Page 72 of Coiled Tight
I didn’t know why I kept self-sabotaging. This morning, before getting in the truck, I’d grabbed my phone and opened the message I’d sent Kara. It showed as read just like before, which was not new, but my heart somersaulted down to my stomach and I had no idea how I went through the notions of breakfast without raising any alarms, but now I was back to thinking about it, which was not good.
Most importantly,Iwas not good.
“What brought this on now?”
Daddy—Saúl; seriously, what was wrong with me?—squeezed my leg when I didn’t answer right away. It wasn’t intentional. Words lodged in the back of my throat, unable to come out.
Breathe. Breathing was important. I knew that.
I was more bothered by the fact that I had to remember. That I had to keep doing this to myself and couldn’t go five minutes without breaking down or going in circles about something that should’ve been fixed already.
“Kara.” The name burned my lungs, past my vocal words; it left a bitter taste in my mouth, sucking the air out of the truck as if I wasn’t having enough trouble breathing. “She read my text.”
Saúl hummed. “Yes, we covered this.”
“Well, yeah.” I didn’t have it in me to feel enraged over the condescension that wasn’t even there. It was a simple statement. It just didn’t do anything to keep me from slumping down, thoughts of keeping my libido in check forgotten. “I just hate myself. I obviously shouldn’t have texted her. I shouldn’t have hired a fucking PI because how violating is that? And, fuck, I shouldn’t have like basically ghosted her. Who the fuck does that?”
“More people than you’d think,” Saúl sighed. “But you’re right. Those weren’t the best choices you could’ve made.”
A moan slipped out. It was so not appropriate. I’d never been very good at keeping a filter. And just because I knew I was wrong and deserved to be punished for it didn’t mean I enjoyed it happening per se.
My gut churned as I tried to think of things to say. Instead, I kept thinking back to chats and voice and video calls with Kara. Of how fucking sick I’d felt during the months leading up to her dropping off the face of the Earth, how mystomach revolted every time I chose to not reply to a text or only gave a one-liner as if it was at all sufficient.
“So why should I have the right to be here? To be calling you Daddy and getting all the rewards that come with it?”
Saúl grimaced. There was no way he wouldn’t have given me the boot already if we weren’t inside his truck in the middle of an interstate road.
The thought was not comforting.
“You don’t have the right to… much, in this life,” he said. His voice was measured, too even in how he pronounced every word with intention behind it. “All you have are chances you can take.”
“So…” I frowned. Granted, I’d never been good with metaphors or whatever that was supposed to be. “You’re saying that I don’t have the right to call you Daddy, but I can take the chance to do it.”
“Pretty much.”
“But what about everything else?” I pushed. “Everything I’ve done that I can’t fix?”
Everything that had weighed down and decided all my choices for the past few years. I kept that last part to myself. Not sure why.
“You make the amends that mean you can live with it, whatever that means for you, Cam.”
“But aren’t consequences important?”
“They are,” Saúl confirmed. It was both a relief and another reason to be confused. “I imagine you’ve already given yourself a bunch of those.”
“I mean…”
He wasn’twrong. I just didn’t feel like conceding his point was right. Truthfully, I didn’t know what I was after. I got the feeling that was the crux of the issue. I had isolated myself from everything and everyone, convinced myself I deserved nothing that brought me joy.
Then, I’d jumped at the chance to interview so that I could be even more isolated, so that I could repent or something. And yeah, it had backfired, but I didn’t know that it would’ve helped, even if the sanctuary hadn’t come with Saúl, or his sister, or any of the volunteers who looked up to me, even when I tried my best to stay humble and get it in their heads that I was not the be-all end-all of veterinary studies.
My skin itched with the need for something else, but I couldn’t tell what. I couldn’t process any of it. I couldn’t look in the mirror and say,Yes, if someone straps me to a cross and makes me bleed thirty times, I will be absolved. It was disingenuous. Punishments were fun. Hence, people referred to them as funishments. They could build all the discourse they wanted about behavioral modification or anything else, but punishments were not meant to take away real-life stuff.
And that deeply seated knowledge left me with nowhere else to turn.
“Can I ask you something personal, darlin’?”
Huh?
