12-07-2026, 01:00 PM
CHAPTER 2: FIGHTS YOU CAN’T AFFORD TO WIN
Time can rush by you and creep at a glacial pace at the same time. I am sleeping with the only woman other than my wife I’ve ever seriously considered making a life with. And it’s like there’s a ticking clock in the back of my head that keeps reminding me she is only mine for awhile. She has a husband and a child on another continent. I want to throw the clock away, so I can enjoy every moment with her, but I can’t escape that tick-tock.
And while I measure the minutes, my life remains frozen in the limbo between the one I had and threw away, and the one that yawns in front of me. The life of a cramped condo and dinners eaten alone and drives by myself when there should be two of us. Television programs I can’t remember when they end. Frozen dinners microwaved in front of the television.
It’s only been five months, but it could as easily be five years, and I can’t make myself imagine what five years alone will feel like. I keep waiting to wake up and discover all of this has been a bad dream, to roll over and feel Debbie’s soft warmth and abundant curves nestled against me in our familiar bed.
But I never do.
He didn’t want to leave another mess in his office for the cleaning crew to deal with like they had after his first session of hypnosis with the former Mrs. Maitland. And it had worked. With the exception of a few explosions of spittle from her stomach, it had been mostly dry heaves.
As she rubbed those heavy breasts against him, he found himself beginning to experience an erection, but forced the sensation down and thought about other things that made him go very limp. He could never afford to begin to even think about her in a sexual way, or he’d never be able to help her as a patient. And he would never betray his medical oath. Never again.
He stroked her blonde hair and whispered as calmingly as he could, “It’s alright now, Debbie. It happened a long time ago and you’re in my office and you’re safe.”
She shuddered and pressed her face into his chest. “Oh, my GOD! Oh my God.”
To get her mind off the experience she had just re-lived, and to begin the analysis of whatever it had been, he said, “Tell me what you’re feeling, Debbie.
What’s going through your mind right now.”
She just gasped and moaned for several moments and then:
“Sick...sick to my stomach....I can taste them.....taste them pissing in my mouth....and....I’m scared...”
“We don’t know when this happened, but it’s likely been some time ago. There’s nothing to be afraid anymore. It’s only a memory. They can’t hurt you anymore.”
“No, I’m not scared of them....I’m....there’s something...I can’t remember...but it....it terrifies me...it’s like one of those dreams when....something is behind you and you know it...but you can’t turn around and look at it...like that...”
He made a mental note to follow up on that. It might be further repressed memories of other attacks, or fear of what they represented? Still and all, anger and depression would be expected if this was a true memory, but fear...?
“And...Jesus this makes no sense. I hate Bill. I could cut his throat if I could
get my hands on him. Now I know I am crazy. Why am I furious at him? He wasn’t one of them. How can I blame him?”
“I don’t know, Debbie. It’s hard for me to visualize his connection, based on what you’ve just remembered, but it’s also hard to imagine how your anger toward him could involve this incident, if there wasn’t a connection. Keep going.”
She pushed herself back and away from Teller, sitting back on the couch where she had lain during the hypnotic regression session. She wiped the tears and snot off her cheeks with the back of her hand, then accepted a white linen handkerchief Teller offered her to finish cleaning herself up.
“You want to know what I feel mostly, Dr. Teller?”
“Yes, I’m very curious if there’s something you feel more strongly than what you’ve already described.”
“No, disgust at myself.” “At yourself?”
“Don’t you get it, doctor? I know you do. You’re just trying to be supportive. I was in a bathroom. I think it was in a men’s bathroom. I wasn’t being bangd. It was obvious I had gone in there to suck those guys off or let them screw me. I
wasn’t expecting what they did to me, but I didn’t go in there to talk politics. I went in there to suck their dicks and let them screw my pussy. Just like the slut that most think I am.”
“You can’t be sure of that.”
“Doctor. It was a bathroom, a public bathroom and a big one, obviously. In a restaurant or big hotel. They weren’t dragging me. They didn’t have me gagged. I could have screamed for help, but I didn’t. I remember them putting their dicks in my hands and I was jerking them. I could have hurt them, but I didn’t want to. And until they got too rough, I obviously didn’t mind sucking them.
“I know what it was, doctor. It was a gang bang, one that I apparently walked into willingly. And I wasn’t a kid. I was a grown woman. So I was a married woman. While my husband that I vowed to love and be faithful to was somewhere else, I was sucking strange dicks.
“I’m a wonderful wife and mother, alright. No wonder I could never let myself remember.”
Tears flowed down her cheeks that she didn’t attempt to wipe away.
“The funny thing is, doctor, I really thought I was a better person than that. I love sex and I’ve had multiple men before, doubles and even triples when I was in college. But I thought...I was an honest person. That when I made a promise, an oath, I could keep it. And I made a promise to Bill.
“He accused me of cheating on him, and I told him he was wrong. Now it turns out he was right all along, he was just wrong about who I was cheating with.”
Teller kept quiet. There were times when patients needed to speak at their own pace.
She wiped a tear from her face and looked at the drop of her liquid on her fingertip as if she’d never seen a tear before.
“I like sex, doctor. I like having sex with men. I like being lusted after. I like that look in a man’s eyes when he sees me for the first time and I KNOW that I could have him if I wanted him. When I met Bill...when I got to know him....when I fell in love with him...I didn’t stop being what I am.
“He knew other men excited me....still do...always will....I’ll probably be a flirt when I’m 80, if I make it that far.....I knew, or I learned, that he had doubts about me....I knew that...but what could I do? I can’t change what I am.
“So I did everything I could to reassure him. No matter how hot other men got me, I always brought it home to him. And I think he liked it most of the time. It’s a man thing. Most men like knowing they have something other men want—as long as they don’t have worry about losing it.
“And for the first ten years, before he joined that miserable State Attorney’s office and our marriage started dying, we were okay. I never cheated on him,
although God knows there were lots of times I wished a little bit that I was still single. But I didn’t. Honest to God.”
Teller stopped her.
“There’s no need to take a pledge to tell the truth, Debbie. You could lie all day to me and the only person it would hurt would be you. I believe you’ve told me the truth in our sessions. I trust you.”
“I trusted myself until today, Doctor. Now I’m not so sure. But anyway, after he joined the State Attorney’s Office, and after he left our marriage for his job, and my Aunt Clarice got dumped by her husband and kept telling me that Bill had to be cheating, that all men cheated, all men were pigs, I probably did things I shouldn’t have done.
“I let men rub their dicks on me when they were dancing, once in a while I let a kiss go too far, and I did...I...uh.....there were two times when I jerk-masturbated a guy at a party when he got me alone.
“But I never gave anybody a blow job, I never put my hands on their naked dick, I never let anybody have...my pussy...because that was Bill’s. Even if the son of a bitch didn’t want it anymore and couldn’t make good use of it anymore. By MY standards, and I’m the only one who counts, I kept my promise to Bill. I wore out two vibrators, but I never cheated.
“Or, I didn’t think I did. Now, who knows. But as I can remember, I just drifted along fantasizing about other men, rubbing them sometimes. About two years ago, after Clarice...died....I started thinking seriously about leaving him. I tried to talk to him. God knows we had fights.
“But I couldn’t tell him what I was really thinking. I couldn’t tell him I teasing other men, because I knew how insecure he was. He always had doubts about his ability to...satisfy...me and if you tell a man he’s no good in bed anymore, all it will do is push you toward a divorce quicker.
“I tried to get him to shape up, because I knew if he was in better shape, and looked better, he’d be better in bed and I’d be hotter around him. But that damned office always came first. I know that his job is his life. And it was probably innocent.
“But I could never quite get Clarice’s words out of my head. She had loved her husband more than life. And then one day he walked in and told her he was leaving her for a 25-year-old secretary in his office. It killed her. Although it took two years for her to die. So I wondered about Bill and that damned office. And maybe that’s part of why I got so damned angry.”
“So I was lonely and getting more and more unhappy and horny every day. But I couldn’t tell him I was thinking about divorce. Because I was a coward, I guess. We had a good home, we were secure financially. We had two young children. It was...comfortable....That’s a chickenshit word, but that’s the way I
felt. I kept praying that one day he’d wake up and realize what he was going to lose.
“But he never did, and one day I met Doug Baker. And looking back, if he’d wanted to, he could have had me in a couple days. But he played it cool. And somewhere along the way, even though I told myself he was just a friend, I knew I was going to wind up in bed with him. And I couldn’t do that married to Bill. So I started seriously planning for a divorce, how I’d break it to Bill, to the kids. How’d we’d be financially.
“And I could have lived with that. I had been faithful to my marriage. I’d stayed with him as long as I could. I knew my mom and family and our friends would all think I was a terrible person. They’d all be sorry for poor Bill, because he was such a miserable sad sack and I knew he’d be a basket case after I left him. But I’d know that I’d been a decent wife.”
She looked up at Teller, her eyes dry now.
“And I find out that it was all bullshit. I was cheating on him. I did break my vows. I did revert to being a slut like I was in college. I don’t know now if I can ever look him in the eye again. Dammit.”
Teller just stared her for a few minutes.
“I’ve never felt guilty, doctor, about my life and the way I’ve lived it. And now I do.”
“Okay,” Teller said finally. “You’re a cheating slut. Now what?” “What?”
“I’m not sure that your interpretation of what we’ve learned through this session is accurate. I have some questions in the back of my mind about it. But for the sake of argument, let’s grant that you broke your marriage vows, once or maybe many times. You had sex, with multiple partners, probably indulging in a number of what might be called risky or deviant sex practices.
“You’re a cheating wife, an adulteress. By most men—and women’s—standards, you’re what society would call it a slut. So, what?”
She looked at him as if she couldn’t believe what he’d said.
“So what? That makes me a terrible person, a liar, a cheat, a person who would hurt a man who loved her just to have bigger and better orgasms with strange men. What kind of mother does that make me? How could I ever talk about what’s right and wrong with Kelly or BJ and keep a straight face. And if they ever find out. ”
Time can rush by you and creep at a glacial pace at the same time. I am sleeping with the only woman other than my wife I’ve ever seriously considered making a life with. And it’s like there’s a ticking clock in the back of my head that keeps reminding me she is only mine for awhile. She has a husband and a child on another continent. I want to throw the clock away, so I can enjoy every moment with her, but I can’t escape that tick-tock.
And while I measure the minutes, my life remains frozen in the limbo between the one I had and threw away, and the one that yawns in front of me. The life of a cramped condo and dinners eaten alone and drives by myself when there should be two of us. Television programs I can’t remember when they end. Frozen dinners microwaved in front of the television.
It’s only been five months, but it could as easily be five years, and I can’t make myself imagine what five years alone will feel like. I keep waiting to wake up and discover all of this has been a bad dream, to roll over and feel Debbie’s soft warmth and abundant curves nestled against me in our familiar bed.
But I never do.
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 31, 2005 -- 5 P.M.
Teller held the blonde goddess tight against his chest. Although she was hiccupping and gasping as tears flowed down her face, he’d been able to get her to evacuate the contents of her stomach with an emetic administered in his office bathroom before he’d begun the session.He didn’t want to leave another mess in his office for the cleaning crew to deal with like they had after his first session of hypnosis with the former Mrs. Maitland. And it had worked. With the exception of a few explosions of spittle from her stomach, it had been mostly dry heaves.
As she rubbed those heavy breasts against him, he found himself beginning to experience an erection, but forced the sensation down and thought about other things that made him go very limp. He could never afford to begin to even think about her in a sexual way, or he’d never be able to help her as a patient. And he would never betray his medical oath. Never again.
He stroked her blonde hair and whispered as calmingly as he could, “It’s alright now, Debbie. It happened a long time ago and you’re in my office and you’re safe.”
She shuddered and pressed her face into his chest. “Oh, my GOD! Oh my God.”
To get her mind off the experience she had just re-lived, and to begin the analysis of whatever it had been, he said, “Tell me what you’re feeling, Debbie.
What’s going through your mind right now.”
She just gasped and moaned for several moments and then:
“Sick...sick to my stomach....I can taste them.....taste them pissing in my mouth....and....I’m scared...”
“We don’t know when this happened, but it’s likely been some time ago. There’s nothing to be afraid anymore. It’s only a memory. They can’t hurt you anymore.”
“No, I’m not scared of them....I’m....there’s something...I can’t remember...but it....it terrifies me...it’s like one of those dreams when....something is behind you and you know it...but you can’t turn around and look at it...like that...”
He made a mental note to follow up on that. It might be further repressed memories of other attacks, or fear of what they represented? Still and all, anger and depression would be expected if this was a true memory, but fear...?
“And...Jesus this makes no sense. I hate Bill. I could cut his throat if I could
get my hands on him. Now I know I am crazy. Why am I furious at him? He wasn’t one of them. How can I blame him?”
“I don’t know, Debbie. It’s hard for me to visualize his connection, based on what you’ve just remembered, but it’s also hard to imagine how your anger toward him could involve this incident, if there wasn’t a connection. Keep going.”
She pushed herself back and away from Teller, sitting back on the couch where she had lain during the hypnotic regression session. She wiped the tears and snot off her cheeks with the back of her hand, then accepted a white linen handkerchief Teller offered her to finish cleaning herself up.
“You want to know what I feel mostly, Dr. Teller?”
“Yes, I’m very curious if there’s something you feel more strongly than what you’ve already described.”
“Disgust.”
“That’s a normal reaction to the kind of event you’re described. It’s nauseating, even to listen to, much less to experience.”
She looked up from the coffee table which was always a magnet for patient’s eyes, which was why he’d had it put in, besides the fact that he loved it. There was a smile of such sadness on her beautiful features that he had to remind himself to keep a psychiatrist’s neutral stance.“No, disgust at myself.” “At yourself?”
“Don’t you get it, doctor? I know you do. You’re just trying to be supportive. I was in a bathroom. I think it was in a men’s bathroom. I wasn’t being bangd. It was obvious I had gone in there to suck those guys off or let them screw me. I
wasn’t expecting what they did to me, but I didn’t go in there to talk politics. I went in there to suck their dicks and let them screw my pussy. Just like the slut that most think I am.”
“You can’t be sure of that.”
“Doctor. It was a bathroom, a public bathroom and a big one, obviously. In a restaurant or big hotel. They weren’t dragging me. They didn’t have me gagged. I could have screamed for help, but I didn’t. I remember them putting their dicks in my hands and I was jerking them. I could have hurt them, but I didn’t want to. And until they got too rough, I obviously didn’t mind sucking them.
“I know what it was, doctor. It was a gang bang, one that I apparently walked into willingly. And I wasn’t a kid. I was a grown woman. So I was a married woman. While my husband that I vowed to love and be faithful to was somewhere else, I was sucking strange dicks.
“I’m a wonderful wife and mother, alright. No wonder I could never let myself remember.”
Tears flowed down her cheeks that she didn’t attempt to wipe away.
“The funny thing is, doctor, I really thought I was a better person than that. I love sex and I’ve had multiple men before, doubles and even triples when I was in college. But I thought...I was an honest person. That when I made a promise, an oath, I could keep it. And I made a promise to Bill.
“He accused me of cheating on him, and I told him he was wrong. Now it turns out he was right all along, he was just wrong about who I was cheating with.”
Teller kept quiet. There were times when patients needed to speak at their own pace.
She wiped a tear from her face and looked at the drop of her liquid on her fingertip as if she’d never seen a tear before.
“I like sex, doctor. I like having sex with men. I like being lusted after. I like that look in a man’s eyes when he sees me for the first time and I KNOW that I could have him if I wanted him. When I met Bill...when I got to know him....when I fell in love with him...I didn’t stop being what I am.
“He knew other men excited me....still do...always will....I’ll probably be a flirt when I’m 80, if I make it that far.....I knew, or I learned, that he had doubts about me....I knew that...but what could I do? I can’t change what I am.
“So I did everything I could to reassure him. No matter how hot other men got me, I always brought it home to him. And I think he liked it most of the time. It’s a man thing. Most men like knowing they have something other men want—as long as they don’t have worry about losing it.
“And for the first ten years, before he joined that miserable State Attorney’s office and our marriage started dying, we were okay. I never cheated on him,
although God knows there were lots of times I wished a little bit that I was still single. But I didn’t. Honest to God.”
Teller stopped her.
“There’s no need to take a pledge to tell the truth, Debbie. You could lie all day to me and the only person it would hurt would be you. I believe you’ve told me the truth in our sessions. I trust you.”
“I trusted myself until today, Doctor. Now I’m not so sure. But anyway, after he joined the State Attorney’s Office, and after he left our marriage for his job, and my Aunt Clarice got dumped by her husband and kept telling me that Bill had to be cheating, that all men cheated, all men were pigs, I probably did things I shouldn’t have done.
“I let men rub their dicks on me when they were dancing, once in a while I let a kiss go too far, and I did...I...uh.....there were two times when I jerk-masturbated a guy at a party when he got me alone.
“But I never gave anybody a blow job, I never put my hands on their naked dick, I never let anybody have...my pussy...because that was Bill’s. Even if the son of a bitch didn’t want it anymore and couldn’t make good use of it anymore. By MY standards, and I’m the only one who counts, I kept my promise to Bill. I wore out two vibrators, but I never cheated.
“Or, I didn’t think I did. Now, who knows. But as I can remember, I just drifted along fantasizing about other men, rubbing them sometimes. About two years ago, after Clarice...died....I started thinking seriously about leaving him. I tried to talk to him. God knows we had fights.
“But I couldn’t tell him what I was really thinking. I couldn’t tell him I teasing other men, because I knew how insecure he was. He always had doubts about his ability to...satisfy...me and if you tell a man he’s no good in bed anymore, all it will do is push you toward a divorce quicker.
“I tried to get him to shape up, because I knew if he was in better shape, and looked better, he’d be better in bed and I’d be hotter around him. But that damned office always came first. I know that his job is his life. And it was probably innocent.
“But I could never quite get Clarice’s words out of my head. She had loved her husband more than life. And then one day he walked in and told her he was leaving her for a 25-year-old secretary in his office. It killed her. Although it took two years for her to die. So I wondered about Bill and that damned office. And maybe that’s part of why I got so damned angry.”
“So I was lonely and getting more and more unhappy and horny every day. But I couldn’t tell him I was thinking about divorce. Because I was a coward, I guess. We had a good home, we were secure financially. We had two young children. It was...comfortable....That’s a chickenshit word, but that’s the way I
felt. I kept praying that one day he’d wake up and realize what he was going to lose.
“But he never did, and one day I met Doug Baker. And looking back, if he’d wanted to, he could have had me in a couple days. But he played it cool. And somewhere along the way, even though I told myself he was just a friend, I knew I was going to wind up in bed with him. And I couldn’t do that married to Bill. So I started seriously planning for a divorce, how I’d break it to Bill, to the kids. How’d we’d be financially.
“And I could have lived with that. I had been faithful to my marriage. I’d stayed with him as long as I could. I knew my mom and family and our friends would all think I was a terrible person. They’d all be sorry for poor Bill, because he was such a miserable sad sack and I knew he’d be a basket case after I left him. But I’d know that I’d been a decent wife.”
She looked up at Teller, her eyes dry now.
“And I find out that it was all bullshit. I was cheating on him. I did break my vows. I did revert to being a slut like I was in college. I don’t know now if I can ever look him in the eye again. Dammit.”
Teller just stared her for a few minutes.
“I’ve never felt guilty, doctor, about my life and the way I’ve lived it. And now I do.”
“Okay,” Teller said finally. “You’re a cheating slut. Now what?” “What?”
“I’m not sure that your interpretation of what we’ve learned through this session is accurate. I have some questions in the back of my mind about it. But for the sake of argument, let’s grant that you broke your marriage vows, once or maybe many times. You had sex, with multiple partners, probably indulging in a number of what might be called risky or deviant sex practices.
“You’re a cheating wife, an adulteress. By most men—and women’s—standards, you’re what society would call it a slut. So, what?”
She looked at him as if she couldn’t believe what he’d said.
“So what? That makes me a terrible person, a liar, a cheat, a person who would hurt a man who loved her just to have bigger and better orgasms with strange men. What kind of mother does that make me? How could I ever talk about what’s right and wrong with Kelly or BJ and keep a straight face. And if they ever find out. ”
Like, Comment and Give Rating.
![[+]](https://xossipy.com/themes/sharepoint/collapse_collapsed.png)