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She’s strapping you down to a table and it’s already different. Padded table, of course: there’s a gym mat under you, with a bit of give to it when you press your cheek to it but with the peeling-away sound of plastic from skin when you lift your face away again. You are naked and in child’s pose, on your face with your knees curled under you and your arms outstretched so your wrists meet your ankles. Padded Velcro cuffs close around your wrists first; Roxy touches the pulse points on the thin skin of the insides of your wrist and your blood rushes to meet her fingertips. Your ankles are next, the same worshiping touch to the filaments of bone that stick out so strangely. All of the cuffs are, of course, attached to a strap, and the strap wraps around and fastens on the underside of the table. You’re not going anywhere. You don’t want to. She soothes down your back with a warm hand (not cold, not hot) and no shivers run down your spine. It is pleasant. Comforting. No foreboding here. A silent ‘are you okay’ with no visible or verbal response to indicate otherwise.
(What Mom would do is pull you by the hair into the bathroom, sit down on the edge of the tub, and yank at you until her knees jabbed into your soft child belly and you were slung across her lap. Push up skirt, pull down underwear.)
Roxy tousles your hair, brings you back from wherever you were wandering. There’s a reason you have it cropped closer to the chin, now. And there’s a reason hair pulling is on your list of hard nos. Her fingers dance along your scalp, give you enough sensation to bring the buzzing to the surface of your skin rather than the recesses of your brain. “You okay in there, Rosie?”
“Mm,” you purr noncommittally. If you could move, you’d be pushing your head into her hand like a cat.
“The water feels a little warm,” she says, “but you said last time was too cold and it was just room temperature,” and you follow her voice as it floats out of your field of vision, somewhere behind the table. Scrape of plastic across tile—bringing the cart over to the table. “It’s real tricky, getting it the right temperature, but I don’t want it to, um. Hurt.”
(Mom never cared about that part. She just put the hose where it was supposed to go and turned the faucet on. Always cold, first. Then too hot. Burning along your insides either way.)
You want to snap at her to just do it, do it and get it over with, but that’s not the point. The point is making this into a thing-that-you-can-be-okay-with. Conceptually.
(You were already sexually okay with it. Your earliest masturbatory fantasies were of a man fucking you in the ass and saying afterwards how good and clean you were. Those fantasies were quickly buried by a total repulsion to actually having carnal relations with other human beings, to an alien species with a phallic apparatus that would spurt jets of fluid into you when they ejaculated. Since those don’t real, you were aggressively asexual for several years until you could process that actually fucking was messy and dirty and filthy and that was okay.)
There is no ‘hardest part’ of it. It’s all difficult. What might be the most disconcerting, though, is Roxy’s perfume. She smells good. Wholesome. Attractive.
(Your mom wore cloying perfume by the bucketload, almost like she bathed in it. And every time she pulled you into the bathroom, the soap she used was pungent. You thought you had a scent allergy for years before you put together that it was PTSD from nasal assault.)
Snap of nitrile rubber gloves. Snap of a cap opening. Not soap—you have to breathe, it’s not shower gel, it’s not going to sting you. When Roxy’s gloved fingertips meet your sacrum, they’re slick and warm and gelid, the slipperiness of the lube a strict counterpoint to what you were expecting. Her probing touch meets your backdoor but doesn’t rub. No scrubbing here, not trying to wipe away anything bad. Just a gentle probe. A testing touch.
(Swift anal dilation is a common physical symptom of sexually abused children, but medically and legally discounted as a definitive indicator of childhood sexual abuse without other physical and mental dysfunctions. You were clean, you were healthy, you couldn’t show Mom you were upset and then you weren’t upset because you couldn’t feel anything at all—there was, and is, nothing wrong with you.)
Roxy’s finger slips in, nudging-but-not-pushing past the rings of your sphincter to glide across the tender inside of you. There’s a burbling wet noise—more lube, and you feel her pushing it into you.
(The only thing inside you, right now. You slipped back into teenage behaviors, cleaned yourself out like you used to, had to have anxious-purged everything you ate in the last week—there’s nothing else to you now. You’re not in here anymore. Only she is.)
“Hey,” Roxy says. The low tenor of her voice somehow surprises you, as familiar with it as you are. “Does that hurt?”
“No,” and you’re surprised by your own answer. Roxy’s finger plunges in and out—but there’s no torque of her wrist, no attempt to manipulate you besides an insertion.
(It’s supposed to hurt, isn’t it? The raw feeling of your skin when you were finally deemed clean, the searing tingling sting of the soap when it went where you now know it wasn’t supposed to go—that’s the price of being beautiful, isn’t it?)
The finger draws out. You still feel too open, not quite puckered enough. It’s okay, though, because now it’s glass, a medical-grade 100mL syringe tipped into you. “Are you ready?”
Does it matter? “Mom,” you say instead, because how else are you supposed to say you’re resolute-but-scared, risk-aware-but-terrified?
The not-skin powdered surface of Roxy’s other hand lays across your lower back. “I’m here,” she reassures you.
(And isn’t that the most fucked-up part about all of this? Not just that she looks exactly like her, not that she shares your last name—not even that you call her Mom during times like this, but that she’s somehow okay with it? Shouldn’t she be disgusted by how pathetic and dirty you are?)
You hear the scrape of rubber-on-glass before you really feel it. Water. Pressed into you. Rushing through you, creeping along your insides restlessly until it gets lodged somewhere in your twisting guts. She’s very slow, very careful. Watches your breathing, and you can feel her eyes on your face even as you shut your own to concentrate.
(The sooner Mom got things over with, the better. She treated cleaning you like it was an odious chore, that you were somehow the filthiest child who couldn’t even be grateful that she was making you presentable. But you still screamed as too much was pumped into you at once, threw up on more than one occasion because there wasn’t enough room inside you for everything she wanted to flush out of you.)
The familiar weight settles into your stomach. Roxy rubs your lower back. “How many?”
“One.” One syringe. You agreed to four. 400mL isn’t so much, is it? It only feels like more because she’s doing it in separate trips.
The glass nub at the tip of the syringe presses into you again. Roxy pushes down the plunger. This one is more like sloshing—there’s already some inside, full contact with every intimate part of you, but there’s more of it now, settling into the nooks and crannies of you where you’re terrified you’ll never be clean again, if ever you were.
(Just water. Just water. No “solution,” no soap. Just water. Clean, pure, simple, hydrogen and oxygen water. No chemical burns from things not meant to go in a human rectum. Just water. It’s just water.)
Roxy has to hold her fingertip over your hole this time. Out of a precaution, because you’ve already clenched every muscle in your body so tightly you can barely move. Hands fisted so hard your nails are digging into the meat of your palms, toes cramped in and the arches of your feet meeting and rubbing so you can have some other sensation to focus on. “How many is that?”
“Two.” You feel like you’re saying it from underwater, like opening your mouth will cause it to pour out the other end of you.
(You never knew there was a word for this until you were in your twenties and deeply invested in kink communities. You thought it was just a thing all moms did with their daughters to keep them clean and healthy. But other girls didn’t seem to have a day of the week when they winced while sitting down, and other girls didn’t seem to be trained to cross their legs militantly for fear of nasty germs crawling between them.)
The third trip goes more slowly than the first two as another 100mL of water is introduced into your system. Your guts threaten to cramp, but you try to breathe—and breathing itself is odd as your stomach bloats out, forcing the organs in your chest to work in a more confined space. There’s air rushing along your esophagus into your lungs, and there’s water rushing along your insides and pressing out with all its force. It feels so heavy somehow. “How many this time?”
“Three.” Except your mouth twists a little on the way out, and the th comes out more like an f, and you feel like you might be six years old again. Roxy rubs at your lower back again, but carefully stays away from creeping to your sides or your front.
(Fat. That’s what you must look like with your stomach so distended—fat. Fat, with a pinch to your hips, a swat at your thighs, a fishhook in your cheek. You were eight. You still had baby fat, but you had to look like a little perfect miniature woman and had to act like one, too, had to be clean and prim and proper, speak like a lady but never when men are talking, always make sure you sound smart. And take up as little space as possible, Mom never wanted you to grow up to be fat.)
“Last one—I promise.” Your hole feels tender, oversensitive as the tip of the syringe nestles in it, and this time—it can’t be much, but it feels impossible that you could hold this much. You feel vast, unending, because you can feel every millimeter of yourself, inside and out, and it’s too much all at once to process. Gravity is too much, the way it keeps your shoulders and your shins to the table, but you’re too heavy to move and you’re too strapped down to try.
(Mom never promised. If she did, it didn’t mean anything. She’d promise not to drink and then you’d find a half-finished vodka bottle behind the couch. She claimed that drinking so much “peeled the paint off the inside of her” and left her feeling clean and pure. Alcohol kills germs, it’s sterile, it was good for her. It was supposed to have been good for you, too, introduced from both ends, but it made you sick whether by mouth or otherwise. Until you learned that it didn’t just make you clean, it made you forget, and then it was magic.)
A pint. Only about a pint. That’s how much is in you right now. And you don’t feel like your organs are going to explode, don’t feel like your skin is splitting apart at the seams, but it’s there. Not solid, but filling all the same. Breathing, twitching, thinking about it makes it slosh around, the weight pressing against you differently. Roxy’s hand moves down from your lower back to your rear, grabs a little, and just that small sensation has you crying out. Too much. Your clit is already hard.
(Gallons, used to be, or at least felt like. Swift in, swift out. Never had to hold it for long but it was intolerable all the same. Letting it go was never even a relief, because then you just felt empty, like something of yourself had also been washed away.)
Your clit is hard. You’re aware of this from somewhere very far away. And then, more immediately. Because Roxy’s lube-slicked, still-gloved hand cups over your genitals and frames it between two fingers, probably on accident, and her other hand still stays solidly on your back but with her thumbprint covering your exit so you can’t let it go, have to let it sit and fester in you.
(The enemas only happened about once a week, just infrequent enough that they were too hard for a child to predict with any accuracy. The inspections happened almost every day. Mom would demand for you to show her your dormant child genitals and she would invariably determine that there was something wrong with them, something that needed to be scrubbed away to leave you pink and puffy and perfect.)
“Good,” Roxy coos at you, her voice low and perfect. “Good girl, such a good girl.” Her slick hand passes back and forth; the ridges where her fingers meet are almost too much sensation, even though they leave room for your folds to glide along her touch.
(You were never good. It was either clean or dirty, and you could never be clean enough.)
“Give me a word?” Roxy asks.
There are so many, though. There’s a system the two of you set up, not quite stoplights but not quite safewords, where you could acknowledge that a thing was risky and you weren’t sure it was safe but you wanted to try it anyway. “Venus,” you tell her. She’s such a nerd that she was the one that came up with the planetary system. Earth is, of course, in the goldilocks zone, with enough water and oxygen to produce life. Mars edges out into being too cold, but then you can go all the way to Pluto with the extent of your nope. And Venus and Mercury—just as dangerous, just as temperamental, but a hitch in your breath, a kickstart to your pulse, the risk in the arousal itself. Venus is Earth’s evil twin, counterclockwise and contrarian, but the allure is undeniable.
Long story short: you’re not sure this is safe for you, but it’s close enough that you’re willing to try and you’re turned on enough that you don’t want to stop.
(Mom never listened. You’d scream, sometimes. Cry, a lot, but mostly silently. Please and don’t and no were not in your vocabulary when it came to dealing with her. She wasn’t even satisfied with yes or thank you.)
You can hear Roxy breathing. Her hand stops. “Is it okay if I want to—“
“Mom, god,” your voice cracks, she can’t stop, that’s not what you said, she isn’t listening—
Instead her hand nearly draws away so that the tip of her index finger is resting at the rim at the nadir of your cunt, nudging it back to reveal your other entrance.
(No, no, that was bad, that was the worst, was when she would soap up her hands with their long fingernails and put her fingers and scrub and scrape at the walls of your vagina while muttering that you were a dirty child--)
You let out a desperate sound, push your chest down and your ass up, because you’re not sure you can let out a word that says everything you need to communicate all at once and this gesture is all you can do. The water in you weighs the wrong direction, pushes against your esophagus, and you clench your teeth. It’s not going anywhere, but you don’t want it to try.
“Fuck, you’re incredible,” Roxy tells you, and pushes a finger into you.
Lubed, slick. No texture of skin against skin. Just an easy glide. Clinical, almost, but undeniably arousing.
(Mom’s touch was too intimate, like she wanted to learn every texture of the inside of you so she could sandpaper them down and make you smooth on the inside.)
You’re dripping wetness. Not from the back, Roxy’s thumb has that on lockdown even if you were dribbling out around it—no, this is the drool of arousal, seeping out of you the more Roxy pushes into you. God, you’re just so full, full of her, and you don’t want it to stop, letting out these whining tight sounds from your throat because you don’t know what to say or how to tell her how you feel.
“Rose,” she says, and you are you. Not a child, not a doll, not a toy, not a thing. You are a person and she cares about you and the way she says your name is wondrous and yet somehow not possessive in the slightest. “Do you think you could—I want to try,” and she starts to stutter, like she’s making one of her trademark typos out loud, “t-to mayb-yeah—not with the strap-on, but—if I c-cold—could--“
“Uh-huh,” you cut her off. It’s supposed to be a yes but breaks into a sob of arousal when the pad of her thumb moves incidentally, incrementally against your mudhole and the finger inside you graces across your g-spot. Full, full full full, you need to be full of something other than you, there is too much you in you right now and she needs to fix that.
“Ohgodokay,” she sighs out, like she was holding her breath—like you were going to tell her no? why would you tell her no?—and draws out, pushes a second finger inside along with the first. “I feel bad that I’m hard, if that makes a difference.”
(It doesn’t, really. You learned a long time ago that your genitals will do whatever the hell they want, and sometimes that is not a thing that you want. But you find this kind of sexy, in a reclamatory super fucked up way, and you’re pretty turned on by it, too. So if she’s going to be okay putting a condom on and fucking you like that, if she doesn’t particularly feel flip-outty about her dick today, then you don’t mind her keeping it safe inside you for a little while. In fact, you’re relatively sure you’ll like it, but there’s always the residual but she’s making you filthy echoing inside your skull.)
You don’t want to think about the logistics. You’re glad Roxy’s doing that for you. If she thinks everything will fit, then you’re not going to second-guess her.
(You’ve never really done the PIV thing before, not with a real P at least—but Roxy fills a liminal space between the woman who abused you and the men you fantasized about anally raping you when you were in single digits. Male sexuality has always frightened you because of how your mom would talk about them while you were growing up, always “don’t have sex or you’ll get pregnant and die,” and the way she talked about getting knocked up by your dad, whoever he was, you think she probably even believed what she was saying. But being with women hasn’t felt safe either—you remember the terror that jolted through you the first time your hand passed far enough up the inside of Kanaya’s thigh that you could feel the cotton of her panties against the web between your thumb and forefinger, the raw panic and physical discomfort when she, for lack of a better term, invaded your genitals and colonized them with her vibrator. Roxy is neither. She’s a girl, and she has a penis. And so, in the constant C-PTSD war zone of your miswired brain, this means she’s permanently green-lighted. Penis but nothing male about her sexuality, woman but without a vulva that would make you psychologically shut down. And patient, and kind, and loving, and like the mom you always wish Mom had been for you. Is this fucked up? Probably, a lot. Do you want to untangle it right now, with your sensitives thrumming and your insides full? No, you want to sprinkle the fairy dust of catharsis on it. And if you actually have an orgasm, which is looking more and more likely, then fucking good for you.)
Roxy doesn’t quite pull her fingers out, more lets your channel close around them until they slip out on their own. A slip-slide sound—wiping the lube off on her thigh, maybe—a snap like a rubber band, and then a snap-rip. “Oops, teeth!” Roxy explains, and then not nitrile rubber ripping, but foil instead, because she’s reluctant to take her other hand away from your sacrum and you’re probably overly grateful for that. After that, a schlick like the one with the gloves—the condom is latex but the gloves aren’t, more due to availability than to any allergy either of you might have. Not necessarily for birth control, but for protection, an easier slide if it’s not skin-friction on both sides, but you trust her not to have ripped the damn thing on its way down.
A knock on the table behind you—a slap on the table by the side of your face. Roxy’s climbing on. She’s too smart to do that without either testing the table herself or getting the OSHA rating for how load-bearing it is first. Hoisting up her other leg is the problem, because she doesn’t want to let go of your back, but she’s lithe in a way you aren’t. Taller than you, too. She puts her now-bare hand against your privates and the intimacy of her skin is almost too much to bear, but it isn’t until you feel her perked nipples against your shoulderblades that your hole threatens to give from the surprise. But she leans further into you, breasts smushing into your back, mouth smearing along the place where your shoulder meets your neck.
Your heart feels too big in your chest, the water-weight in your stomach now pressed down by her weight as well; every pulse through your veins makes you very aware of the extent of your body and how strange your position is right now. Made even stranger when Roxy stops cupping her hand around you and instead ruts her cock between your legs, pressing it through your folds so you sort of drape around her; you cry out and your backdoor spasms when the head of her dick bumps up against your aching-hard clit. “Mommy!” comes out of you on impulse and you’re immediately ashamed.
(She was never Mom or Mommy. Always Mother. To strangers, Dr. Lalonde. To you, a near-stranger, kept at a distance by the deliberate formality of her title. Even invading your genitals she did in a clinical way, because she had to. That was how she showed she cared, because otherwise she was so cold.)
You wonder if she can feel your thoughts through your skin—or maybe if it’s hers phasing into you. A definite element of fear, an even stronger streak of courage. You’re both trying this together. And even if it doesn’t work out, you’re going to be okay. You trust her.
You breathe, and tell her “Earth.”
She doesn’t waste time lining up—she’s scientific and precise, even in sex—and pushes into you with one swift slide until she’s buried to the hilt oh god she feels so big. It makes the water inside of you slosh around as it rearranges itself; she massages your hole with her fingertip, but rather than holding it closed, that touch is halfway persuading it open. You try to clench that, to keep anything nasty inside of you from seeping out, but that means you clench around her, and fuckshe’sjustsobig it makes you sigh out the breath you were holding. Your guts make a sloshing sound as they try to rehome themselves inside you. “Oh my god, I could hear that,” Roxy says, but she doesn’t move, just pins you in place like this, stopping you up in both holes between your legs.
(You wonder if she should try to put something your mouth the next time. You wonder why you think there’s going to be a next time, or if there should ever be a next time.)
Your mouth tastes of blood and snot—you’re sniffling at the pressure in you, and you’re biting at your tongue to keep your teeth occupied. You don’t know why you feel like you can’t say anything. “Rosie?” Not Rosalyn. Rosie. Rosie Rosie Rose. “Nnh—you can mmh. Make noise if you want.”
“Hnn,” comes out of your throat high and tight, a swallowed scream. You hope she can interpret that correctly.
She does—you’re loving being filled every way she can. Until she draws out, and then you delighted-whine again when she pistons right back in, smooth and slow, to fill the hollow she just fucked out of you. Yes, you can let yourself empty out, your brain doesn’t have to be full of memory or thought or worry. Your body just has to be full of her and what she’s putting in you.
Every thrust from her makes you worry about the integrity of your sphincter, but she’s holding you closed. There’s an alarming moment right when she starts to pick up the pace that you feel it give a bit too much and a drip manages to escape—you want to cry out of shame but instead Roxy leans her hand further into your hip, caresses her thumb against your hole, and takes the weight off her other hand so she can bring it up under your armpit to reach up and caress your face. You feel disgusting and gross on the inside and you feel like too much of you but somehow also not-you and your insides are churning and cramping and your brain is trying to put itself through a meat grinder with the way it’s snarling up your thoughts and it’s Roxy’s fingers against your cheeks that remind you that it’s okay to cry when everything is this overwhelming, that she cares about you just the same and she’ll be here to wipe away your tears and she cares if you’re hurting.
Her hand comes down to touch your lips. Well, both hands—her hand still at your ass slips further down so her thumb is both across your sphincter and touching the place where you’re swallowing down her dick, and her hand at your face moves down until you can taste your own tears from her fingertips.
She starts to push her fingertips past your lips—
(Mom called you fat and you threw up anyway sometimes when she’d force all that water through you, what was one more episode of hyperemesis among all the others? You know your own tonsils by feel now, but at least you were thin and pretty, even when your hipbones jutted out a bit too much. Carefully controlled, so no one would suspect you were throwing up before you went to bed every night, still keeping some flesh on your bones but wasting away enough to be supernaturally beautiful. And it left you feeling pure afterwards, and wasn’t that the most important part, really?)
--and you push back against them with your tongue, everything in you spasming, hole twitching and leaking out a little bit more so it doesn’t come out of your mouth instead. “No,” comes out of some deep, primal part of you, “no no no no—“
She listens. Pulls her hand back so her fingers don’t travel quite so far over your tongue, but you suck the very tips of them into your mouth before she can retreat all the way. All your holes are now plugged and somehow this feels right, like you need some kind of containment to keep all of you inside yourself so that it doesn’t spill out and infect others. But it’s spilling out anyway, isn’t it, enema leak from your sphincter, arousal from your cunt, drool from your mouth, tears from your eyes.
You need Roxy to wring you out. And the more she pistons into you, the closer she takes you to bursting. Not with content, not with being full, but with a brimming anticipation. You recognize this. It doesn’t happen a lot, but you’re afraid to touch it and chase it down in case it never comes about.
(Because your genitals are for cleaning, not for fucking. Because your body is for presentation, not for self-ownership. Because your mind is for purity rituals, not for orgasms.)
Roxy rocks into you, constant and sure. Presses herself into you, thigh into thigh, hips nestled in hips, belly to back only separated by her hand holding you closed, arm tucking your body into hers by strapping it across your chest and holding your heart in place. Everything in you is churning, a tempest, a tidal wave, too much sensation everywhere at once and your mind full of nothing but trying to map out the places where you’re getting touched and it’s too much to hold all at once and you’re so small and everything is so big and you’re sure something’s coming and it’s threatening to overwhelm you and out of your throat comes the most pitiful whine you’ve ever heard.
“Shh,” Roxy says, not patronizing, just trying to help. “You’re safe. It’s okay, Rose. You’re okay.”
This is what makes you orgasm.
It crashes down around you and un-knots everything in you that was ever tied up, systematically rushes through you and overloads your synapses until it feels like an atomic bomb was detonated behind your teeth and your skin feels radioactive. A spurt of water leaks out of you as you clench up, and you nearly push Roxy out of you, but she fights just as hard to stay in, hitching her hips in micro-movements so she can keep the fires in you stoked for as long as possible. And not just staying in there, either—her thumb, oh fuck, everything is too much and you can’t feel your tongue and you can’t hear anything but white noise and the first joint of her thumb sneaks into your asshole and you start to sob because she has to plug you up like this and it’s humiliating that you don’t have control over your own body but you asked for this and it’s almost arousing that you can’t help it because she was so good to you.
As you’re winding down, Roxy rears up onto her knees, drives forward with a little more speed, a little more purpose, and the little minx takes her fingertips from your mouth coated with your drool and pushes them down your front, over your belly toofulltoomuchstretchedout, and over your clit so they can pinch. And the cascade starts again, but differently this time. If the one before was an explosion, this one is an implosion, a collapse, everything in you drawing in so you can protect yourself and shrink down to your id, the most primal part of you when there’s nothing else of you left. Everything else has been stripped away and here you are, tainted and fucked up, and Roxy’s making love to you. It’s too much to bear, and it overloads your senses the same way the first one did. And as this one sweeps you away, you can feel just a little extra—Roxy pulsing in you, flooding the condom, she thinks this is hot, she knows how broken you are and she thinks you’re okay anyway.
It dissipates gradually, like a migraine. Your skin feels deadened; your insides are heavy, but not sensitive. Roxy moves her hips back as she softens, mostly flops out of you at the end there. Her thumb worms its way back out of you but never stops pressing you closed so you can hold it. Gravity helps, but only so much. With one hand slicked by your drool and girljuice, Roxy still manages to fumble open the hook-and-loop closures of your cuffs; even though they didn’t go dead from cut-off circulation, sensation returns to them like pins and needles. The caress of her fingers against the skin of the arches of your feet has you flinching away, oversensitive. Your ankles are freed as well, and Roxy finally, finally takes her hand away from your entrance and stops making you so aware of it as an entity. It doesn’t stop the molten-lead feeling of the water inside of you as she helps to rearrange your limbs.
“Rose,” she’s saying. “Rosie.”
“Mm.” That’s you. Somehow.
“Can you walk?”
“Mm” again. You don’t know. Your limbs feel shaky but you can probably pull yourself together for as long as it takes to get into the bathroom.
“Mm,” Roxy hums in response. Her thinking noise. As she crawls towards the edge of the table, she sort of takes your body with her until she’s back standing where she was and your knees are at the edge, feet dangling off. It feels weird to not have them sticking to the plastic texture of the gym mat. “Right leg.”
She helps manipulate your body into functioning again so you can remember how to stand, how to walk. Mostly your body awareness is focused entirely on your core and how full you still feel. And you can’t psychoanalyze that away. Even though you know it wasn’t very much to start with and you probably lost some of it anyway, it feels overwhelming still. Roxy has to catch you when you lean off-balance before she can similarly get your left leg off the table.
It’s nine steps to the toilet. Roxy doesn’t let you whump down onto it, and you’re glad for it, because that would have hurt. Probably bruised your tailbone. Instead, she has you hold onto her shoulders with your hands, grabs onto the backs of your arms, and leans down as you cling to her so you gently maneuver into a sitting position. “Hey,” she says, and kisses your sweaty temple. “You’re okay. You did really good, Rosie. I just need you to give the water back now.”
The weight inside you? You thought you’d have to bear that burden forever, have it cramping your insides around its presence. Now that you’re actually allowed to, you can’t relax. “I,” comes out panicked, and it doesn’t help that she’s looking at you.
“Nuh-uh,” she argues with your lizard hindbrain. “You can do it. You don’t have to hold it anymore. Give it back.”
“What if I can’t?” Logically, you have to. But right now, in this moment? That seems like a real possibility. What if you can’t just let it go? What if it sits inside of you forever, becoming more and more disgusting the longer it leeches the awful from the inside of you? What if it comes out and it’s filthy and gross just like you always knew you were?
Roxy kneels down, sits in front of you with her feet tucked under her rear. Her hands lay on your thighs. “You’re safe now, Rose. You don’t have to keep it. Let it out.”
(You never had a problem doing this before, mostly because it was too much to hold anyway and you were already standing in the tub by this point. And you already knew Mom thought you were disgusting and dirty and ungrateful, so there was nothing to prove one way or the other. But Roxy?)
Her hands caress up, past your hips, to dip into the tuck of your waist, and that’s what finally does it.
You start crying. She doesn’t press on your belly, but you’re very aware of the frame of her fingers between your ribs and your hips. It rushes out of you in a torrent and the sound it makes is shameful. One pour, two, and you feel like there might still be filthy water clinging to the inside of you somewhere so you bear down and try to wring it out but there’s nothing and you’ll hurt yourself trying and you feel empty and guilty about it.
Roxy reaches past you, flushes. You’re grateful she won’t make you look at it. She gathers you up in your arms, and you walk with her, and then you’re flopping onto your bed together, with its still-rumpled sheets that you never manage to make up in the mornings. Another moral failing.
For a while, she just cuddles you close. Petting at your hair. Holding you so your skin touches hers. Breathing together, chests jostling each other. She’s not moving or going anywhere. And cubic inch by cubic inch, you start to let go. Your muscles unfurl—your toes hurt from curling in so hard. There’s a twinge somewhere in your mid-back that will probably hurt like hell later. And Roxy is still here. Breathing with you.
This is the debrief, right? Where you’re supposed to talk about what happened? “I’m sorry,” you say on instinct, because someone has to start this conversation.
“Huh?”
“I called you mom and I’m sorry.” That’s the kind of thing you apologize for, isn’t it?
“Oh, honey,” Roxy says, and it’s genuine, not any Strider fakey-fake Southern “charm.” “Why are you saying sorry?”
Of all the things that could trip out of your mouth, the one that spills out was “She abused me.” Not this is incestuous enough with you sharing my last name, not Mommy is the least sexy, not it’s inappropriate to play out caregiver-little if that wasn’t negotiated beforehand. Yes, all of those are bad—but the worst thing, to you, in your mind, is that you called her by the title of a family member who abused you in the same way that you just played out sexually.
What might help the most, though, is Roxy’s response. “Yes, she did. And what she did to you was fucked up.”
You hiccup a little on your next breath in. “From your perspective,” you say carefully. “I think she thought she was doing the right thing.”
“She hurt you, Rose.” And you don’t know why this is harder to process than the barrage of sexual sensation you just put yourself through. “It doesn’t matter why. From your perspective, she hurt you. And she did it because she thought you were dirty, and that’s why she might have thought it was okay. And that’s not true, Rosie.”
“Look at me,” you tell her, although what you really want her to do is turn over so you can spoon her, your breasts to her shoulders, so she can’t see how much of a mess you really are. “I’m a mess. I always have been. She was just trying to clean me up so I could be presentable.”
“Hm.” She draws back, and she does look at you—just like you asked. Except instead of judging you, she’s looking at you like she might look at an equation. Not like you’re a problem, but like there might be a solution. “Have you considered that it’s okay if you’re a mess?”
“What.”
“Have you thought about,” she words it differently, “the fact that it might be okay if you feel a little bit messed up? Because nobody’s perfect. You’re not perfect—and that’s okay, because you’re you.”
You close the gap between the two of you again, press yourself into her arms so that your ear is pushed up against her breastbone. She gladly envelops you in an embrace and plants a kiss in the part of your hair. You can hear her heartbeat like this. “What if I don’t want to feel like this anymore?”
This close, you can feel it, rather than see it, when Roxy shrugs; her boob moves against your face. “You should never have felt like this in the first place, eye-emm-oh. And I don’t want you to feel like this either. But it might take a long time and a lot of work until you feel okay—even though you are.”
“You think I’m okay?”
“Totally okay,” she reassures you. “The most okay.”
“Because I feel fucked up.”
“No, you feel fucked,” she gently corrects you, and she’s right. Your skin feels like it’s humming with oxytocin, and everything between your legs feels vaguely tingly. But not in a violated way, which is weird, because she was definitely just inside you. A lot. “The question is, good fucked, or bad fucked?”
Ah, yes. The true debriefing. “Very good fucked. Also in the head.” Because churning through all your visceral, emotional reactions was tumultuous. “Thank you for not pushing your fingers in my mouth.”
“You said no,” Roxy points out. “But then you started sucking on my fingers.”
“There was a reason,” and you’re sure you knew what the reason was at the time—oh. “I wanted to be filled up in every place that could have been open, so I needed something in my mouth. But if you push too far, I’m going to throw up, and I don’t have an emetophilia kink.”
“I’m wounded.” She’s not—she’s giggling into your hair. It’s a hard no for her, too. “This kills the relationship.”
“Mark it on the gravestone. What number reason is this?”
“Twelve, prolly.” Her hand doodles idly onto your skin. “So you needed me to fill you up?”
That sounds strange, when she puts it like that. Also sexually charged, and not like it’s a neutral thing you can process. “We’re going to pack that particular suitcase and set it to the side for now and I will very carefully unpack it later. With a full hazmat suit on, emotionally speaking.”
“Fair ‘nuff.” When she yawns, it only makes you realize how tired you are, too. “Is it okay if we get back to Milly Vanilly for a while? Because that was A Lot,” You can hear the capitalization in her voice, “and I can’t do that every day.”
“I don’t want that every day.” The thought of it is terrifying to you. You don’t want to go back to it even being a weekly thing. “Maybe we can mark it on the calendar and space it out and I can psych myself up for it.”
“Not in pink, those are my sub days.”
“Purple,” you promise. “And you switched amazingly well.”
“So I did an okay job?” You nod against her boobs. “And you’re not traumatized or anything?”
“Not by that.”
“Good.” Then, “Good” again. “You’re good, Rosie. You were so good—you’re so good to me.”
“As long as you think so.” Because you don’t believe it yourself—you’re not even clean, how can you be good—but maybe you can be good for someone.
And maybe you can be good to yourself, too.