Bully's Reunion Surgery

The class reunion was where I made my mistake. I went looking for Wren.

Fifteen years since high school, and I still pictured her the way she was at sixteen. Soft in the middle, easy to make cry, the girl I trained the whole locker room to call names that I will not repeat because I am ashamed of them now. I had three drinks in me and a stupid idea that I could find her, say something light, get a laugh, and bury the old version of myself under one good night.

I found her by the coat check. She was not soft anymore. She wore a black dress and a small gold pin shaped like a snake, and she had the kind of calm that made the noise in the room drop a notch when she turned her head.

“Mara,” she said. Not a question. She had been waiting.

I should have felt warned. Instead my mouth went dry and something low in me pulled tight, the way it does before you fall, and I hated it. I had come to apologize. My body had come for a different reason and it had not asked me first.

“You look good,” I said, which was true and also the weakest thing I have ever said to anyone.

“I’m a surgeon now.” She let that sit. “Pediatric, originally. I moved into something more specialized.” She smiled, and the smile did not reach anywhere safe. “Restorative work. I fix what people break.”

We talked. I do not know how she did it, but twenty minutes later I had a fresh drink I did not remember accepting, and the floor had a slow tilt to it, and Wren’s hand was warm on my elbow guiding me toward a side door because I had told her, apparently, that I needed air.

The intrusive thought hit me right there at the threshold. Run. Not a feeling, a word, sharp as a slap, the sober part of me hammering on the glass from the inside while the rest of me followed her like a dog on a lead. I went anyway. That is the part I cannot explain even now.

The room she took me to was not a coat room. White walls. A padded table under a hard light. The smell of clean rubber and something medical underneath it. My legs had gone loose and stupid, and when she helped me up onto the table I let her, because sitting felt necessary, because the floor would not hold still.

“There she is,” Wren said. “The big mouth of the west wing. Do you remember what you used to chant?”

I did. My face went hot. The shame of it should have sobered me. Instead it slid down into the same low place that had been humming since the coat check, and the two things braided together until I could not tell them apart, and that, the not being able to tell them apart, made my breath catch.

“I came to say sorry,” I managed.

“I know.” She was rolling a steel cart over, unhurried. “You’ll get to. You’ll say it a lot, by the time we’re done. You’ll mean it more each time.”

My wrists were in the cuffs before I understood the cuffs were there. Soft inside, wide, the kind that do not bruise, the kind designed to hold a body that has stopped cooperating. I pulled. The table did not care. The pulling sent a hot wire straight down through my belly, and I clenched against it, and clenching made it worse, and a small wrong sound came out of me that I would have given anything to take back.

“Interesting,” Wren said, watching my hips. Just watching. “Your mouth says sorry. The rest of you is already thanking me.”

“Wren. This isn’t funny.”

“No.” She snapped a glove. “It’s the opposite of funny. It’s the most serious thing I’ve done in years.”

She cut my dress off. Not roughly. She worked the shears up the seam with a surgeon’s straight line, and the cool air hit my skin section by section, and I lay there cuffed and bare under that white light with the girl I had tormented studying me like a chart. I should have screamed for the room full of people forty feet away. My throat would not make the shape. Some animal in me had decided that being looked at like this was a thing it wanted, and it had locked the door from its side.

“You’re wet,” she said, two fingers parting me without ceremony, clinical, owning. “Soaked. You came in here to feel better about yourself and your cunt made other plans.” She lifted her hand so I could see it shine under the light. “Say it.”

“No.”

“Say what your body did, Mara, or I leave you cuffed here and go enjoy the party, and you can explain the situation to whoever finds you.”

The threat landed somewhere it had no business landing. My hips lifted off the padding, looking for her hand, and the betrayal of that, my own spine arching toward the person I had spent a year breaking, brought tears up hot and fast.

“I’m wet,” I whispered. “I’m sorry. I’m wet.”

“Good girl.” Two words. They went through me like a current I had no defense against, and I hated them, and I wanted them again immediately, and the wanting was its own deep humiliation that only wound me tighter.

She did not touch me again right away. She let me lie in it. That was the cruelty she had refined, I understood later, the waiting. She turned to the cart and I heard the click of a cap, the squeeze of a tube, and then her gloved fingers came back slick and cold and circled lower than I expected, against my asshole, pressing, patient.

“What are you,” I started, and the word doing died because the slow burn of one finger pushing into me took all the air I had. My whole body tried to climb away from it and the cuffs held me down into it instead, and the no in my head turned traitor halfway out and came apart into a moan.

“Breathe,” Wren said. “You bullied a girl until she stopped eating, and now you’re going to learn what it is to be unmade and put back the way I want you. Surgically. Permanently.” She worked a second finger in beside the first, stretching, and the stretch lit up nerves I did not know answered to her. “But tonight is just the consultation. Tonight I only find out how much of you is already mine.”

She found something inside me with the pads of her fingers and pressed, and my hips bucked, and a high thin sound I had never made in my life tore out of me. The wrongness of it, the loss of the voice I used to hurt people, sobbing now under her hand, only drove the heat higher. I was close already. I was close from almost nothing and we both knew it.

“Look at you,” she breathed. “Fifteen years of mean, and you fall apart from two fingers and a kind word. You should be ashamed.”

“I am,” I gasped, and it was the truest thing, and it did not stop my hips from grinding down onto her hand, chasing, shameless, hers.

She pulled out. The empty ache that opened up where her fingers had been made me cry out, actually cry out, begging without a single word, and I saw her file that away behind her eyes like data.

“Not yet,” she said. “You don’t come for free. Nothing about you is free anymore.” She reached back to the cart and lifted something I could not see past the light, and there was the small electric whir of a motor coming awake, a deep even buzz that I felt in my teeth before I understood what it was. “First we calibrate. I want to know your exact limit. Then I want to take it from you, give it back, and take it again, until the only word you have left is please and the only name you have left is mine.”

She set the wand against my clit and the buzz became the whole world. My back came off the table. The cuffs sang. Every muscle I had pulled toward one bright unbearable point, and Wren leaned over me with that calm surgeon’s face, one hand flat and warm on my heaving stomach, holding me to the table, holding me to it.

“You don’t come until you’ve thanked me for every awful thing you ever did,” she said against my ear, over the buzz, while I shook and climbed and sobbed under her hand. “Start with the locker room. We have all night, and after tonight you don’t go home the same. Now.”