For all the money he had to pay off his lawyer, he didn’t seem to care about paying him to bring him decent clothing whenever he came to visit. He was the only patient on the behavioral wing who insisted on wearing the paper scrubs that were provided when you didn’t come in with any clothes. It didn’t do any good to imagine him being in an orange jumpsuit instead of the light blue scrubs when I knew he would never face justice through the court system. The system was far too broken to speak out for the niece that he so brutally raped and murdered.
“What’s up, doc?” Brandon sneered as Thomas led him into the room.
“Go take a well-deserved break,” I told Thomas, “you probably need it after having to deal with him all day.”
I wasn’t worried about speaking kindly to Brandon. My sessions weren’t recorded, and my notes were in a short-hand only I could translate. The worst thing that could happen was if he made a complaint against me, then an investigation could open up, and it would be a headache for a while, but nothing would come of it. I’ve helped far too many patients who have made great improvements with their lives for the board to think I was doing anything unethical, so fuck him if he didn’t like my frame of mind.
“You should work on your bedside manner, aren’t you therapists supposed to be all sunshine and daisies and shit rainbows out your ass?” Brandon grumbled as he took his seat. He was smaller than I was in stature and slender. By no means washe unfit; I just viewed him as a toothpick that could easily be snapped in half despite his lean muscle.
“And if you were a patient deserving of that behavior, that is what you would be receiving. You’re not though, are you, Mr. Everett?” I placed my notebook on my knee as I took my seat in my usual armchair. Thomas didn’t stick around when I dismissed him, leaving me and the pedophile unchaperoned.
“What do you want to hear, doc?” I resisted the urge to strike him every time he called me doc. He knew damn well I wasn’t a doctor.
“Where did we leave off last time? We were discussing what brought you into the behavioral clinic, but the little stunt you pulled during the group session the other day messed up our schedule, didn’t it?”
Brandon smiled, an unkind smile that showed too many of his teeth. With his bald head and sunken dark eyes, he looked like a demonically possessed version of Vin Diesel.
“My outburst wasn’t entirely my own doing,” he stated, slouching back in the middle of the sofa like this wasn’t going to be a horribly uncomfortable conversation. His body language always became more relaxed when the topics were going to start venturing into the realm of the taboo.
“Then whose doing was it? I spoke with Jessica while they had you in solitary. No one provoked you during group.”
“It was hers, doc, she looks so young and so innocent. Her eyes, I bet her eyes would look even prettier if shewore her hair in pigtails,” his tongue darted out to lick over his lips like a snake catching scent of prey.
“Who is ‘her’? You can’t blame someone else’s presence for your behavior.”
“The new girl, I don’t remember her name. Her name doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is how tight she is, and doc, she looks like she could be tight. She looks like she could be young enough to be untouched. With the right clothes, she might even pass for a pre-teen.” The desire was evident in his voice; the more he talked, the stronger it grew. His hands rubbed up and down his thighs as he caressed himself, his muscles tight as he thought about her, sickening arousal becoming apparent.
Now that I knew who he was talking about, it took every ounce of willpower I had not to kill him on the spot. She was safe; he couldn’t touch her while she was here. Brandon was too well watched to get away with hurting another patient so intimately. Just the thought of his hands on her had me seeing red.
“None of the patients here with you has anything to do with your outburst, Mr. Everett. We talked about accountability in our last session, do you remember?” I masked the edge in my tone easily enough. If he knew he could get under my skin, then he would gain the upper hand.
“They do when they eye fuck you all day and then pretend you don’t exist!” He shouted, though he remained seated. He knewhis place in the pecking order, and I wasn’t one to be pushed around by fucking sickos that liked to abuse children.
“Is that what you told the police when they arrested you for your niece's murder?” I made a few notes in my notebook, ignoring the rage starting to simmer in his eyes as we approached the real reason he was in my office.
“I told them what she told me, that she loved me, I couldn’t let them take that away from me.”
“When did she tell you that she loved you?” It infuriated me that he was victim-blaming. I wouldn’t get anywhere arguing with him over it; I had to play the part.
“Years before anything finally happened. She said I was always her favorite uncle, bringing her candy and toys all the time. We even had sleepovers where she’d lie and say she had nightmares just so she could sleep in bed with me.”
“All of those could be considered innocent things for her age; what made you think they were anything more than her wanting to spend time with her uncle?”
He didn’t answer right away; —the pervert was probably lost in a memory of molesting his niece, or something just as disturbing.
“She never told me no.” He finally said. My knuckles were nearly white from gripping the pen too tightly.
“Did she consent to you? At seven years old, do you think she understood what that meant? To give you permission to dosomething to her body that the state of Virginia says you have to be a legal adult over the age of eighteen to give?”
“That was up to her parents to teach her, not me. But I’ll tell you this, when I’m able to put my fingers in a pussy that young and they’re not yelling at me that it hurts, they’re enjoying it.”
My stomach twisted as I tried to separate myself from his point of view and the way he saw an innocent child. I made more notes on the paper, but there was a game that needed to be played first. Brandon was doing nothing more than hammering the final nails in his coffin, the more we spoke.
“How old was she when you started touching her like that?”
“Claire was five the first time she let me play with her pussy, she even licked my fingers for me so they’d feel better going in.” Holding onto the knowledge that he wasn’t going to make it long enough to see his trial in court was the only thing that kept me from plunging my pen into his eye. A five-years-old was an innocent baby, not someone to be sexualized by a monster.
“Did her parents ever suspect the relationship the two of you had going on?” I used the term relationship because, to perverts like Brandon, that’s essentially what it was. Their own perverse version of a true relationship. He knew he was hurting her; he knew she wasn’t old enough to give any form of consent, but he convinced himself in his mind that it was consensual.
