Chapter 14: Therapy of Flesh
The silence in Iris’s apartment congealed around her for three days. She didn’t study. She didn’t answer her phone. She slept in the stale sheets, smelling of Ben and their shattered attempt, and moved only to microwave forgotten meals or to touch herself absently, mechanically, achieving nothing but a fleeting physical spasm that left her emptier than before.
The love-bites on her inner thighs, mottled purple and yellow now, ached with a delicious tenderness. They were the only real thing. Proof. She traced them constantly, pressing until the pain flared, remembering the split-second of his mouth there, the confusion of affection and possession. It hadn’t been enough. It had only carved the hole inside her wider, more defined.
On the morning of her appointment, she dressed with a deliberate carelessness. A short black skirt, no tights. A simple cotton top. She wanted the bruises to be visible if she chose to show them. She wanted the option.
Dr. Thorne’s office felt colder than she remembered. The antiseptic smell was a slap. He was behind his desk, scribbling in a file, and looked up with his usual calibrated kindness. “Iris. How have you been this week?”
She didn’t sit in the patient’s chair. She stood in the center of the room, under the brutal fluorescence, and let her bag slide from her shoulder to the floor with a thud.
“He left,” she said, her voice flat. “After. He did exactly what I asked, and then he left, and he won’t be back.”
Thorne placed his pen down carefully. “And what was it you asked for?”
“Everything. And nothing.” She took a step toward his desk.Then another. “I asked him to be sweet to me while he ruined me. To tell me I was beautiful while he treated me like a worthless cunt. And he did. He was perfect.” Her eyes were dry, wide, fixed on Thorne. “And now the hunger is worse. It’s like he turned on a tap in a desert. I’m thirstier than I was before I drank.”
“Sit down, Iris. Let’s talk about this.”
“No.” She reached for the hem of her skirt. In one fluid, defiant motion, she hitched it up to her hips. The pale skin of her inner thighs was a canvas of decay, the love-bites stark and violent against the white. She saw his gaze drop, saw the professional detachment in his eyes flicker, just for an instant, with something else. Something human and dark.
It was all the invitation she needed.
She closed the distance, stepping around the desk. He started to rise, a hand up, a therapist’s gesture. “Iris, boundaries—”
She didn’t let him finish. She pushed him back into his swivel chair and climbed onto him, straddling his lap, her skirt pooling around their hips. She was close enough to see the faint grey stubble on his jaw, the surprising striations of green in his hazel eyes. The leather chair groaned under their combined weight.
“He couldn’t fill it,” she whispered, her lips inches from his. Her hands gripped the back of the chair, caging him in. “Can you?”
“This is highly inappropriate.” His voice was tight, but he didn’t push her off. His hands hovered at her waist, a paralytic indecision.
“I know what you are,” she breathed. She ground her hips down, feeling the rigid line of his erection through his trousers. A sharp, victorious thrill shot through her. “You study people like me. You write papers about our voids. Don’t you want to know what the void feels like from the inside?”
She took his right hand, which was still hovering, and guided it under her skirt, past the fabric of her underwear. He didn’t resist. His fingers were cool and dry. She pressed them against herself, already wet, a humiliating, eager soak. “See?” she murmured, her confession hot against his ear. “It’s always hungry. Ben’s tenderness, his cruelty… it was just better seasoning. It just made me crave the meal more.”
His index finger slid inside her, then a second. It was a clinical motion, exploratory. His thumb found her clit and began to circle, not with passion, but with a dreadful, precise expertise. He might as well have been taking a pulse.
She moaned, her head falling back. The contrast was electric. The cold room, the diagrams on the wall, his detached touch, and the fire it was stoking in her gut. She began to rock against his hand, taking his fingers deeper.
“Some voids,” he whispered, his voice a low, therapeutic rasp in the sterile air, “are ontological, Iris. They are a fact of your being. No person, no act, can fill them. You can pour entire oceans into them. They remain.”
“Then let me drown,” she gasped, her hips moving faster. His thumb pressed harder, a pinpoint of relentless pressure. “Just… fucking… let me drown.”
His other hand came up, not to caress, but to grasp her chin, forcing her to look at him. His expression was unreadable—a mask of professional concern cracking at the edges to reveal a profound, weary emptiness that mirrored her own. “This is a replication. Not a solution. You are trying to fuck your way out of a hole that only gets deeper with every encounter.”
“I don’t care,” she sobbed, her orgasm building, coiling tight from that expert, impersonal thumb. “I just need it. I need…”
The climax broke over her, a sharp, silent convulsion that shuddered through her frame. It was joyless and essential, like a sneeze. She slumped against him, spent, the smell of her own sex mingling with the office’s sterility.
For a long moment, there was only the sound of her ragged breathing. His fingers were still inside her, motionless. Slowly, he withdrew them. He didn’t wipe his hand on his pants. He just let it rest on the arm of the chair, glistening.
The power dynamic had subtly, irrevocably shifted. The room was no longer a consulting room. It was a confessional booth after the priest had climbed in beside the sinner.
She nuzzled into the crook of his neck, a grotesque parody of intimacy. “Do you live alone, Dr. Thorne?”
He stiffened. A beat of silence stretched, thin and dangerous. “Yes,” he finally said, the word dragged from somewhere deep.
She lifted her head, her green eyes luminous with a terrible, innocent cunning. “I could cook dinner for you. Like your wife did.” She had done her research. She knew about the divorce, the empty house. “I could come over. You could call me by her name, if you wanted. I wouldn’t mind. We could sleep together. In your bed.” Her voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper. “I would let you do anything you wanted to me. Or with me. Anything at all. You wouldn’t have to be my doctor anymore. You could just be a man. And I could be the void you get to explore for real.”
She felt his heart hammering against her chest. Felt the violent, conflicted tremor that ran through him. His hand, the one that had been inside her, finally clenched into a fist.
He didn’t say yes.
But he hadn’t said no.
And in the crushing silence of that suspended answer, Iris finally felt the momentum she craved. She had jumped from the cliff of one man’s decency, and now she was free-falling toward another man’s corruption. The air whistled past her ears, and for the first time in days, she didn’t feel the hunger. She only felt the terrifying, exhilarating pull of the ground rushing up to meet her.