The Scrapbook of Shame

The book she kept was pink, and it lived on the low shelf where I could see it.

I had told myself a hundred times that I would not look at it. That morning I broke that promise before my coffee was cool. The cover was soft cloth, the corner already frayed where my own thumb had worried it. Wren had written my name on the front in her round, patient hand. Not the name on my license. The other one. The one she gave me the night I stopped being the man who signed payroll for forty people and started being the thing she was building instead.

I sat on the rug because the chairs were not for me anymore. That rule was three weeks old and it still made my face hot.

I opened to the first page. There I was, knees together, hands flat on my thighs the way she taught me, eyes red from crying and shining like I had been given a gift. Under the photo she had written the date and one word. Good. My stomach dropped the way it does on a stair you misjudge in the dark, and lower down, against my will, something pulled tight and warm and eager.

I hated that. I want to be honest about how much I hated it, because the hate was the only thing left that felt like mine.

A man does not get hard looking at his own shame. That was the thought, sharp and clean, cutting through the warm fog like a wire. I was a grown man of thirty four. I had a body that knew better. And it was already lying to me, already swelling under the thin cotton she dressed me in now, already telling the truth that my mouth would never say.

I turned the page.

Each one was a step down a staircase I could not see the bottom of. The day she took my belts away. The day she put me in the soft padded thing and photographed me from behind while I covered my face. The day I learned to ask for what I needed in the small voice, the one that came out of me on its own now when I was frightened, and I had been frightened so often lately. She caught all of it. She framed all of it. She made it permanent, which was the cruelest part and the part that made my throat go dry with wanting.

I heard her on the stairs before I saw her. I knew that rhythm. Slow, unhurried, a woman who had never once in her life had to rush for anyone.

I should have closed the book. I should have put it back exactly square on the shelf and sat with empty hands and pretended. Instead I froze with it open on my lap, caught, and the catching was its own kind of heat that I could not explain to you without sounding broken.

“There he is,” Wren said from the doorway.

I did not look up. Looking up was a thing I had to earn now, and I had not earned it, and the not-earning sat on the back of my neck like a warm hand.

She came across the room. Bare feet, slow, until her shins were level with my face and I could smell the lotion she wore, something with milk in it, something that had wormed its way so deep into my head that one breath of it loosened my spine. My cock jumped. I felt the wet start of it against the cotton and my whole face went up in flame.

“You found your book,” she said. Not a question. She crouched, and her fingers came under my chin, lifting, and I let her lift it because there was nothing in me strong enough to stop her anymore. “Were you looking at how far you have come?”

“I wasn’t,” I said, and it came out wrong, came out small, came out in that voice. “I was just.”

“Shh.” One word and the rest of my sentence died. She turned the book on my lap with two fingers, found the page she wanted without looking, the day she first put me over her knee. There was the photo of my own face mid-sob, mouth open, and there was the thing my body was doing now while I stared at it. “Look at you then. Look at you now. You’re leaking, sweetheart.”

I shut my eyes. Hot shame, and under the shame the swell of it, the awful gratitude, the part of me that bloomed when she named what I was doing.

“Eyes,” she said.

I opened them.

“Good boy.” She let the words sit on me. She knew what they did. She had spent months learning the exact weight of them, where to set them so they pressed on the soft new place she had opened in my chest. My cock ached. My eyes stung. Both at once, always both at once now, the wires crossed somewhere I could not reach to fix them.

She set the scrapbook aside on the rug, open, face up, so it watched us. Then she sat back on the low ottoman and patted her thighs once.

“Come here.”

The thought came up in me fast and ugly, a flare of the old man clawing for the surface. You are a person. You run a company. Get up off this floor and walk out the door and be a person again. It was a real voice and it was mine and for one half of one second I almost believed it could move my legs.

It didn’t. My legs were already moving the other way, already crawling, knees on the rug, the soft thing between them making its quiet crinkle that I hated and waited for and could not live without now. I crossed the three feet to her like it was three miles, and the whole way the book watched me, and the watching went straight to my cock like her hand was already on it.

I draped myself over her lap the way I had been taught. Face down. Hands hanging. Hips settled across her thighs so that the hard ache of me pressed right into the muscle of her leg, and there was no hiding it, there had never been any hiding from her, that was the whole terrible point.

Her palm settled on the small of my back. Warm. Heavy. Not moving yet.

“You weren’t supposed to touch the book without me,” she said, conversational, like we were discussing the weather. Her other hand came to rest on the curve of my ass, over the cotton, and just rested there, and I shook. “Were you.”

“No, Mommy.”

The word fell out of me. It still did that, surprised me every time, like a tooth coming loose. And the saying of it kicked the heat up so hard I pushed against her thigh before I could stop, a small helpless grind, and she felt it, of course she felt it, she felt everything.

“Oh,” she said softly. Pleased. “Look how badly you want to be a good boy for me. Even while you’re in trouble. Especially while you’re in trouble.”

I pressed my face into the cushion so she would not see what my mouth was doing, which was trying to thank her. The wrongness of that, the urge to thank her for catching me, for owning me, for keeping the record of every way she had taken me apart, lit up every nerve I had.

She peeled the cotton down. Slow. The air hit me and I clenched and she made a low sound, approving, the sound she made when I gave her something true without meaning to. Her fingers traced lower, between, found the place she had been training open for two weeks now with her patient hands and her cool sweet voice, and I sucked in a breath that came out shaking on the exhale.

“Hush,” she murmured. “Mommy has you.”

From the floor the open scrapbook showed me my own past face, crying, ruined, grateful. Her thumb pressed slow circles where I had no defense left at all, and my cock wept against her thigh, and I heard myself start to make the small sound, the one that was not words yet, the one that came before I begged.

She reached to the basket beside the ottoman without hurry. I knew the basket. My whole body knew the basket. I heard the soft click of a cap, the wet sound of her warming something on her fingers, and every muscle I had went liquid and tense at once, dread and want twisted so tight I could not have told you where one ended.

“Since you wanted to look at how far you’ve come,” she said, and I felt her settle the cool slick tip of it against me, just barely, just enough to promise, “let’s give the book a new page.”

She pressed.

And the man I used to be went under for good, somewhere I have never been able to find him since, and I opened my mouth against the cushion to beg her for the very thing that was going to finish me.