Sheer Dominance (Sheer Submission, Part Nine) by Hannah Ford

Author:Hannah Ford [Ford, Hannah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-08-28T18:30:00+00:00

The silence on the other end of the phone was deafening. I’d never really believed in that phrase before, because how could silence be deafening? It didn’t make sense. But this silence was deafening. It stretched over the phone, almost reverberating in my ears, so strange in its simplicity and emptiness.

“Therapy is a waste of time,” Landon said finally.

“How do you know unless you’ve tried it?”

“How do you know I haven’t tried it?” he shot back.

“Have you?”

“Yes.”

“Well, me too. After my parents died.” I’d seen a therapist right after my parents had died, on the insistence of my aunt, who thought it would be good for me to talk to someone. The therapist was a small birdlike woman named Julie who’d acted like I was a child instead of a teenager. Even so, it was helpful to talk to someone, to get tips on how to deal with my grief, to hear someone tell me that what I was feeling was normal.

“Therapists are useless, Aven. They fill you up with psychobabble and drugs, until you’re dependent on both of them and forced to pay more and more money to get more and more therapy while the whole time you’re getting more and more fucked up.”

“Not if you’re honest with them,” I said. “Not if you go into it with an open mind.”

“Really? Did you tell your therapist what you told me?”

My hand tightened around the phone, thinking about what I’d told him, about the night before my parents had died, how I’d been the one responsible. My mouth went dry and I took a sip of water, but it didn’t help.

“Aven?” he prompted.

I stayed silent.

“Ah. So then maybe you shouldn’t be espousing the virtues of honesty in therapy.”

It was uncomfortable for me, and I wanted to hang up on him.

But I didn’t. I fought through it.

If I wasn’t willing to confront things, to talk about things that were uncomfortable for me, then how could I expect him to do the same?

“If we go to therapy, I’ll talk to the therapist. I’ll tell them the truth.” My throat tightened at the thought of telling a stranger the truth about what happened. And then something even worse – a brief flash of what Landon had told me before, that the only reason I wanted to be with him was because he punished me, that I thought I deserved to be punished for what I’d done, and that was why I was drawn to him.

“I’ll tell the truth and I’ll expect you to do the same,” I said. “This is just… this is too fucked up, and we just… we need to figure out how we can…”

“Aven.”

“Yes.”

“If I agree to this, I need a promise, too.”

“Isn’t it enough to tell you what Paisley said?”

“No. This is far more important.”

“What is it?”

“I need you to promise that no matter what happens, that no matter what a therapist tells us, that we will not give up on this. That we will stay together, no matter how fucked up they tell us we are, how bad they say we are for each other.

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