Punished and Pampered

The clipboard hung on a hook by the door, and I had spent the whole drive telling myself I would not look at it again. I looked at it again.

My name was on the top sheet. Just the first one, Reese, printed in his blocky hand where a normal clinic would have a full file. He had asked for nothing else the day I signed up. No last name, no insurance, no history past the one line I had written and then crossed out and then written again. Trouble sleeping. As if that was the thing that had brought me to a basement office with no sign on the street.

Daniel came in without knocking. People who own a room do not knock.

“You’re early,” he said. He did not look at his watch. He looked at me, the way you look at something you are about to take apart to see how it works. “Good. Up on the table.”

I am thirty-one. I run a team of nine. That morning I had fired a vendor over the phone in the parking garage and felt nothing about it. So I want it on the record that I knew exactly how stupid it was, the thing my body did when he said up on the table, the way my stomach dropped like the floor of an elevator and something low and warm pulled tight without asking me first.

I stood there instead. Small defiance. The last one I had.

“Reese.” He said it flat. Not a question. He never asked questions. “I’m not going to count.”

I got up on the table.

The paper crinkled under me, that thin sheet they roll out fresh, and the sound of it did something to the back of my neck. He washed his hands at the little sink with his back to me. Unhurried. The water ran and ran. I watched the muscles move in his forearms and hated that I was watching, hated the way the hate sat right next to the wanting like they had always been roommates and I was only now coming home to find them sharing a bed.

“Shoes off. Then the slacks.” He dried his hands on a paper towel and folded it in half before he dropped it. Folded it. Who folds a paper towel they are about to throw away. A man who decides what happens to everything in the room, that is who.

My fingers were at my belt before my head agreed to it. That is the part I cannot explain to anyone, not that I did it, but how far ahead of me my hands ran. The buckle. The button. The slacks down over my hips and off, folded by him, of course, taken from my shaking grip and squared away on the chair like evidence.

“Cold in here,” I said. Filling the silence. A grown woman making small talk in her underwear on a doctor’s table.

“It is.” He did not turn the heat up.

He came and stood at the end of the table and put one warm hand flat on my knee, and the relief of it, the simple heat of a palm, embarrassed me more than the cold had. I felt my knees want to fall open. I clamped them. He waited. He has a kind of patience that is worse than force, because force you can brace against, and patience just sits there until you do the work of giving in yourself, until the giving in is yours, with your name on it, on the top sheet.

“You came back,” he said. “Three weeks, and you came back. Tell me why.”

“I told you. I can’t sleep.”

“You sleep fine.” He pressed his thumb into the soft inside of my knee, slow, and my breath went ragged in a way that answered him better than I could. “You can’t be in charge for one single hour. That’s different. That’s what you came back for.”

There it was. The thing I had driven around the block twice to avoid hearing out loud. I opened my mouth to argue and what came out was air.

He moved my knees apart with two hands, just like that, no fight left in them, and I let him, and the let was the whole point and we both knew it. The cold air touched me where I was already wet through the cotton and I shut my eyes so I would not have to watch his face notice.

He noticed.

“Look at that,” Daniel said. Not cruel. Worse than cruel. Pleased, the way you are pleased when a thing you predicted comes true on schedule. “All that attitude in the doorway. And you’re soaked.”

“That’s not.” My voice cracked down the middle. “That’s just.”

“That’s just what?” He hooked one finger in the waistband of my underwear and drew it down so slowly I could have stopped him a hundred times in the time it took. I did not stop him once. The cotton dragged and clung and peeled away and he looked his fill, and the looking went through me like heat through a wire, and I have never in my life wanted to disappear and be seen at the same time the way I wanted both right then.

The thought came in sideways, sharp, unwelcome. This is the most honest you have been with anyone in years and it is happening with your legs open on a vinyl table. I shoved it down. It floated back up.

“Hands at your sides,” he said. “If they move, we start over, and we start over from the door.”

I put my hands flat on the paper. It crinkled. He liked that I obeyed the small thing, I could tell, his mouth did something at one corner, and God help me I wanted to do every small thing in the world if it kept that look on his face.

He pulled the rolling tray over. I had not let myself look at the tray. I looked at it now. There was a thick folded square of soft white on it, and a tub with a blue lid, and beside those a slim wand of pale silicone with a dial set into its base, and the sight of all of it together undid something in my chest, because I understood the order he meant to do them in, and the understanding was its own small drowning.

“You don’t get to be the one who decides anymore,” he said, conversational, snapping one glove and then the other up over his wrists. “Not your bedtime. Not when you eat. Not when you come. You handed that over the day you signed your name and crossed it out and signed it again. I keep the things you can’t be trusted with. Starting tonight, that’s most of you.”

“I didn’t agree to,” I started.

“You’re wet on my table arguing about what you agreed to.” He said it mildly and it landed like a hand around my throat. “Tell me to stop and I stop. That’s the only word that does anything in this room. Everything else you say, I get to ignore. Do you want to say it?”

The word was right there. Stop. Two letters and a hiss. I have said no to a board of directors. I have said no to my own mother. I lay there with my knees fallen open and my hands pinned to crackling paper by nothing but his instruction, and I could not find the one small word that would give me back the parking garage and the fired vendor and the woman who felt nothing.

“No,” I said. Meaning I don’t want to say it. Meaning the opposite of the word he offered. My whole life rearranging itself around that one syllable.

“Good girl.”

I should be ashamed of what those two words did. I am ashamed. The shame did not cancel it. The shame poured straight into it, the way one warm thing pours into another, and the sound that came out of me was thin and high and not a sound I make, and the heat between my legs went liquid and shameless and his, already his.

He scooped two fingers into the blue tub and the smell hit me, clean and powdery and soft, and he warmed it between his gloved fingers before he touched me with it, which somehow was the most devastating mercy of all, that he warmed it first. His hand moved over the inside of one thigh, slow and thorough, the cream cool then warm then nothing, and I bit down on the inside of my cheek because if I made the sound again I would not stop making it.

“Lift,” he said, and his palm slid under the small of my back, and I lifted, I lifted my hips for him without a flicker of the woman who had stood in the doorway, and he slid the thick soft folded square beneath me and I felt the give of it take my weight and the wrongness and the rightness collided so hard I made a noise into my own teeth.

“There,” he murmured. “See how easy. You’ve been carrying all of it for so long. Look how fast you put it down.” His thumb found the slick center of me and circled once, just once, and my back came up off the table. “We’re going to do this in order. You don’t get the wand until you ask for it. And you’re going to ask me out loud, in words, exactly what you want, in this room where there’s no one to hear how badly you want it but me.”

He took his thumb away. I heard myself whine for it. The dial clicked. Somewhere below the edge of the table the wand woke up with a low buzz that I felt in my teeth before I felt it anywhere else, and he held it just close enough that the air between it and me hummed, and he waited, glove resting warm and patient on my hip, for me to be the one to say it.