She nodded, “Yeah, that. Sam, I know you didn’t really like the idea of real punishment, but I appreciate it. Everything’s sore, and I don’t think I’m going to be able to sit without a pillow, but I think it really helped.” There was some embarrassment there. Thanking him for blistering her butt seemed weird, but she meant it.
“Hold on there, Charlie girl. You got it all wrong.” She looked up, surprised and their eyes met. “I’ve got no problem punishing you anytime you need it. Hell, you’re not the only one to get something out of it either. You’ve had me wound so tight with all the acting out and attitude that I was about to lose my mind, but I feel better now after getting some of it out of my system.”
She rolled her bottom lip under her teeth and looked up at him with her best innocent little girl look. He snorted and rolled his eyes. He took a deep breath and then with a serious look he continued, “I never said I had a problem with punishment. I said I didn’t want to take that on without a committed relationship with you. Punishment is serious business. It’s not just fun and games; you know that now. And it’s a lot of responsibility to have for someone who can’t even decide if they want to be with you.”
“But Idowant to be with you, Sam! That’s not the problem. It’s never been the problem!” The words burst from her and she clung tighter to him without even noticing. It was so intensely important to her that he understood it wasn’t about him, or her feelings for him.
“Then tell me what the problem is, Charlie,” he said. It wasn’t a demand but a gentle urging for her to fill him in.
She felt like he deserved that much, but she wasn’t sure she could explain. Not the whole thing anyway. She shifted in his lap, and then winced as her sore ass rubbed against the heavy denim of his jeans. “Ouch,” she said with a soft rueful tone. “You spanked mereallyhard.”
“Good, that was my intention.” And he looked pleased about it, too. “No more stalling, talk to me.” After a brief pause he added, “Please.”
The words came slowly at first and she had to start somewhere in the middle which was going to make it complicated. “Do you know when I went off to grad school, I started therapy?” she asked.
One eyebrow went up, but she wasn’t sure if it was because of the sudden change in topic or just the idea of her doing therapy. “No. Wait, maybe. I think you mentioned therapy once in passing, but I wasn’t sure when or what it was for,” he said.
She nodded. “You know when Dad sent me off, I was pissed. I quit grad school the first time I tried it and there he was sending me back all over again. I was mad at you getting to stay and mad at him for making me go—and maybe for being sick too. I had so much going on that I couldn’t deal with all the panic attacks and nightmares anymore. I saw something in the student center about therapy, so I gave it a try and it really… helped. A lot.”
She tucked her head down, leaning into him for comfort and so she didn’t have to see his expression. It wasn’t that she was ashamed of needing therapy; it was just that she’d never told anyone about it before. It was a private thing that was just for her, but she had trusted him with her body so now it was time to trust him with the rest.
“My therapist was, is, amazing. She taught me a bunch about how to deal with panic attacks, and stress. How to sort out my emotions and we talked a lot about why I’m…” She paused, one hand waving vaguely. “like this. A mess.”
His arms tightened around her, and she suspected he wasn’t a fan of her calling herself a mess. Too bad—because it was true and they both knew it. He didn’t comment though, which she appreciated. After a second, she continued on toward the hard part.
“I don’t know if we’ve ever talked about my mom?”
“Not much. I remember when I first moved here, we talked about how we both just had dads. I think we bonded over that before anything else,” he said thoughtfully. “My mom was dead, and I think I just figured yours was too, but you didn’t really say and I didn’t want to bring up bad memories by asking.”
“Yeah.” That sounded about right. As a child she never wanted to say the truth, so she’d always implied her mom had died without actually lying. “My mom left when I was about five. Her and dad were always fighting about the ranch, about money, about—I dunno, everything? And one night they had a huge fight and she just packed up and left and never came back.”
That made Sam only the second person she’d ever told and she could practically feel him trying to gather up the words to comfort her, but if he did that she was going to start crying again so she rushed to continue, cutting him off. “I was in therapy for months before it finally came up,” she said.
“I guess in a way it always felt like…like they should never have been together. They didn’t have anything in common. They were always fighting, but they stayed together for like eight years before she finally ran off.”
Her eyes were prickling again, and she took a second to dab at them with the handkerchief. “I asked Dad why once. Why did he stick it out so long when they were both miserable with each other, and he said something about how once you were committed to someone you couldn’t just walk away. And I…”
It sounded so stupid now trying to say it. It was ridiculous that her adult relationships, not just with Sam, but even with friends, were so strongly affected by a few words from her childhood. She was sure he’d never meant her to take them to heart. It was just a casually tossed out explanation to a little kid asking questions he didn’t know how to answer.
“You decided that commitment was a trap? That committing meant you couldn’t leave if you were in an unhappy relationship?” he asked, obviously trying to fill in some blanks.
She nodded, “I guess? Something like that? Being in a relationship meant you weren’t free to be happy—plus, you know the whole abandonment thing affected me on a different level. I mean if my own mom didn’t want me how could I trust anyone else to stick around, right?”
They seemed like contradicting feelings but the thing about emotions is they didn’t always make sense. At least hers didn’t.
Having gotten all of that out she snuck a shy glance up at him, trying to read his expression. He looked like he was lost in thought and then he focused in and took a deep breath, letting it whoosh out slowly. “Well, that explains a lot.”
“Does it?” she asked, with a note of anxiety. She wasn’t reading him well at the moment and it made her nervous.
He patted the side of her thigh as if knowing she needed the reassurance. “Yes, it does. I wish you’d told me about your mother years ago; things might have gone differently.”
“I couldn’t. I didn’t tell anyone about her. Even Dad and I never talked about her after she left. I mean after all these years; she might actually be dead. I wouldn’t have any way of knowing,” she said. Her voice was sad and wistful, letting another secret slip out. She’d always hoped her mother would come back one day.
As a child she’d fantasized about the tearful reunion. Her mother would be full of regrets, of course, and would want to make it up to her. In some of her wilder flights of fancy, she’d imagined something had kept her mother from returning. A sudden accident had taken away her memory and one day it would all come rushing back and she’d remember she had a daughter.
It had never happened. The painful truth was that her mother hadn’t wanted her enough to stay, or even to try to take her when she left. She sighed and let a few more tears fall. She could have held them back but after having just purged herself of all those built up emotions, she wasn’t ready to start stuffing them down, not yet.
Maybe he felt her soaking his shirt again because he seemed to know, and he squeezed her tight. “I love you, Charlie.” There was a pause filled with energy and she knew he was building up to say something important.
