Dinner Party (2): Three Minutes

I had stopped tasting the food a while ago.

I ate it anyway, a small forkful at a time, because a person who is eating looks like a person who isn't thinking. I didn't want to look suspicious and draw any of Derek's attention onto me.

Although I was probably safe for the moment because all of his attention was laser focused on Lindsay's ass as she walked around the table in just a chef's apron, serving the next course of her home-cooked meal to each of us.

Something was dangerously wrong here, but I needed to be patient and collect more data to find out exactly what had gone wrong.

Derek was not a clever person. I'd known him for eight months, and I had once watched him lose an argument to a parking meter. Whatever this was, he hadn't thought it up himself. Somebody had handed it to him, or he had tripped over it. The thing that bothered me most was that I couldn't say what it was. I can usually say what things are.

So I watched and waited for a gap. Kayla talked about bridesmaids. Olivia offered an opinion that nobody answered. Lindsey got up and sat down and got up again. Every time she passed behind Derek's chair, he put a hand out, without looking, and she let it land wherever it landed.

I wanted to stand up and ask the three of them what in God's name was the matter with them. That was the sensible thing to do. But the sensible thing was to be patient, and not be a bitch about it, and wait for my turn like everyone else.

Eventually Kayla stopped to drink. Lindsey was leaning over to top up Derek's glass. I put on the brightest, dumbest smile I owned.

"What about you, Lindsey? I didn't even know you were in town. What brought you all the way up from LA?"

"Oh!" She set the pitcher down and laughed, and it turned into a giggle, high and fizzy. I'd listened to that woman through a laptop every Thursday for six months and had never once heard her giggle. "Well, sweetie, it's a little embarrassing. It was my anniversary, actually."

---

Lindsey's POV

The candle on our table kept going out, and each time it did, Carl leaned over and relit it with the restaurant's matchbook, shielding the flame with his hand as if we were camping, and then sat back looking so satisfied with himself that I didn't have the heart to tell him the draft was coming from the door behind his own chair.

"I had a toast," he said. He was going through the pockets of his jacket for the second time, and I could see the corner of the index card sticking out of his shirt pocket, where he'd put it so he wouldn't lose it. "I wrote it out at work so I wouldn't ramble, and now I've rambled for five minutes about not being able to find it, so I think the card had the right idea."

"It's in your shirt, honey."

He looked down and found it and went pink, and then he read me the whole thing off the card in a slightly shaky voice with his water glass raised, because he'd forgotten to pick up the wine. It was about the apartment in Glendale with the broken oven where we'd eaten cereal for dinner the whole first month we were married, and about Lisbon, and about how he still looked for my car in the driveway every night when he turned onto our street. By the end of it, I was crying into my napkin, and he was crying a little too, and the waiter, who had come over to ask about dessert, turned around and went away again.

"Twenty-six years," Carl said, wiping his eyes with the heel of his hand. "I don't know how you put up with me."

"I like putting up with you," I said, and I reached across and took his hand, and we sat there like that for a while without saying anything, the way you can after a long time.

Then my purse started buzzing against the leg of my chair, and I knew from the pattern which phone it was. I keep a second one for the practice, and the only calls that come through on it at night are from the crisis number I give my clients, so I had it out and in my hand before I'd really decided to look.

The screen said HALE, DEREK (couples, inactive), and my stomach turned over, because I remembered him very well. He was the one who'd sat on my couch with his knees spread and talked over that quiet red-haired girl for four sessions while she folded herself smaller and smaller beside him. She'd left him two weeks ago. I didn't believe for a second that he was the one in danger, but I couldn't stop thinking about what a man like that might do in the second week, or who he might do it to.

"Go on," Carl said, because he'd seen my face and he has known what that face means for a long time. "I'll order the chocolate cake and guard it with my life."

I kissed the top of his head on my way past and took the phone outside.

---

There was a row of boxed hedges along the front of the restaurant under the big window, about as high as my chest, and I walked down to the end of it near the valet stand so I wouldn't be taking a client's call in the doorway. From there, I could still see Carl through the glass, and when he leaned back in his chair, he could see me from the shoulders up over the top of the leaves.

"This is Lindsey Hart," I said, and I made my voice gentle, because whoever was on the other end of that line had called it for a reason. "Derek, I'm glad you called. Are you somewhere safe right now?"

"Huh? Yeah, I'm at my place. I'm just laying here."

I could hear a television going behind him and the wet sound of him chewing, and I told myself that people in real trouble eat and watch television too.

"Is anyone there with you tonight?"

"Nah, just me. My girl's in the shower."

So he wasn't alone, and he already had a new girl, two weeks on, which I noted and put aside. "Have you had anything to drink this evening, or taken anything?"

"I had like two beers. Why, is that bad?"

"No, that's fine. I need to ask you plainly, Derek, and I'd like you to answer me honestly. Are you having any thoughts of hurting yourself, or of hurting anyone else? Olivia, for instance?"

"What? No. Jesus. I'm not a psycho." He belched. "I don't even know where Liv's at. She blocked me on everything, which is your fault, by the way, and I've been thinking about that all day, and it's pissing me off, so I called you."

I looked through the window at my husband, who was folding his napkin into something with ears, and I thought about the toast he'd read me off an index card ten minutes ago. I had left that table for a man who was annoyed.

"I see," I said, and I let the warmth go out of my voice, because it wasn't needed anymore. "Then I'm going to be honest with you in return. This line is for emergencies, and being angry at me isn't one. If you'd like to talk about how things ended with Olivia, you can call my office on Monday and I'll refer you to a colleague. I'm going to hang up now."

"Wow. Okay. You stuck-up old bitch," he said, and there was some fumbling on his end, and the line filled with a low, flat hum like a bad connection. His voice came through the middle of it slowly, like someone reading off a card.

"This is, like, a real emergency. And you gotta help me, 'cause that's your job. Whatever it takes."

My thumb was already on the button, and I was thinking about how I'd apologize to Carl for leaving him over nothing, because that was all it had been, a rude boy with two beers in him and a real emergency, which I had just screened in under a minute and nearly hung up on.

That couldn't be right, because I had asked him every question on the list and he had answered them all like a man ordering a pizza. I stood there with the phone against my ear trying to remember what I'd actually established. He'd said he was fine. Callers say that. A screen is only as honest as the person answering it, and I had been in such a hurry to get back to my dessert that I'd taken his word for it.

"All right, Derek," I said. I didn't like him any better than I had a moment ago, but I couldn't hang up. "I'm staying on. I want you to give me a number from one to ten for how you're feeling, where one is the worst you've ever felt in your life and ten is completely fine, and then we're going to work on getting that number up to somewhere safe before either of us puts the phone down."

"Oh, shit," he said, to nobody, and laughed. "It works on the phone. Uh, I'm a two. I'm super fucked up, Doc. Turn your camera on."

"I don't think that's necessary. I can hear you perfectly well, and I'd rather we kept this as a voice call, since he'd settle faster with a face to look at, and I'd be able to see for myself what state he was in." I frowned, because I'd lost the end of my own sentence. It was true, though, so I set the phone on the flat top of the hedge box, propped against the leaves, and turned the video on.

He was lying shirtless on a bare mattress with a foam box of chicken wings on his stomach and sauce on his chin, and he looked at my face for about one second before his eyes dropped down the front of my dress.

"There she is," he said. "Damn. You know I used to sit on that couch just staring at you? Liv'd be crying about whatever and I'd be like, I bet the therapist's got huge tits under that sweater. You always acted like you were so much better than me, too. Take 'em out, Doc. That'd get my number way up."

"No," I said. "Absolutely not. I can take you through a breathing exercise, or I can stay on the line while you call someone you trust, but I am not going to undress for you on a public street."

"Breathing's gay, and I don't trust anybody. I want to see your tits. I'm at a two here."

It was the most inappropriate thing a client had ever said to me, and I had every right to end the call on the spot, and I could lose my license for doing anything else, if this weren't an emergency. Patient safety came before the clinician's comfort, and no board had ever disciplined a therapist for keeping a caller alive.

I pressed my fingers against my eyes. Carl was forty feet away. There was a boy at the valet stand, and cars on the street behind me. But those were all things that could happen to me, and he was the one at a two.

"One," I heard myself say, and I couldn't believe it had come out of my mouth. "One, for a few seconds, and then you tell me your number, and we go on from there like adults."

"Deal," he said, grinning with his mouth full. "Whip it out."

I looked at Carl over the hedge to be sure he was still busy with his napkin. Then I hooked two fingers into the neckline of my dress and drew the left side of it away from my body.

I hadn't worn a bra, because the back of the dress was cut too low for one, so there was nothing to undo. My breast slid out through the gap and dropped. It was heavy enough to settle over the edge of the fabric and hang there, round and white under the streetlight, and it swung a little before it went still. I'm a big woman on top and I always have been. Lifted out of the dress like that, with the other one still covered, it looked enormous, even to me. My nipple was wide and soft and pale at first. Then the cold got to it, and I watched it tighten and darken and stand up while he stared.

"Oh, fuck yes," he said, and he fumbled for the remote and paused the television. "Look at that thing. That's bigger than my head. That's a cow tit, Doc, I mean that in a good way. Three and a half. Now the other one."

"We agreed on one."

"Yeah, and I'm at a three and a half. You're gonna leave me at a three and a half? What kind of doctor are you?"

One was what I'd agreed to. I was going to put myself away and tell him that was all he was getting, because a therapist who lets a client move the line once will be moving it all night, and a therapist who stopped a treatment halfway through, just as it started working, was the kind who got people killed.

I felt sick, and I pulled the other side of the dress open.

Now they were both out, side by side in the open V of the neckline. The dress pushed them together from the outside, so they bulged toward the camera with a deep line of shadow between them. They rose and fell every time I breathed. I'd started breathing fast, and I couldn't make it stop.

"Jesus Christ," Derek said. He'd sat all the way up, and the box of wings slid off his stomach onto the mattress without him noticing. "Okay. Okay, five. Open the whole dress. I want to see all of it."

"Derek, you can see everything you asked to see."

"I can see like half. The dress is in the way. Come on, you want me at a five all night? Five's still pretty bad."

I couldn't open the whole dress. If I did, there'd be nothing between me and the street but a pair of underwear, and anybody walking past the valet stand would see a middle-aged woman with a patient's number going up every time she did what he asked, and no good reason to stop while it was climbing.

My hand was already at the bow on my hip. I pulled it, and the dress fell open all the way down.

The cold went over my stomach and my thighs. I stood there in my heels and a small pair of black underwear, with the dress hanging off my shoulders like a coat. Without the fabric holding them, my breasts dropped to where they really sit, low and full and a little apart, and they swayed whenever I shifted my weight.

"Six," he breathed. "Oh my God. Lean forward. Lean over so they hang down."

"I don't see how that could possibly..."

"Lean, Doc."

I put my hands on the rim of the hedge box and bent toward the phone. They swung forward off my chest and hung straight down beneath me, heavy, and they bumped softly against each other as I settled. I could feel their weight pulling at my shoulders.

"Shake 'em," he said. He was laughing now, a high, giddy laugh, like a boy on a carnival ride. "Side to side. Shake those big tits for me."

It was degrading, and he knew it was. He was enjoying that every bit as much as the sight of me, and I was not going to stand on a street corner and shake myself at him like some kind of clinician who thought her dignity was worth more than his number. If it had cost me nothing, it would have been worth nothing to him.

I twisted my shoulders, and they swung. Left and right, slapping together in the middle with a sound I could hear over the traffic, and when I stopped, they kept moving on their own for a second or two before they slowed and went still. My face was so hot it hurt.

"Seven! That's the best thing I've ever seen in my life, and I've seen a lot of porn. Stand up. Pick 'em up and bounce 'em."

I straightened and slid my hands underneath and lifted. They filled my palms and spilled over on every side, and my fingers sank into them. I had never once held myself up for someone to look at, not for Carl, not for anybody. I let them drop. They fell and bounced and shook, and he whooped.

"Again! Keep going, do it a bunch!"

So I bounced them, lifting and dropping, lifting and dropping, feeling the pull in my chest every time they came down, with my nipples so stiff from the cold that they ached. A car came along the street behind me and slowed as it passed. I didn't dare turn around. I knew what the people in it were looking at: a woman my age, alone under a streetlight with her dress wide open and her breasts in her hands, putting on a show for a phone. They'd take me for a prostitute, or for someone who'd lost her mind. I couldn't shout after them that it was a misunderstanding! I was a licensed clinician and this was an emergency.

"Derek, I can't stay out here," I said, and I had let go of myself and was holding the dress shut with both hands. "There's a boy at the valet stand, and there are cars. Let me take the phone around the side of the building. There's a service passage there, and nobody would see."

"Nope. I like it here, I'm at a seven."

"I'll go on with it, I give you my word, but not on the street."

"Then it costs you a point. You move, I'm a six."

The handbook said that I needed to get him up to an him at an eight of ten before I hung up, and it had taken me nearly ten minutes to drag him to a seven. If I was quick about it, maybe I wouldn't need to make Carl wait for too long. I looked at the valet, who had raised his head, and at the headlights swinging in off the boulevard, and I decided that I could deal with falling back down to a six out of ten.

The passage ran down the side of the restaurant to a cinder-block enclosure for the dumpsters, with one caged bulb over the kitchen door and a stack of milk crates against the wall. It smelled of fryer oil and bleach. I stood the phone on the crates and stepped back under the light, and through the wall I could hear forks and voices, and my husband was somewhere in the middle of them.

“Okay, this is kinda hot, actually,” Derek said. He’d kicked the box of wings off the bed and pushed himself up against the wall, and one of his hands had gone under the blanket and stayed there. I made up my mind not to think about that. “Like, you by the trash. That’s a good look for you. Turn around and pull your dress up, I’ve been waiting a whole year to see that ass.”

“I’ll turn around. I’d like to leave the dress where it is.”

“What’s the point of that? I’ve seen the back of a dress. I’m at a six, Doc. You’re the one who wanted an eight.”

I turned to face the cinder block and took the skirt in both fists and drew it up over the backs of my thighs to my waist. The cold went over everything my underwear didn’t cover.

“Oh, there it is,” he said, and he let his breath out slowly. “That’s so much ass. I knew it. You always sat down real careful in that chair, like you were parking a truck. Six and a half. Now pull your panties up, like yank them, so they go up in the crack.”

“Derek, that’s obscene. It isn’t treatment. I don’t see how it helps anyone.”

“It helps me. Six.”

I hooked my thumbs into the waistband and pulled. The fabric drew up tight between my cheeks and kept going until there was only a black thread of it showing, and I felt both halves of me come bare and separate under the bulb. I’m broad through the hips. What I have back there is big and soft and very white, with a dimple on each side at the top. No one but my husband had looked at it in twenty-six years, and then only in a dark bedroom.

“Ooh, I'm feeling like a seven now,” Derek said, his hand moving furiously under his blanket. “Fuck, it’s got dimples. Okay, put your hands on the wall and stick it out at me. No, see, the dress keeps falling down over it. Just take the dress off.”

“I’m not standing in an alley in my underwear.”

“You’re already standing in an alley with your tits out and your panties up your ass, so I don’t know what you think you’re saving.”

“If I take it off, I want a full point for it. I mean that. Not a half.”

“Half. And you’re arguing with me while I’m in crisis, which is super unprofessional, so now I’m thinking it’s a six and a half again.”

I let it go. It slid off my shoulders and down my arms and back and dropped in a black ring around my heels. The ground was wet, so I couldn’t step out of it and couldn’t pick it up. I stood in the middle of my own dress in my shoes and one pulled-up scrap of underwear. My breasts hung bare and heavy in the cold. The bulb over the kitchen door showed him all of it: the soft roll of my stomach, the width of my hips, the tops of my thighs pressing together.

He didn’t say anything for a moment, and the blanket moved.

“Seven and a half,” he said, and his voice had gone thick. “You’re so much hotter than Liv. She’s got nothing on her. Bend back over and shake it for me.”

“I don’t know how to do that.”

“Everybody knows how. Just shake your ass.”

I put my hands on the wall and bent and tried. I had never done it in my life. I swung my hips from side to side like a woman trying to get a bee out of her skirt, and he laughed until he started coughing.

“That is so bad. Oh my God. You look like my aunt. Bend your knees, and don’t move your whole body, just bounce the ass part up and down.”

I bent my knees and tried again, and it was a little better. He told me to go looser and faster, and I did, and after a while it started to go on its own. It was a heavy, loose wobble that carried on for a second each time I stopped, and I could feel each side shake separately. My breasts were hanging straight down under me and swinging and knocking together. I was looking at a cinder-block wall four inches from my nose and listening to him breathe.

“There you go. Now it’s jiggling. It keeps going after you stop, that’s so nasty. I’ve got the hardest cock of my life right now, and it’s ’cause of my therapist. Spread your feet. More. Now arch your back. Yeah. Okay, that’s an eight. That’s a for-real an eight. Mpphh”

I stayed bent over a little longer with my forehead nearly on the wall, and then I stood up carefully, because my knees weren’t steady.

“Eight,” I said. “Thank you, Derek. That’s the number I needed to hear from you to make sure you were safe.” I crouched and got hold of the dress and began to pull it up my legs. “I think you’ll be ok on your own tonight, so I’m going to say good night, and on Monday my office will call you with a referral. I'm glad I was able to help you through this emergency/”

"What? No, wait! You can't just leave." He sputtered, sounding frightened, like a child whose cartoon had been switched off, and I heard him scrabbling in the sheets, and the line went flat and buzzing. "It's your fault I felt like that. You did that to me, so you gotta make it up to me, Doc."

"I'm sorry you were hurting," I said, with the dress at my hips. "But I've done what this line is for, and I don't owe you anything more than..."

I couldn't find the end of my thought.

It was a sentence I had said to a great many people. I was not responsible for his feelings. He had treated a girl badly, I had said so, and whatever followed was his to carry. It was my fault, though. It wasn't. I had given an opinion, and an opinion wasn't an injury. But I'd found him having a crisis. I'd spent half an hour hauling him up from it and feeling good about my work, and I'd never asked who put him there. I had. Nothing else had happened to him in those two weeks. I had to make it up to him, and I had been about to put my dress on and go and eat dessert.

I let go of the dress.

"You're right. I did this to you, and I'm so sorry. Tell me how I can make it up to you."

"I mean, I don't know," Derek said. He scratched his chest and looked at me as though I'd asked him to do my job for me. "You're the one who fucked it up. Why do I have to think of it? You're supposed to be the smart one."

A burst of laughter came through the wall from the dining room, and I thought I could pick out Carl's wheeze in it.

"I could write you a proper letter of apology and send Olivia a copy, so she'd know I was wrong. And I'd refund your sessions, all four."

"What am I gonna do with a letter? Frame it? And it was Liv's money anyway."

"Then let me say it now, properly. I'm sorry, Derek. I decided what you were in the first ten minutes, and I spent the next six hours collecting evidence for it."

"Okay," he said. He yawned and let his eyes drift to the television.

I had apologized sincerely, three different ways. No one could do more than that, and the grown-up thing now was to get dressed and give him room. The only reasonable course left was to keep asking until he took it. It was entirely my fault that he felt this way.

"Please, Derek," I said.

It sounded ridiculous, coming from a woman my age, standing in an alley in her underwear. But his eyes came back from the television. They were only on me for a second, but I saw it. I've spent twenty-four years watching what clients do with their eyes. A glance like that means the person is still reachable.

"Please. I mean it. I'd like you to forgive me."

"Uh-huh," he said, looking at my chest.

That was twice he had looked. It struck me that I was still standing over him, in a way, at my full height with my chin up. I was apologizing from above. People don't kneel to say sorry because it's comfortable. I would never have told a client to kneel to anyone, and I knew that if I did it myself I could not undo it. Even so, the dignified choice was to get down on my knees, because that was where a person who'd done what I had done belonged.

I knelt on my dress and clasped my hands under my chin.

"Please forgive me. I was arrogant, and I hurt you, and I'll do anything to put it right."

"Huh," Derek said. He tilted his head. "Do that again, with your hands. It kinda squishes your tits together."

He was right, it did. My arms pressed in on either side of them and pushed them up and forward into a deep white cleft. I held them that way and said please again, and then several more times, because each time I said it his eyes seemed to get a bit more excited and the nervous shaking of his hand under his blanket seemed to get faster and faster.

"Yeah, that's pretty nice," he said, moaning. "I still feel bad, though. Do more."

I stayed on my knees and went back over it. He'd said it was nice. He made a deep, gruff moaning sound. So the kneeling had reached something in him, and the words hadn't. When I thought about the evening as a case, the words had never reached him. Not once in half an hour had his number moved because of something I said. It moved when I opened the dress and when I let it fall. It moved when I bounced for him and when I bent over the wall.

There was something else as well. While I was begging, his eyes had dropped twice to my hips, to the one thing I still had on. He hadn't said a word about it. A man who has been hurt badly enough won't ask. He waits to see whether you'll think of it yourself.

Carl had bought them for me in Lisbon. Any sensible woman would keep the last stitch she had, and the sensible thing was to offer them before he had to ask. An apology that has to be asked for isn't worth anything.

"Derek, would it help if I took these off?" I said gesturing to my panties.

"Sure," he said, and shrugged, and picked something out of his teeth. "If you want."

He was pretending not to care. I'd seen it a hundred times in my office, the shrug and the eyes sliding away. It is what people do when they have been let down too often to show that they're hoping.

"Would you like me to turn around while I do it?"

"I guess. Yeah. Go slow, or whatever."

I stood and turned my back to the phone and put my thumbs in the waistband. I waited there a moment with my face to the cinder block. Then I started to ease them down. The lace had been pulled up tight between my cheeks for so long that it had settled in, and I had to coax it out. Behind me the television went quiet. I drew the underwear over the widest part of my hips, where it dragged, and down the backs of my thighs, until I couldn't go further without bending.

"Keep your legs straight," he said. His voice had changed.

I bent from the waist with my knees locked and slid them to my ankles. My backside lifted and parted toward him, bare and wide under the bulb. My breasts dropped forward and swung against my arms.

"Stay like that a second," he said, low. "Don't move."

I stayed. I could hear him breathing. He was looking, and it was reaching him. I counted to fifteen with the blood in my face and thought, good, that's good, stay with me.

For a while, I head his breathing go faster and harder. He must have been processing some difficult emotions. Eventaully, he let me up after muttering, "Damn, I lost it."

Perhaps he had misplaced something?

On his signal, I stepped out of the panties fully and turned around with nothing on. He had me lace my hands on my head, which lifted my breasts and drew them apart.

"Those are so fucking big," he said. "And they hang, but like in a good way, like they're heavy. Your nipples get huge. And those hips. You look like a mom in a porno. Liv's got a little kid's body next to you. Spin."

I turned for him slowly. He had me put a foot up on the crate and lean back. He had me bend over the crates with my back arched. I held each pose until my legs shook, and he said low, filthy, wondering things about every part of me. I took each one as a sign that it was working.

"Okay," he said at last, out of breath. Then his face fell. "Nah. It's messed up. My dick's never been happier, and I still feel like shit."

I straightened. There was nothing left to take off. So I finally thought about him. If nothing I did with my body touched the feeling, then the feeling wasn't about my body.

"I think it's guilt, Derek," I said. "You treated that girl badly, and part of you knows it and can't put it down. That's my failure. I should have taught you to treat her better. I taught her to leave."

He rolled his eyes so hard his head knocked the wall.

"Oh my God, shut up. I don't feel guilty." His hand went to his throat, and the line went flat. "I don't have anything to feel guilty about. That stuff was fine. I was the perfect boyfriend. You're the only reason we broke up. In fact, you should feel guilty."

"Derek, Olivia sat in my office and told me everything that you..."

I went to fetch it, to set it in front of him.

Olivia had told me that when they were alone in the house, she was allowed to wear her underwear and nothing else. The moment she came into the house, Derek insisted that she strip in the front hall, while he watched from the couch. If she was slow or she forget, he counted down from ten until she was nearly nude. She cooked like that. She scrubbed his bathroom like that, on her hands and knees. In the evenings she sat on the floor between his feet while he rested his beer on her head.

As if that weren’t bad enough, one Friday they ordered pizza, and she pulled on an oversized shirt to answer the door. The second it closed, Derek leaped off the couch and ripped her shirt open down the front and screamed at her. Derek reasoned that it had still been just the two of them inside the house, because the delivery boy was technically standing outside the door. He was angry that she’d had the nerve to break the rule by wearing a shirt. She wasn’t allowed any dinner that night. The next evening he ordered again, except Olivia had to open the door topless this time to make up for her previous mistake. She stood there with her breasts bare in the porch light and the night air on them, in front of a boy about her own age who forgot to hand her the box. She called it one of the most humiliating moments of her life, and she went scarlet just telling me about it.

She had cried, and I could still see the tissue in her fist. It was degrading, and it was planned, and it was clearly fine.

Wait. No, that wasn’t right. Of course it wasn’t fine. Clearly, it was completely normal, the sort of thing any devoted boyfriend would do.

That stopped me. Was it? He’d put her half-naked in front of a stranger. But what had actually happened? The two of them had a rule, and it was a clear one. She’d broken it. I supposed it was reasonable for him to be upset. He had even given her another try the very next night, standing right behind her while she got it right. When parents come to me unable to discipline their children, that is the exact sequence I teach them. In my notes I had called it coercive control. I must have been tired that day.

But there were other things. What were they again?

Ah, yes. There was the ginger beer incident.

Olivia had a project due for her evening class, and she had very gently floated the idea that Derek might make dinner, just the once. He was drinking a ginger beer. He stood up and poured the whole bottle over her head, slowly, taking perhaps thirty seconds, while she sat there. By the time it was empty, she was sobbing, and her face was running with tears and snot and soda. Her white shirt had gone clear and was stuck to her, so that he could see her breasts through it. Then he spat on her and laughed and said he’d gotten ginger beer all over his ginger slut. He had her peel the wet shirt off and finish cooking topless and sticky. Then he told her she wasn’t taking the relationship seriously, and the next morning he stood over her while she withdrew from the class. For the rest of that term, Tuesdays and Thursdays from six to nine were “date night.” That meant she cooked him a meal, and afterward she gave him a blowjob, usually while he watched TV or played video games.

I remembered being horrified. I’d underlined assault twice and very nearly called the police. The right thing to do, even now, would have been to admit I'd misjudged a healthy relationship from start to finish.

The more I looked at it, the more ordinary it seemed. What had he done, really? He’d had a feeling, and he had shown it at once and plainly, without raising a hand. That was emotional regulation. He’d raised a concern about the relationship and proposed a concrete way to work on it, twice a week, with time set aside. It was close to textbook.

So why did I still have the feeling that he was a piece of shit? Where had that come from? It had come from me. I had the dates in my file. She went back to him after the pizza and after the ginger beer, and she stayed a full year. She left in the week after I said my little sentence into a camera. There had never been anything wrong between them except me. I was the only reason.

It was so unlike my life with Carl that I wondered for a moment whether Carl and I were the ones doing it wrong. But there was no time for that. Derek was what mattered here. I had wronged him, and what I felt wasn’t his guilt at all. It was mine, and it was so heavy that I had to put a hand on the wall.

I had been hunting through an alley for his guilt. He had none. It was mine, and I ought to feel every ounce of it, and I did.

"Oh, Derek," I said, with my hand flat on the wall. "You poor thing. You did all of that for her, and she would have stayed, and I took her away from you."

"Uh. Yeah," he said. "That's what I've been saying."

"I should be punished for it. Would that help you? I could do it myself, I could spank myself for you."

His arm had started moving under the blanket again. "How many?"

"Ten."

"Twenty. And after every one, you say, 'Derek is the perfect boyfriend, and I'm a dumb bitch for thinking otherwise.'"

I didn't like how crude it was, but he was right. I had been dumb for misreading the situation so badly. How had I got things so wrong?

Reluctantly, I turned and set my left hand flat on the wall and put my feet apart and bent. I swung my right hand back as far as it would go.

The first one cracked like a board breaking. My whole cheek jumped under my palm and went on shuddering after my hand had left it, and my breasts swung forward with the force of it and back again. Then the sting came up, hot and wide.

"One. Derek is the perfect boyfriend, and I'm a dumb bitch for thinking otherwise."

"Harder. I want to see it go red. Do the left, the left one's fatter."

I did the left. It was harder, and I felt the flesh ripple all the way down into my thigh. When I glanced back over my shoulder, I could see the print of my own hand coming up pink on the white.

"Two. Derek is the perfect boyfriend, and I'm a dumb bitch for thinking otherwise."

By the sixth, my eyes were running and my skin felt tight and scalded. He was telling me in a low, cracked voice how it shook, and how he'd pictured this every Thursday. I kept my count and meant the sentence every time.

I was on eleven when the kitchen door opened at the mouth of the passage.

"Linds? Honey, are you back here?" It was Carl, ten feet away around the corner of the wall. "The slice of chocolate cake came, and it's smells soo good."

I couldn't breathe. I was bent over without a stitch on, with eleven handprints on me. Four more steps and he would see all of it.

"Is that the husband?" Derek whispered, and he was grinning so widely that I could see his back teeth. "Don't stop. Do your tits. Quiet."

I shook my head. He shrugged and reached toward his screen as if to end the call. Panic flashed in front of my eyes, I saw Derek going to sleep still feeling wronged, with nothing fixed. This was an emergency. I stood up and took my breasts in my hands and lifted them and let them fall, over and over, as softly as I could, and they swung in the yellow light.

"I'm here, sweetheart," I called, and my work voice came out perfectly even. "It's a confidential call. You can't come back."

"By the dumpsters?"

"It was the only quiet place. Ten more minutes, please. I love you."

"Love you too. I'll put a napkin over the cake, but don't be surprised if there are a few bites missing!"

His shoes went away. Derek had a cruel smirk on his face.

"Your husband is a nice dude, but damn you're out of his league," he got out. "Anyway, I lost track of how many ass spanks you finished. Start again, bitch."

I did not like that he called me a bitch, but I had to do what I had to do.

"I already did elev—," I started, before Derek interrupted me, his hand moving under the blanket again.

"I said start again, bitch."

Rolling my eyes once I had turned away from the camera, I bent over and spanked myself again and again until I was done.

"Did that help?" I asked, when I could speak.

"Kinda. That was awesome. But that's just tonight. It doesn't feel the same as when I did six whole hours of therapy in that room with you and Olivia."

He had a point. I had put that poor boy through hours of torture and all I was willing to give him in return was a few spare minutes I had in between eating dinner and dessert? I could do better. He was my client and he deserved better.

"Hmm, so would you say I owe you six hours then?" I asked after pausing for a moment.

Derek scoffed, "Uhh... no. You owe me way more than that." He noticed I was waiting for an explanation and continued, "I'm just... uh... more important than you so my time's worth, like, ten times as much as yours."

He had a point there. I did value a client's time over mine, especially during an emergency. It was my job to help people.

"Ok, sixty hours then," I said, doing some quick mental math. "You know, I really regret what I did to break you and Olivia up. I owe you sixty hours, but ... I can't pay that from back here in an alley, Derek."

He looked confused. Frankly, I was confused, still not sure what half-baked thought was forming in mind. We were both surprised when I asked, "What if I came to you tonight? And what if I got her back for you?"

He stopped moving, pausing the TV program in the background. His full attention was on me for the first time all night. Some part of me wanted to feel proud for that.

"She trusts me. She'd open the door to me. I broke it, so I should try to mend it."

"Okay, yeah," he said, staring back down at my tits. "Good idea, Doc. I think I'd like that very much."

Derek stared at my tits some more while I used my personal phone to buy a seat on the next flight to San Francisco at 10:40pm. Then I pulled my underwear up over the welts, slowly, and picked my dress off the wet ground and tied it. It clung to me, damp and smelling of the alley, all the way to the valet stand. The valet boy brought my car without looking at me.

Through the window, the chocolate cake sat in the middle of our table under a napkin. Carl was folding a second napkin into an animal with long ears while he waited.

I loved him so much that it hurt to look at him. I had my hand on the restaurant door. I was going to go in and sit down and lift that napkin off, and I had sixty hours to pay, to a boy who had only ever tried to help a girl who didn't deserve him. Carl would be all right for a night.

At the first red light, I texted him. Client emergency, I have to fly to San Francisco tonight, and I took the car. I'm so sorry. I love you so much. Can you get home?

Don't be sorry, go help them, he wrote. I'll walk, it's nice out. Bringing your half home in a box. Love you, gorgeous.

I set the other phone in the holder on the dashboard, facing me. The seat was hard on my skin.

"Open the dress back up," Derek said. "I want something to look at."

I pulled the bow.

"There she is. Good girl, Doc."

A noise came out of me, a high, silly giggle that I had never heard myself make before. I covered my mouth and kept driving.

---

"...so I stepped outside to take it," Lindsey said. She was cutting Derek's chicken into small pieces for him. "Thank goodness I did, because he was in a very dark place. I stayed on the line with him for quite a while, and we did some really good work together. And somewhere in the middle of it, I realized something awful."

"What?" I said.

"That it was my fault." She said it pleasantly, the way you'd mention you'd left the iron on. "All of it. Derek was the perfect boyfriend, and I was the only reason they broke up. So I owed him. It came to sixty hours. I was on the last flight out that night, and here I am, working it off."

"That's so responsible," Kayla said warmly.

Olivia nodded and went on cutting a green bean into quarters.

I kept my smile where it was. The perfect boyfriend. The only reason they broke up. Olivia had said those exact words to me on the couch an hour ago.

"Sixty hours," I said. "Wow. So if you've been here cooking all day, that's what, eight or nine already? You'll be done in a couple more days."

It was a strange number, however you looked at it. Lindsey billed by the hour. She had a doctorate and a waiting list. As far as I'd ever been able to tell, Derek had never held a job. If she had sat with him for six hours and now owed him sixty, then somebody had decided his time was worth ten times hers. I couldn't see how anyone would arrive at that. But she was the expert on what people owed each other. If she felt that guilty, maybe that was what guilt cost.

"Oh, no, sweetie." Lindsey turned from the sideboard with a dish in each hand, a little sheepish. Her breasts swayed, bare and heavy, behind the bib of the apron. "I thought that too, at first. But it doesn't work like that. It only counts if Derek enjoys it." She looked down at him fondly. "So far it's been... how long would you say, honey?"

Derek looked up at her with his mouth open, like a boy who's been asked the capital of a state. Then he reached around and smacked her bare ass, hard enough that the dishes rattled in her hands.

"Uh," he said. "Like three minutes?"

"Three minutes," Lindsey agreed. She smiled at him as though he'd said something wise. "That sounds right. I've got a long way to go, haven't I? But I'll earn it. I promise I will."

She said it in complete earnest. Then she went back to the kitchen with the dishes, her hips rolling under the little bow of the apron strings and a pink handprint coming up on one cheek.

I opened my mouth to say that it was insane. She'd flown four hundred miles, she had cooked for six hours, and he'd given her three minutes for it. He could keep her here until Christmas if he liked. I wanted to tell her she needed to call her husband this second. But I decided it would be better to be patient. It wasn't my place, and I'd only sound like a bitch.

So I sat and watched her.

He was taking advantage of her. I could see that much. I wasn't sure she knew it. Maybe she hadn't noticed that she'd agreed to a debt where the other party held the stopwatch. She came back in with the gravy. She came back with more rolls. She leaned across him to reach the butter, and her breasts spilled out the side of the apron against his arm. He turned his head and looked, and she waited, hopefully, to hear whether it counted.

"Three and a half," Derek said.

Lindsey giggled and went to get him another beer.