SWNOVELS The Sinner: Chapter 9
I’VE BEEN AROUND sex all my life. My mother is a sex therapist. My father built her an office on the fourth floor of our house so she could work from home. He even put in an elevator that bypassed the other floors so her clients could have direct access to her office.
I was nine when I started listening in. By age ten, I knew more about sex than most adults ever will. One time when I was twelve, I snuck upstairs and listened in like I usually did.
I slowly walk down the hallway, stepping as softly as I can to avoid giving myself away.
If so, I’ll get in trouble. She always tells me, “These are adult conversations, Elli. And unethical of me if you overheard them.”
I push my back against the wall and slide down to my butt, straining my ears to hear.
A woman is softly crying, followed by a man’s voice. “I’m sorry, I thought you’d like it.”
Mr. and Mrs. Taylor. I’ve listened to a few of their sessions before.
“You can’t be serious.” The woman begins to sob. “How… could you…?”
Mr. Taylor had a kink for watching other men get his wife off—known as cuckolding. His wife didn’t but still had the occasional bottle of wine and allowed her husband to take her to a swingers’ club or party where he would choose a man for her, and he’d sit back and watch the man fuck her.
She hated it.
The fact that she was able to get off with the stranger made her feel dirty. But that was the only sex she was having. He hadn’t fucked her in years.
This particular session was about the night before. Mr. Taylor had two of his best friends over who just so happen to also be his business partners in his multibillion-dollar company. He had slipped something in his wife’s wine that night, drugging her to the point she passed out. He then let his two friends tie him up in a chair, naked, facing their bed where they tied up his wife and raped her. He had set up a recorder earlier that day, and he could not understand why she didn’t want to watch it the following morning with him. He figured since she had willingly let other men fuck her before that she would be okay with letting his two business partners have their turns with her. He cried and begged her to forgive him.
Instead, she ran out screaming that she was filing for divorce. I had never sat so still in my life, praying she wouldn’t see me. Thankfully, she didn’t.
Then I heard him beg my mother to fix him. To give him drugs. Do whatever she could do to make him “normal.” She reported the rape to the police. By law, she had to.
I saw it on the news the following week. His two business partners being dragged out of their downtown office building and shoved into cop cars. They were both married with children.
I wondered why Mr. Taylor hadn’t been arrested along with them, though. I couldn’t ask my mom because then she’d know I had listened in on her session. Two months later, I got my answer. Mrs. Taylor was back, and I sat in that same spot and listened to her cry to my mother once again.
Her husband had committed suicide. Went home after their last session and shot himself in the head on their bed where he had given her up like an offering to a cult. He could not live with himself after what he did to her. He was so disgusted that, at the time, he hadn’t realized that what he liked was wrong. Until he understood he betrayed his wife. A twenty-five-year marriage down the drain for a kink.
For three hours, I sat there listening to her cry, and she felt guilty. Her husband was the one who betrayed her, yet she felt responsible for his death.
She was pregnant. She’d found out that morning, and that was the reason for her emergency session. For ten years, they tried to have a baby. They wanted kids later in life. They were both focused on their careers, and once they decided to start, it was too late. Or so they thought, and he had stopped sleeping with her altogether.
I’ll never forget the words she told my mother when I peeked into the cracked door and saw her on the couch crying. “He gave me the one thing I always wanted. I’m pregnant, and he’s no longer here. Because of me. Because I couldn’t love him for who he was.” She said she didn’t care which man who raped her was the father. She was keeping the baby and would raise it to know her late husband as the dad.
She sobbed. My mother sobbed for her own personal reasons. It was traumatic for both of them. And me?
I learned two things listening to the Taylors’ sessions. First, love is utterly fucking bullshit. Who in the fuck allows their friends or anyone else to rape their wife? Let alone record it and expect her to be okay with it?
And second, I learned that just because your body craves something doesn’t mean you should give it what it wants. So I pushed everything my body begged for to the back of my mind. But that didn’t last very long.
I was young when I realized I wasn’t like other women. When I was eighteen, Sin cornered me at a party and told me I was pretty. I knew he was lying. A way to fuck with me. Hell, a friend probably dared him or something. But then he told me that my eyes were so beautiful that he wanted to cut them out and place them in a jar in his room so he could look at them every day.
It made me wet. It also made me realize that I’m more fucked up than any patient my mother had ever seen. What would have made any woman cower made me lean into him. I convinced myself it was the two lines of cocaine I had just snorted too, but that was a lie. Deep down, I knew I’d never have a healthy relationship with a man because I’d never be happy with what society would call normal.
I want toxic. I want madness. I want someone who makes me question my sanity. And I know I won’t be happy until the masked man decides to make me his forever. I’m perfectly fine spending the rest of my life not knowing who he is as long as he continues to come see me.