Dr. Kim told me that it wasn't my fault and that time heals all wounds. I desperately wanted to gain control over the last hurdle in my life and I'd started to feel like no amount of therapy could get me there. The body has reactions that are involuntary she said. The knowledge that I'd been force-fed an aphrodisiac didn't make what I'd gone through any better. Knowing that my body was unable to help its responses, that I was a slave to a chemical didn't help with the guilt and self-hatred I had over what had happened to me in Cantana.
Masturbation and sex in general were major challenges. Even though I started to enjoy my body, I cried the whole time after my father left my bed. I felt so guilty because I'd enjoyed it. I was left with parts of Cantana to pull from just to find pleasure by myself. Self-gratification was torturous, even a year later. I found myself in a constant battle to make peace with my body after it had taken so much abuse. I tried to look in the mirror and see the beautiful girl I'd been before Cantana.
I'd lie in bed at night touching myself. I separated my mind and body, but that was too much like being in Cantana. It was almost an agreement I had to make with myself, a deal that sex was okay, because it wasn't happening to me. Not my mind, just my body. Finally, I learned to let go. I could get to a climax, but only when I thought of the Commandant. I felt as if I was pleasing him with my release and it let me enjoy my self-pleasure. Even though I knew it was a sick fantasy to have, I found I could only think of him and have pleasure when I masturbated.
I rationalized it, but I couldn't admit what I was going through in my therapy sessions. From what I could tell her, Dr. Kim advised me this was expected and natural. She said I was going to feel what I was going to feel and it was okay. I found it embarrassing and conflicting that I couldn't push past my history and find a new way to think about myself and sex.
Between my legs, the hair that I refused to cut had grown full because the skin was so damaged I didn't want to see it. I didn't want to see the scars and discoloration. It was different to touch myself. I guess masturbation is a personal experience for everyone who does it, but I'd never done it before Cantana. I learned to do it for the pleasure of others. So learning to do it for my own pleasure was a challenge, one I'd thought I'd mastered.
Mrs. Donnelly hung around a lot. Somewhere along the way she and my father had developed a friendship. She even encouraged me to take the online courses I needed to become a paralegal. I pulled it together, trying to stop the nightmares and just live, even though I felt like I was holding on to this one dark secret about myself and masturbation. Two secrets if you counted my killing Noel.
Then my father died. I'd been walking a thin tightrope and thought I was on a strong plank of wood. When he died my world shattered. I wasn't healed and his death made me face the hard facts. I'd just buried everything deep and it was ready to surface. I was a burned-out shell of the person I had been—barely moving or breathing and certainly not thinking.
My therapist suggested I take self-defense. It helped. The classes let me take control of myself and my life. It was as if life didn't have to happen to me. I could survive it, no matter what hardships life placed in my path. I also started building my porn collection about that time.
Something about dominating my abusers let me release Cantana in a way that nothing else had. Not that I wanted to top men in general, just my abusers. I felt better except I still couldn't even think to masturbate without the aid of my memories of the Commandant. Only instead of being dominated by him, I dominated him in the fantasies.
I'd survived Cantana and I'd survived my father's death. I started to feel I could survive anything—except love. My first love was murdered in front of me. After that, losing the last person on earth I knew loved me unconditionally didn't make the idea of entering into a relationship fun. In fact, it was terrifying. Opening my heart up to a stranger and knowing that person could die made me leery of taking the risk. Still, I tried dating after I took the self-defense classes. It was the next step, according to my therapist.
I never seemed to get to the magical date where sex occurred, though. Part of the problem was I didn't want to explain the scars. I was broken by my experience and afraid I would expose it every time I met someone new. My walls were up and I couldn't get to a place where I could let go or let them down for even a night.
Then there was Jeffrey Dixon, the partner I worked for at the law firm. I still didn't think I was ready for sex. My therapist encouraged the relationship. I supposed she had every reason to think I was ready because I had stopped admitting how much I still thought about the Commandant.
Jeffrey seemed no-strings enough. He was devoted to his job, and not all that physically attractive to me. He was my height, with black hair and brown eyes. I thought when he finally asked me out after nearly a year of working for the firm that it would be good. Well, I thought that my therapist must be right—or if I wanted to truly be as healthy as Dr. Kim thought I was, dating him was the way to prove it. Jeffrey knew my history and it didn't seem to bother him. So we dated. We kept the relationship quiet and strictly outside of work because I didn't want anyone to find out.
The fact that he was technically my boss made it easier. I guess the idea that he had some power over me appealed to me on the same level as my dark fantasies. As if that was the dynamic, the trick, I could play on myself to make the situation sexual. When the time came to undress in front of him, though, I froze. He said it didn't bother him. We tried again and again over the next month. Still every time the moment to move forward with our relationship came, I couldn't do it. My body shut down hard, as if it refused to be aroused by him.
I'm not sure if it was a lack of physical attraction on both our parts, or if it was what I finally admitted to my therapist on my last session with her. I told Dr. Kim that I feared that my sexual experiences in my past had me desiring a less loving or caring relationship. I'd gotten to the point where I enjoyed the being forced part. I needed my choices to be taken away.
She used words like 'submissive' and 'masochist' to explain who I was in Cantana. I guess I'd found a sort of freedom in not having to think or respond because my body did so whether I wanted it to or not, whether I liked it or not. What I feared most about Cantana was that the whole nightmare had changed me so much I might never be able to have a healthy sexual relationship. Once I had this revelation and admitted it to her, she called it a breakthrough. I thought of her as a quack and was unable to continue therapy with her.
Jeffrey and I stopped seeing each other. There wasn't a conversation about it or even a break-up. He stopped calling, emailing, and texting me outside of work. I didn't care. We saw each other at work and I transferred to a different partner on the same floor a month later. To see us together now, no one would have ever known we'd tried dating for a bit.
Maybe it was Jared's kiss that had me thinking about all of this as I watched the sunrise. I was confused by my response to it. The fact that I'd reacted to him, however slightly, was rather overwhelming. I couldn't deny it had been there. I needed to take control of something, anything, in my life. I couldn't go home until it was safe, and despite everything else, Jared did make me feel safe. I had no doubt that he could protect me, especially now that I didn't feel able to save myself.
I stared into the dense woods around the cabin from the porch. After everything that Jared had admitted in the kitchen I wasn't sure what I wanted or how I felt. Travelling into my recent past didn't feel any more comfortable for me than reliving my memories of Cantana. New questions developed in my mind about my feelings for Jared, the most persistent being why? What was it about him that I found attractive, something I hadn't found in the last six years?
