of itself, is a fantasy. There are no cameras or paparazzi anywhere. I sit at a table on the sidewalk and open a book. The sun shines. The breeze is light in my hair, and the mug is made of red porcelain.

He stands over me with his paper cup, casting a shadow on my book. “Fiona?”

I look up, and I put him together as I remember him: light brown hair, green/blue/grey eyes, narrow brows, long neck, and a smile that, for once, is genuine, unburdened by self-reproach or professional courtesy.

“Elliot, hi.”

“How are you?”

“Great. Do you have time to sit?”

He always sits. Sometimes he’s on his way somewhere and decides to take the time out, and sometimes he has nothing to do. But he always sits. I imagine our conversation. I have to make his life up, because I know so little about him. I tell him how well I am. How I’m cured. How I don’t do drugs anymore and how sex is no longer a need. Sometimes I tell him I haven’t had sex since I was released, and sometimes I tell him I have, just a couple of times.

When I claim chastity, that’s when the fantasy is most vibrant. That’s when he walks me to my car and his words of affection, of longing, of repressed desire pulse between my legs. The kiss I imagine, with his hands on my face and his dick pushing against me, makes me so wet I have to rub it off in my mental ward cot.

I imagine going down to Compton, to some rat-infested shelter or run-down church, and seeing him. Our hurt for each other is so strong that the magnetic pull makes our will to remain professional and proper impossible.

He says, “I always wanted you.”

I replayed our short time together, looking for moments when that might have been true. As the days wore on, I imagined he has me on the bed. He takes my ankles and spreads my legs so far, and looks at my wet cunt for a second before kissing it. The look on his face is one of bliss, as if he’d been starving and imprisoned and I was a great meal of freedom. When he fucked me, he did it like in the movies, with his face close to mine, eyes half closed, breathing my name.

I knew it was fantasy and impossible. I didn’t know the man at all, yet I did. He was normal, straight-laced, probably vanilla. He’d never be with a fuck-up sex addict, a druggie slave worthless whore camera-magnet like me. I’d never attract a man who was plain nice. I didn’t have access to the ordinary world, yet I craved it. My darkest desires were for an inaccessible normality.

I hadn’t wanted that until Elliot left. In the days following, as my fantasies became more outrageously mild, I thought of Deacon, my master, the one who had helped me function and who I had betrayed. Maybe one day I’d remember the sticky web of circumstances that put us both in the stables, but did it matter a fuck? In the end, did I stab him to be free of him?

And free to do what?

Fuck? Snort? Party?

Or free to be normal?

ELLIOT

I
 didn’t like rushing. If everything was done properly and in the right order, I never had to rush. Even the most tedious parts of the day could be managed effortlessly if they happened when they were supposed to.

On Tuesdays, I had therapy before work. As a therapist, I needed my own therapy sessions in order to maintain my sanity, though some weeks I had nothing to discuss and my sanity was only impaired by having to spend yet another fifty minutes in Lee’s office, talking about nothing. Those sessions supposedly gave me an angle from which to see the seemingly unproductive sessions with my own patients, but I felt more and more like I was wasting my time.

I opened my car door. The bougainvillea that hung over the driveway needed a trim. I often did the trimming myself because I found it soothing, but since I took the job at Westonwood, I had stopped. Since the gardeners had been instructed to leave it alone, they did, and it exploded into a waterfall of purple blooms that dropped onto my windshield.

I’d gone back to work at the Alondra Avenue Family Clinic in Compton. I’d left a chaplaincy there that had had a limited time frame. They’d asked me to stay on, but I went to Westonwood. When I left the enclave for the rich and troubled, I picked up some part-time work at Alondra while I sorted out my life. I didn’t like the instability any more than I liked the upset schedule, but I needed the balance badly.

L.A. traffic was famously brutal, but it was easily managed if one took into consideration the season as it related to the LAUSD, the time of day, the weather, and were willing to change routes at a moment’s notice. If I turned right on LaCienega at 7:01 a.m. on a normal Tuesday, I’d be on time. Turning at 7:02 made me upward of ten minutes late. I never figured out where the eight minutes went, but that extra sixty seconds seemed to increase the density of the traffic arteries by an order of magnitude.

So when I turned at 7:04, I assumed I’d have to apologize as soon as I walked into my session. That always led to an explanation of why I was late, and why it was important to be punctual, and back to how I felt about it, and so began the digging like kids in the yard, looking for treasure that wasn’t there. But I’d forgotten that it was still Christmas break for the LAUSD, and the roads were clearish. I pulled into the alley behind Lee’s office and took a deep breath. I’d made it, and I’d get to Alondra in time because the traffic was light. Being late for Lee was forgivable. Being late for my patients was egregious. They were people who had nothing reliable in their lives but me.

“Why do you worry about them?” asked Lee, her fingers laced together over her pregnant belly. She’d managed to get knocked up at forty-two, and I often found her in a state of bliss, sickness, or a meld of the two.

“Because I’m human. It’s human to care.”

“But it’s not your job.”

We’d had that discussion a hundred times. My job was to give patients a safe place to work on their problems. If I cared about them, I’d be emotionally shredded at the end of the week/month/year, and unable to work with the rest.

I didn’t answer her. There was no point. I felt fidgety and caught myself rubbing my upper lip with my middle finger. I had nowhere to put the energy. I’d been that way since I left Westonwood.

“You were almost late this morning. I saw you pull in.” Lee indicated the window beside her desk, looking onto the parking spaces. She didn’t have any tics. World’s perfect therapist, recommended by my mentor for her completely calm, organized, non-distracting demeanor.

“Jana caught me in the shower,” I said, remembering the perfectly pleasant, if ill-timed lovemaking in the bathroom. “Set my morning back.” She’d moved in six months before, after a whirlwind of dating, and had made little or no impression on the house except to be the prettiest thing that had ever stepped foot in the kitchen.

“Ah,” she said. “Can I assume things are going well?”

“The usual. She wants me somewhere safe. She thinks I’m going to get jacked every day. She puts on a show of panic and worry. I soothe her. It works for a little while, et cetera et cetera…”

“And she wants you back at Westonwood.”

“Yes.”

“Did you tell her why you left?”

That was sticky, very sticky. Only Lee was qualified to unravel it, and she was the only person I’d trust with that level of complexity. I’d downloaded my desire to protect Fiona from her family and the media to her during the first session after I left Westonwood, and she’d let me dance around it, waiting for me to describe my exact feelings in my own time.

“Jana wouldn’t understand,” I said.

“You should try.”

“She’s a delicate person. If I tell her about a patient’s family pressuring me, she’ll worry. If I tell her about the countertransference, it’s worse.”

“Countertransference happens. The thing with the girl’s family, that’s something she deserves to know, and it’s well outside the privilege of the room.”

“There’s nothing to tell,” I said. “That’s what I told you—it was all inference. If I express inference, she’s not going to have a place to put it, so it goes in the panic bucket. She can’t deal with things that aren’t facts.”

“How are you going to live like that, Elliot?”

“You make my eyeballs ache, you know that?”

“You’ve said the same about Jana.”

I sneered, knowing it was a sneer and she’d think it was funny. She was pointing out my transference, the redirection of feelings related to someone outside the room to the therapist. Transference was necessary. Countertransference, where the therapist placed unresolved feelings onto the patient, was trickier. Though it was normal, my countertransference with Fiona had to be dealt with. That was why we needed therapy for the therapy, to keep things in check.

“I didn’t trust her father’s motives,” I said. “He comes in and tells me I should let her go. Tells me they’ll take her in and watch her and thanks me very much for my time. The way he said it, it was off.”

“So you think he should have asked you to keep her for more observation?”

“I think the fact that he even asked is a problem. If he’d asked me to feed her at noon, I would have fed her at eleven because I don’t trust him.”

“That’s very reactionary,” Lee said.

“You’ve never met the guy.”

“And do you consider your decision meddling?”

“Anyone with a television knows what’s going on. The media frenzy around her brother’s accident and her stabbing her boyfriend; no sane person could survive it. She’d go back to using. Letting her out would have been setting her up for failure.”

She leaned back in her chair. I didn’t know if she needed the belly space or if she was taken aback by my tone.

“You believe that you made this decision based solely on the data?” she asked.

“Lee, what’s the difference if it was the right decision?”

“You tell me.”

I didn’t, because I wasn’t ready to say out loud that I had feelings for Fiona Drazen.

FIONA

I
 didn’t require black dark to sleep, which was good since I fucked anywhere, any time, and sometimes I needed to drop off afterward. Once I woke up on top of Owen Branch on the floor of Club Permission Granted at ten thirty in the morning. All the lights were on, and ladies in blue smocks were vacuuming to the Spanish music on the boombox. Owen wasn’t even fully awake when he lit a doob and handed it to me. I went back to sleep for another half an hour.

But at Westonwood, I had a problem I’d never had before: Everything kept me up. I knew I couldn’t blame it on the light coming through the door window, or the crickets, or the whooshing of the pipes whenever someone, somewhere flushed.

It was stabbing Deacon and the waterfall of guilt that followed. Everything I’d done in my young life. Everyone heartbreak. Every careless betrayal. Every time I hurt someone to fulfill some minor need or wisp of a desire. For ditching Owen the morning after the high school prom. For sucking his dick the next week because it happened to be there. For throwing his phone out my car window on the 101 when he told me he’d snuck a shot of my mouth on his cock because it was such a pretty sight. For pulling the car over and punching him in the face, then telling everyone what he’d done until no one would hang out with him any more.

People in my position—meaning people other people looked at—didn’t like Sneaky Petes taping fuck sessions, even if they told me nicely what they did and only did it for themselves. No. Just no. That was why phones were surrendered at Deacon’s place.

But still. I wasn’t focused on my rightness. My rightness didn’t hurt, and I was after full-bore self-immolation. So I did what I did every night at Westonwood: I chose a random incident from my life and turned it over in the dark. That night it was Owen. I didn’t have to punch him in the face. He’d been a harmless surfer with a huge dick and a permanent boner. I didn’t have to make sure none of my friends spoke to him again, or throw his phone out the window on the freeway. It was expensive to him, and I hadn’t given a fuck.