From the notes of Dr. Kelsey Ransom, PsyD
Bertie and Rachel have been making excellent progress in session. As of my seventh meeting with them, I’m finding that I am able to listen more and mediate less. Bertie has been conciliatory in giving Rachel room to speak, and Rachel has been more direct in speaking her mind. And as has been my experience in these cases, I am now being asked if they are ready to leave the program.
While the decision is theirs to make, I reminded them that the hard part of recovery is not in making changes, but in maintaining them. This has given the pair some food for thought, and in the end we reached a compromise – our next sessions would be on an individual basis, to better gauge how each of them were doing and identify problem spots that they were uncomfortable bringing up in front of the other.
The first date was reserved for Bertie, but he was forced to cancel the session to deal with a work-related matter. Rather than wait for her turn the following week, Rachel offered to take his place, and I agreed.
As I expected, Rachel is far more talkative in a one-on-one setting. She’s identified avoidance as the trait she most needs to overcome. She sees this trait as one that was instilled from a very young age – her parents were of limited means, but believed that their children should be free to follow their passions. What this meant in practice was that she could do anything she wanted, provided she could do it by herself.
Moving out at nineteen, Rachel found that her unsupervised childhood had left her without the necessary skills or discipline to function as an adult. Avoidance became a coping mechanism: if she couldn’t handle her finances, she didn’t pay her bills. If she hated her job, she’d quit. She fears this mentality extended to her relationships as well, prioritizing security over compatibility and always ending up on the lesser end of a skewed power dynamic.
I asked her if she felt her relationship with Bertie was a continuation of that dynamic. She reasoned that Bertie was different on account of his age and life experience – he was twenty-four when they began their relationship, she was twenty-eight, and she saw this as starting fresh.
Pointing out that regardless of age, she was once again involved with a man who had control issues, I repeated my question.
I’ve had patients break down at these moments of clarity. Some have even turned hostile. To my relief, Rachel did neither of those. She summarized the difference between Bertie and her exes in one word: Accountability. She’d recognized in Bertie a strong sense of responsibility, but a lack of lived experience, and that meant that she could support him as much as he would support her.
Curious, I asked her what that accountability looked like – say, what would happen after an episode like our session a month ago, where Bertie, by his own admission, relapsed and tried to take control of the conversation. Rachel candidly replied that she had “lit his ass up for that” and that the matter had been settled. I casually asked if this meant that the pair was involved in a BDSM relationship.
It was immediately clear that Rachel had revealed more than she intended. Trying to placate her embarrassment, I pointed out that kink-aware therapy is part of my practice, and that my only concern is that their activities are not being used as a substitute for our sessions. With a little coaxing, she explained the dynamic as one where the top/bottom distinction had become interchangeable, that spankings were ordained but consensual, and that sex commonly followed the act.
As the hour drew to a close, Rachel nervously asked if I would have to tell Bertie that she had shared their secret. I informed her that if I was expected to keep confidences from her partner, that I would have to remove myself as his therapist.
I have declined thus far to mention my own background in BDSM. It does not strike me as professionally appropriate at this time.
She’d gotten word when she got home that Bertie would not be coming home that night – what the late shift barista had described as a leak instead turned out to be a burst pipe, and Bertie had stayed for hours past closing to work with the plumber, a man he described as unreasonably surly despite making double his usual rate for an emergency job. He would be staying with his mother overnight, and expected to be back by 10 AM the next day.
She glanced at her phone. Given how punctual her boyfriend tended to be, that left her about ten minutes to apply the final touches. After the session with Dr. Ransom, she’d been too jittery to go to bed, and had instead spent the following hours dusting, and then reorganizing their DVD cabinet. She hadn’t like the new arrangement, and spent another hour putting it all back.
Anything to distract herself from the fact that she’d accidentally told the therapist what Bertie had taken such pains to avoid.
Never mind that the secret was a poorly kept one – Ransom had jumped on her word choice so quickly that they had to suspect something already – or that that it was ridiculous to keep such a part of their relationship from their couples counselor.
She’d worked up her apology, as it was, sometime in the wee hours. Now in the light of day, she was beginning to have her doubts. But as she heard the muffled click of the front door deadbolt, she knew that the time had come to commit. Resigned, she hitched her leggings and panties down to her knees and waited.
Bertie would be arriving full from breakfast at his mom’s, as Alicia couldn’t help but roll out the red carpet any time her son came to visit. Given the time, there was a fifty-fifty chance of him having already bathed at her house, and if he hadn’t, he would walk right past the closed bedroom door.
She’d prepared for that likelihood. As the knob turned, she knew it had worked.
“Honey, why is there a sign on our door that says “Me and My Big Mouth”….” His voice trailed. He cleared his throat. “Did you do something to your hair?” he managed.
She loved that he could come home to his girlfriend kneeling on their bed with her bare butt in the air, and the first thing he’d notice was that she’d tied her hair back. She would have laughed if not for the duct tape.
He stepped experimentally around the frame, regarding the placement of the pillow cushioning her lower half. He gave her bottom a light pinch, making her squeal and finally causing him to notice the improvised gag over her mouth. His hand brushed her face…
She shook her head furiously, but not before he’d caught a corner of the tape. Already lubricated with her sweat and spit, it tore off with ease.
“Ow! Can’t you just take a hint?”
“It just makes me suspicious, actually.” He plopped down at at the foot of the bed. “Care to tell me what this performance art is actually about?”
Rachel rolled into a sitting position, furiously pulling up her pants. “I over-shared with Dr. Ransom. I told them about… the spankings.”
“You’re mumbling, honey.”
“I told them about the spankings.”
The silence that greeted her sucked the air out of the room. Finally, “The spankings.”
“Yeah.”
“Is there anything else you’d like to get off your chest?”
She hated that tone in his voice, even though she’d knowingly provoked it. But there was something else, and after making the arrangements over the phone an hour ago, she wasn’t going to be able to back out of it now.
“If you don’t have to go back to work today… how do you feel about going to see my parents?”
***
She shifted uncomfortably in the car seat, not for the first time.
“Quit it,” Bertie warned, watching the road.
“I can’t help it,” Rachel whined. The address that her mother had given her had sent them down over an hour’s worth of ice-encrusted dirt roads, and being off the beaten path had disagreed with Rachel’s newly warmed backside.
The car bounced, having struck yet another hidden pothole. She hissed audibly.
If Bertie sympathized, he didn’t show it.
She murmured a quiet, “Thank you, by the way.”
“What for?”
“I thought I was going to get… more. So thank you.”
“That was for dropping this road trip on me, so don’t get your hopes up. I still haven’t decided what to do about your ‘over-sharing’.”
Rachel pouted. “Come on, they acted like they knew already. We would have had to say something eventually.”
“Maybe we would have, but since we didn’t, your butt is going to answer for it at some point this weekend.” He glanced to the instruction sheet Rachel had scribbled out before they left. “And if you don’t want to have this conversation in front of your parents, I suggest we leave it here. We’re almost to the place.”
The place turned out to be called “Recreation Valley”, and consisted of nearly forty mobile homes in two lines between the road and the river. As they approached the address they’d been given, Rachel could make out three figures waiting outside the RV. Her mother and father she could recognize immediately, but the third…
She groaned. “It’s Leanne.”
Bertie winced. Rachel hadn’t seen her sister, five years her junior, since shortly after her first year with Bertie. Leanne had spent the evening stoned, called Rachel a cradle-robber after learning of their age difference, and pushed Rachel to the ground after she’d refused to give her sister fare for an Uber.
The years had not been kind to Leanne, either. While she had never shared Rachel’s curvy figure, she looked almost emaciated now. Mismatched bracelets dangled from her scrawny wrists, and her weathered frame, pockmarked with old tattoos, peeked out from under loose-fitting puffy vest. She waved at her sister’s arrival, grinning through a mouth of broken teeth.
“She doesn’t look well,” Bertie mused, as they rolled into a parking spot beside the trailer.
“That’s because meth’s a hell of a drug.” Rachel bit down her irritation and disembarked from the car, glad to be rid of the vinyl rubbing against her sore bum, and went to greet her parents.
Greg wrapped her in a great bear hug, nearly swallowing her in his folds.
“I see you’ve decide to ditch those lavender locks and join us here in the grey cadre,” he said with a chuckle, rubbing Rachel’s head, then laughed again at his own mispronunciation.
Bertie got to her mother first, and got the first hug in. “Yassou, Marina.”
“Ooh, you charmer. You know I don’t speak the old tongue, but I appreciate the effort. So Rachel, how do you like our new digs?”
Rachel shrugged, “To be honest, I really liked the beach house.”
“We bought that place before we knew what the property taxes were going to be like,” Greg huffed. “The beauty of this place is if the landlord decides to be a jerk, we can pack up and move!”
“This is our second trailer park since the pandemic,” added Marina, “It’s comfy, but it’s no place to be stuck during a lockdown.”
By this point, Leanne had joined them, waving her hands in the air. “Speaking of lockdowns, you know what’s the worst place to be during a pandemic?”
“Leanne, dear…”
“No takers? Really easy one.” She beat a staccato into the aluminum siding. “It’s prison! You know I caught the damn bug twice, because when it comes to public health and you’re in prison, nobody gives a sh-“
“Leanne, listen to your mother.”
Rachel watched for a tense moment as Leanne considered how to finish her sentence. Finally, her sister smiled and kissed her on the cheek. “Glad to have you home, sis.”
Greg broke the awkward moment with a joke about how his girls got along better once their periods were synced, and led them toward the picnic table under the trailer’s canvas overhang. Rachel’s offer for a get-together had caught them by surprise, as Marina had noted with some passive-aggressive emphasis, but they had been able to whip up a quick lunch of salad, quinoa and veggie dogs. And if that wasn’t enough, her mother winked; they also had some of her uncle Stavros’ “old family recipe.”
When Marina’s back was turned, Rachel leaned over to Bertie and warned him that Stavros was the kind of man to sample his own supply, and that care should be taken when drinking the deceptively potent kombucha.