Chapter 2: Cracking The Therapist
The silence in the room was a physical thing, a third presence sitting between them on the stained industrial carpet. Dr. Aris Thorne’s pen had stopped moving five minutes ago. It just hovered above the digital notepad, a sleek, obsolete gesture in a world of voice-recorded sessions. The camera’s red light in the corner was a unblinking cyclops. Bethany watched it watch her, and the thrill was sharper than the one she got from the man last night.
“He came on my tits,” she said, her voice flat, a bored news anchor reporting on municipal zoning. “Not my face. I don’t let them do that anymore. It stings the eyes. But the tits… he seemed really into them. Kept calling them ‘big beautiful pillows’. Like a bad poet.”
She shifted, the cheap vinyl of the client chair groaning in protest under her weight. She saw Aris’s knuckles, the ones holding the stylus, whiten just a fraction. A tiny fissure in the professional veneer. Got you.
“Bethany,” he said, and his voice was the same calibrated instrument, warm but distant, like sunlight through thick glass. “We’ve spoken about this. The graphic recounting of encounters. It’s a deflection. A way to avoid talking about what happens before. Or after.”
“Before was three gin and tonics on his UBI tab. After was me wiping his jizz off with a towel that smelled of someone else’s mildew, and a two-kilometer walk home because I didn’t want to wait for a pod.” She leaned forward, letting her blouse gape slightly. She saw his eyes flicker down, then immediately back to her face. A surgeon avoiding a contaminated field. “What more is there to say, Aris? It’s the same shit, different week. The script is getting boring.”
“The script is a choice.” He set the stylus down with a precise click. “You use sexuality like a flare gun. A distress signal you light to see who comes running, and then you’re horrified by the shadows it attracts.”
“Philosophy now? I pay my community care credits for this?” She laughed, a short, brittle sound. “Twenty years ago, this was called being a free spirit. A sexually liberated woman. Now I’m a ‘personality-disordered liability’. The behavior didn’t change. The mirror did.”
Aris sighed, a real one this time, his shoulders dropping a millimeter. She catalogued it. A point for her. “The context changed. You changed. The world isn’t punishing you for being thirty-seven, Bethany. It’s reacting to the fact that these encounters leave you emptier, more fractured. You told me last month you miss the violin until your hands ache. That’s the loss we should be focusing on. Not the… logistics of strangers.”
The violin. The word was a scalpel slipped between her ribs. She looked away, at the motivational poster behind him. A generic mountain peak above the words ‘Rise Above’. She wanted to rip it from the wall. Rise above what? The empty bed? the silent apartment? The way her own body felt like a foreign, cumbersome landscape?
“The violin doesn’t want me back,” she muttered.
The rest of the session blurred into the usual terrain: medication adherence, dietary logs, the useless mindfulness app the system had mandated. He was careful, solid, immovable as a lighthouse. And she was the ship, circling, trying to crash against him just to feel the impact. As she stood to leave, shrugging her coat on, she let her hand brush his desk.
“Same time next week?” she asked, holding his gaze a beat too long.
“Always,” he said. But his eyes, just for a millisecond, dipped to the curve of her hip where her coat hung open. Or did she imagine it? She lived on that diet of imagined glances.
Her apartment was a tomb of curated nostalgia. The violin case, dust-furred, lay on a shelf like a relic. Photos of a thinner, brighter Bethany laughing on stages, arms around friends whose names she’d half-forgotten, filled a digital frame. Now, the screen was dark. The silence was a humming pressure in her ears.
She poured a drink, didn’t bother with the tonic. The ice cracked like bones. She opened her pad, the glow painting her face in sickly blue. The forums were already buzzing. The Dive Bar, they called it. A place for the unmoored, the hypersexual, the terminally bored. Her profile was a decade old, a ghost of her former self staring back with defiant eyes.
A message pinged. User: HollowPoint. Hey. Saw your last post. You into pain?
Bethany took a long swallow. Her skin felt too tight, buzzing with a static energy that the session with Aris had stirred but not settled. She typed back, her fingers decisive. Depends. What kind?
The kind that leaves a mark. The kind that reminds you you’re real.
A shiver, not entirely unpleasant, traced her spine. This was the dance. The dangerous, stupid dance. When she was twenty-five, this was an adventure. Men wrote sonnets to her recklessness. Now, at thirty-seven, it was a pathology. But the need was the same. A screaming void in her center that only the sharpest sensations could momentarily fill.
Send a pic, she typed.
His came first. A crude, angled shot of a hard cock, thick and veined, gripped in a rough hand. No face. Just the weapon. It was transactional. It was honest.
Her heart hammered against her ribs. This was the pivot. The door out of the crushing silence. She stood, walked to the mirror in her dim hallway. Looked at the woman there—the softness at her jaw, the weary eyes, the full breasts heaving with a breath she couldn’t quite catch. She unbuttoned her blouse, let it fall. Pinched her nipple, hard, watching the pink flesh bloom under her fingers. She took the picture, making sure the stretch marks on her side were visible, the soft swell of her belly. A document of the now. She sent it.
Address, came the immediate reply.
She sent it too. The UBI block was a warren of identical units. He could be anyone. The thrill was metallic on her tongue.
Twenty-three minutes later, a knock. Not a doorbell chime, but three firm, percussive raps. She opened it. He was taller than she’d imagined, shoulders tense under a synthetic leather jacket. His face was all angles and shadow, eyes dark and devoid of the faux-warmth of the men who used to buy her drinks. He looked at her, at her bare skin still visible under the open robe, and his expression didn’t change. He just stepped inside, pushing the door closed behind him with a final click that echoed.
“Bethany?”
“Who else?” she said, trying to sound flippant, but her voice wavered.
He didn’t speak. He grabbed her, his hands rough on her upper arms, and pushed her back against the wall. The impact knocked the air from her lungs. He smelled of ozone and cheap stim-sticks. His mouth came down on hers, not a kiss but an invasion, teeth scraping her lip. She could taste blood. Her body went rigid, then a flood of heat dissolved her bones. Yes. This.
He pulled back, breathing heavily. “You want a reminder?” he growled.
“Show me,” she breathed.
He ripped the robe the rest of the way open. His eyes raked over her, and there was no admiration in it, only a cold, assessing hunger. He spun her around to face the wall, her cheek pressed against the cool plaster. One hand fumbled with his belt, the other shoved between her legs from behind, his fingers rough, probing, not bothering with any pretense of gentleness.
“You’re wet,” he grunted, a note of surprise. “Already a fucking mess for me.”
She was. Shame and desire twisted together in her gut. He shoved his fingers inside her, a brutal, stretching intrusion. She cried out, the sound muffled by the wall.
“Quiet,” he hissed. He withdrew his fingers, and she heard the tear of a foil packet, the swift roll of condom. Then the blunt, insistent pressure of his cock, nudging against her. He didn’t ask. He didn’t guide. He just pushed, a hard, relentless invasion that burned and filled her in one brutal stroke.
“Fuck!” she gasped, her fingers scrambling against the wall.
He set a punishing rhythm immediately, his hips slamming into the soft flesh of her ass with each drive. His hand twisted in her hair, pulling her head back, arching her spine. The pain was bright, clarifying. Each thrust was a punctuation mark in the blank page of her evening. He grunted, animalistic, into her ear. “Take it, you fat fucking slut. Take all of it.”
The words were corrosive. They were also, perversely, an absolution. He saw her. The messy, hungry, unacceptable her. And he was using her for it. His free hand groped her breast, squeezing hard, pinching her nipple until she saw white sparks behind her eyelids. The pleasure was a dark current underneath the pain, swirling together, impossible to separate. She was a body. A function. A hole to be used. The terrible freedom of it made her sob.
His pace grew frantic, erratic. His grip on her hair tightened. “Gonna fill this condom up for you,” he panted. “Gonna pump it full. You want that? You want my come in this rubber inside you?”
She couldn’t speak. She nodded, a frantic jerk of her head, and felt a climax rip through her, unexpected and violent, her muscles clamping around him in ragged pulses. It was less pleasure than a seismic release of tension, a short-circuit in her nervous system.
With a final, choked groan, he drove deep and held there, shuddering. She felt the condom swell inside her with his release. They stayed like that for a moment, a grotesque statue, both breathing in ragged gasps. Then he pulled out, the loss sudden and profound. He disposed of the condom in her waste bin with a clinical detachment.
He zipped himself up, adjusted his jacket. He looked at her, still slumped against the wall, robe puddled at her feet, marked and used.
“Later,” he said, and opened the door. The hallway air, cool and impersonal, washed over her. The door snicked shut.
Silence. Deeper now. The pain began to announce itself—a throbbing in her scalp, a deep ache between her legs, the taste of blood still in her mouth. She slid down the wall to the floor, the plaster rough against her bare back. The tears came then, hot and silent. She wasn't sure why. There was no catharsis, only a deeper hollow than before.
Her pad, on the table, glowed again. Another message, from a different user. She stared at the empty hallway door, listening to the distant hum of the city, and wondered when, exactly, Aris Thorne would finally break. And what would be left of her when he did.