He doesn't try to convince me that actually, I am OK, that I'm just being dramatic, that I'm overreacting to a perfectly normal experience.
He doesn't do what Derek used to do, which was dismiss my feelings as inconvenient obstacles to his own pleasure.
"Tell me," he says instead. "Explain it to me."
The words stick in my throat.
This is the part where I'm supposed to be good with words. This is the part where my supposed talent for language should kick in and help me articulate the tangled mess inside my head.
I've written forty-seven stories about women who feel exactly what I'm feeling right now, and I've found the perfect sentences to describe their shame, and their longing, and their desperate need to be understood.
But those were fictional women.
Those were characters I could control, puppets I could manipulate into saying exactly what needed to be said at exactly the right moment.
I'm not a character.
I'm a real person with real emotions that don't come with a backspace key, and right now I can barely string together a coherent thought.
"My whole life," I start, and my voice cracks on the second word. "My whole life I've felt like something was wrong with me."
He's watching me with total attention. Not the performative listening I've experienced from therapists, and counselors, and well-meaning teachers who were really just waiting for their turn to talk.
This is something different.
This is him actually hearing me, actually caring about what I'm trying to say.
"Even when I was little…" I force the words out through the tightness in my chest. "IknewI wasn't like the other kids. They could make friends so easily, just walk up to someone on the playground and start talking, and within five minutes they'd be best friends. I could never do that. I would watch them from the corner of the schoolyard, trying to figure out what they were doing differently, what secret social code they all understood that I couldn't crack."
The tears keep coming, but I don't try to stop them.
"My mother used to tell me I was too sensitive. Too much in my own head. She said I needed to stop daydreaming and start paying attention to the real world, but the real world never made sense to me the way the worlds inside my head did. The real world was loud, and confusing, and full of people who seemed to operate according to rules I couldn't understand."
He strokes my cheek with his thumb, wiping away tears that are immediately replaced by more.
"So I retreated. Into books, at first. Then into my own writing. I created characters who felt the things I felt, who wanted the things I wanted, and I gave them happy endings because I couldn't figure out how to get one for myself. And the more I retreated, the more disconnected I became fromeveryone around me, eventually, I just stopped trying to connect at all."
The words are tumbling out now, faster than I can organize them, a flood of confession that's been building for years.
"I hate myself," I whisper. "I've always hated myself. For being weird. For being different. For wanting things that nice girls aren't supposed to want. My mother found one of my stories once…"
I can't even finish as the memory floods in. My sobbing gets louder. The pain of that day, so real again.
The unmasked man caresses my cheek, paying attention to nothing but me. "You can do this, Scarletta," he whispers softly. "What happened when your mother found your story?"
I want to stop here. I want to pack up all my feelings and put them in a suitcase, then I want to lock that suitcase up and hide it under the bed.
But that's what I always do. And the thing no one tells you about packing your suitcase like that is… you have to take it with you, no matter where you go.
So instead… I find the courage to keep going. "She told me that good women don't think about sex, don't fantasize about being controlled, don't dream about being taken, and used, and owned. And I believed her. I believed that the darkness inside me was proof that something was fundamentally broken, that I was damaged goods, that no one would ever want me if they knew what I really was."
His hand cups my face, warm and steady.
"So I hid. I created ScarletSins and wrote all the things I couldn't say out loud, and for a while that was enough. I could pretend to be brave online while being invisible in real life. I could explore my darkness through fiction while maintaining the illusion that the real me was normal, and acceptable, and not a complete freak."
I'm shaking now, full-body tremors that have nothing to do with the temperature of the room.
"The cross was amazing," I manage. "It was everything I've ever written about and more. The pain and the pleasure and the feeling of being completely at your mercy, completely out of control. It was exactly what I've been fantasizing about for years."
