“Yes, what do you visualize when you look at the photo.”

“Lo,” I say, “doing this to me, and then maybe he’d actually put his fingers…in…” Buzz! Buzzz! Buzzzz! “Motherfucker,” I curse under my breath and close my eyes tight.

“Take it easy, Oliver,” Lo sneers.

“Find another, Lily.”

I scroll through the tablet and land on a photograph of a girl’s oiled ass, but large male hands massage her butt and even edge closer and closer to her clit. Holy shit. Buzz!

The shock doesn’t dissuade me from picturing Lo massaging me this way. Maybe he’ll get some ideas from this session. Maybe it’s worth the pain.

But as Dr. Evans shocks me again, all my thoughts morph into shame. I guess, I shouldn’t want to like this. Dr. Evans boosts my fears when he says, “You’re trying not to be deviant anymore. This is bad.” He shocks me one more time and I wince. “Understand that we’re trying to relate these images to a negative stimuli. You should reach the point where these images don’t arouse you anymore. We’re going to shock the whore out of you, one way or the other.”

I give Lo another look but his lip has curled into disgust and he grips the armrest with white knuckles.

The clock ticks languidly.

We have one more hour.

***

My favorite part of therapy is the ride home. Even though I feel like I’m a million leagues below the sea, Lo never stops talking. He brings me back to the surface.

I press my forehead to the fogged window, rain pelting the glass. After four weeks in a drought, the downpour almost feels like a dream. He flicks on the windshield wipers and navigates the road. “Next session I’m going to call him a whore,” Lo tells me. “Give him a taste of his own f**ked up medicine.” His eyes keep flitting to me in concern.

“You’re going to flip us off the road,” I say.

“You’re being quiet.” He merges onto the highway.

“I’m just thinking.”

“About Dr. Oliver Evans’ lack of pornographic magazines for females? What the f**k was he doing giving you a guy mag?”

Though, this was furthest from my mind, I will gladly take the distraction bait. I smile and rotate fully in my seat to face Lo. “You remember in eighth grade when you used to buy me magazines and rip out all the pages with only girl parts?”

He laughs. “It wasn’t all selfless. I thought the more you masturbated the less you’d have sex with actual guys.”

“Huh…” I suppose that makes sense. “Did you know that I used to dump out your bottles of Everclear?” I admit with a grin. The liquor was so strong that he scared me whenever he plucked a bottle from the cabinet. I guess I was too afraid to dissolve our system to actually tell him this, so I did the next best thing.

“I always thought I just didn’t remember drinking them.”

It feels nice to know that we had each other’s backs, even if it seemed like we could care less. “I never told you,” I say softly, “but I was always worried about your health. Your liver…” We don’t usually talk about the risks, at least we never have before. But somehow, banding together to take on evil Dr. Shock Therapy has made us closer in a different way.

He lets out a long breath. “I know you were, Lil. And it’s one of the reasons I can’t drink again.”

I frown. “What do you mean?”

“We have to take all these kinds of medical tests in rehab, and the doctors basically told me that if I continued down the path I was on, I’d do serious, irreparable damage to my liver.”

My eyes suddenly start to burn, silent tears building. “Why didn’t you tell me before?”

“Because I knew you’d be upset and probably blame yourself,” he says, “and it’s not your fault.” He glances at me and then back at the road. “Lil, please don’t cry. It’s really not your fault, and I’m fine. Nothing’s wrong with me.”

“But it could be.” I wipe my eyes and shake my head. “And how can this not be my fault, Lo? I enabled you all our lives. I should have—”

“What?” he says roughly. “What could you have done? Tell me to stop? I wouldn’t have. Physically taken the bottles away? I would have hated you. Tattled to my father? He wouldn’t give a shit. The only person who could have stopped me was me.”

“I could have done something.” I can’t sit here and act like I’m not to blame at all. I supplied him with booze sometimes. I facilitated his addiction.

“You did do something. You were there for me when no one else was.” He drives down another street and turns on the lights as the sun descends. “And Lil…” His eyes meet mine for a brief moment. “If you’re going to blame yourself for enabling me then I have to take fault for enabling you.”

“It’s not the same. Your addiction can kill you.”

“And those men you slept with couldn’t have beat the shit out of you? You couldn’t have contracted an STD or HIV? I let you take those risks and you let me take mine.” He turns a sharp left and I brace myself against the door. “How about we call it even? And then we make a pact to never do it again.”

“Okay,” I say. “Can we shake on it?”

His lips rise mischievously. “We can do better than that.”

Is he thinking what I’m thinking? “Like…”

He laughs. “Well, I saw you staring rather hard at that massage picture.”

Ohhhhh. Yes. No. Wait. “We shouldn’t.”

His brows furrow into a hard line, but he keeps his gaze on the road as the rain falls heavier. “Why not? And you may want to choose your answer carefully. If it begins or ends with the name Oliver Evans, I’m going to eject my seat.”

“It’s deviant.”

Lo lets out a long groan. “Please, for the love of f**king God never say that word again.”

“Well it is.”

“The only thing deviant is what that psychiatrist is putting you through. You shouldn’t be shocked for being aroused by those photographs. I get semi-hard looking at them.”

I frown. “You do?”

“Yes!” he says, half-laughing. “Any human would, Lil. Even if I thought aversion therapy was ethical, which I don’t, I’d only recommend it to people who stare at those photos with violent thoughts. Like rape or child molestation. You’re not a pedophile. The fact that he treats you like one kills me.”

I watch the rain scatter my window as I think this through. It’s not weird to be aroused by them, but it’s wrong to compulsively abuse porn. That sounds right.

“Hey,” Lo says, wanting my attention again. I turn to him, and he gives me a hard look, his eyes flickering between the road and me. “If his therapy methods are f**king with your head, then you’re going to stop.”

“I’m fine, honest. Talking to you helps.”

He grabs my hand and kisses my palm.

“So we went to our respective press conferences, finished publicly apologizing,” I list off. “I’m seeing my new psychiatrist. All we have left is the wedding, and after that I’ll receive my trust fund. My parents should forgive me fully, and everything will turn back to normal—or as normal as we can be.” Once a week, my father actually calls me to catch up. He even told me he was proud that I was seeing this psychiatrist. After everything that I did to his company—the backlash that he’s been through—for him to tell me that he’s proud was enough to cause happy tears. I can’t screw with that.

My mother will take more finesse to win over, and I know she won’t be completely content until the marriage. I can’t afford to stumble anymore.

“What if they don’t?” Lo says softly.

“What?”

“Have you ever thought that maybe, even after you do all of this, that your mother may still not forgive you?”

I shake my head, not willing to believe she could be that cruel. “She has to.”

But the way Lo stares at the road, like he sees a colder future than the warmth I’ve planned, makes me worry.

{ 44 }

LOREN HALE

Some days are harder than others. There are days where I don’t even think about alcohol, and then days where my brain circumnavigates around drinking and nothing else.

Today all I can think about is my mother. My real mother. Emily Moore. After my father gave me her address, I often imagine her house, what she looks like, her life without me.

What I do know for certain is that she’s a substitute teacher in Maine. Married. Two kids. When I was little, I rehearsed the same confrontation in my head. I’d stand on the stoop of my birth mother’s house. I’d ask her why she didn’t want me, why she never called or left a note. But in my mind, I was thinking of Sara Hale—not this Emily Moore.

The name has changed, but my questions haven’t. I just have to figure out when to go and who to take with me. Maybe Ryke or Lily, but neither know I’ve been plotting the date to travel to Maine. Ryke will disapprove, thinking I’ve embedded myself further into my father’s world. So I’m leaning towards a trip with Lily.

But I can’t meet Emily today, even if I want to.

Ryke wants to teach me how to rock climb. Not in a gym. Like on a real f**king mountain. I had to ask whether we were going to use ropes and a harness—considering the guy free climbs (he’s stupid enough to scale a mountain with nothing but his hands, legs and some chalk). We’re planning on climbing the normal, sane way. He can do the whole Spider-Man routine when I’m not watching.

I can’t leave until I finish filtering the morning mail with Rose.

The kitchen table overflows with letters, manila envelopes, and small packages.

Paparazzi have sold photos of Lily buying tampons in the grocery store. It’s ridiculous. And her “fan” mail accumulates with each new headline on the cover of a gossip magazine. Most letters are from old men who think she’ll reply or meet them somewhere for sex. That’s what’s been happening lately. People are grabby as hell. I thought that the guy in the hallway of Princeton was just a fluke, but a lot of men feel as though Lily wants all sex, even from them, just because of her addiction. And they make a go of trying to get it from her.

It’s like she has a twenty-four-seven “open” sign plastered to her body now. And there’s no way for her to spin it around to “closed,” which I know she wants to. Thank God she has a bodyguard.

I rip open a couple letters and nearly vomit at a picture of some dude’s balls.

“Shred this one twice,” I tell Rose, throwing the photo into her pile. The shredder rumbles by her feet as she feeds the machine more and more mail.

She glances at the photograph, flips it over and lets out a snort. “I’ll be thinking of you while you touch yourself,” she reads. “Your sentiments are not shared, Mr. Gordon.”

“This guy is living at the State Penitentiary. That makes me feel fantastic.” I toss her another letter and then slice open the packages with a knife.