Chapter 8 - 3
“No,”
I said to the officer while looking at the medics as they treated me. At this point, I was loaded onto the stretcher and strapped in to be taken to a local hospital, namely a different one from where Will was being taken.
“So he didn’t assault you?”
she asked. “Not sexually? He just hit you and struck you with the gun?”
“Right,”
I said. “He hit me on my back and my arms with the gun and on my face…with his hands.”
I lifted my left arm up, the gaping wound that was present now covered in gauze and wrapped. “He bit me and…forced me into the shower. He made me bathe in front of him.”
“Why do you think he did that?”
the officer asked. “What do you think he wanted to accomplish with that?”
“He thought I was sleeping around,”
I said as my stretcher got slid into the ambulance and secured by the medics.
“Were you?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
I paused at this and stared at her for some time.
“I’m sure.”
She stared back at me sternly, but kindly. Regardless of her kind expression, I couldn’t help but feel a twinge of pain over the fact that she felt she had to ask me if I was sure I hadn’t been cheating on my husband.
“Ma’am,”
she said to me. “Did he sexually assault you?”
She was purposely repeating the questions to see if I’d slip up and give her a reason to add to his charges so I did what anyone in my position might do when someone they were in love with held them at gunpoint, beat them and raped them - I lied.
“No,”
I said as one of the medics cleared the officer from the ambulance door so they could close it.
I was sitting in the corner of my bedroom when I felt a hand on my shoulder. Once I realized I was being touched, I snapped my head around and came face to face with the woman I’d purchased from the auction. She stood there staring at me, a mass of worry and concern on her face.
“Ana?”
she said, her brow furrowed and confused. I didn’t know how long I’d been there or what all had happened while I was spiraling. All I knew was my face and hands were wet with tears and my feet had grown numb from sitting on them. Reyna gently tugged me until my butt was on the floor and off my feet, and sat down with me there in the corner. She used her hands to wipe off my cheeks which were red from stress and wet with tears, taking some of my makeup with each wipe from her thumb.
I didn’t know what to say to her at first. I’d never had such a break down in Aurora before, although I’d had heard and seen things that did soft trigger me at times so I made sure to either avoid them or take a moment to prepare myself for them. Over time I’d gotten to know the more popular rooms around the game world and made sure I was aware of what went on inside them.
“Hey,”
Reyna said to me, her hand still on my face. “What just happened?”
Her voice was soft, but concerned. I remember looking at her and not looking away for an extended period. She, in turn, looked right back.
“Why?”
I finally said to her after not speaking for some time. “Why are you still here?”
“What?”
she said to me, somewhat confused.
“I….”
My voice trailed off as I thought of what to say to her. “I ruined this for you. I screwed this all up over my….”
Again, I was at a loss for words.
“You didn’t screw up anything,”
she said back to me. “It’s fine. It’s all fine. Nothing got screwed up.”
“But I did,”
I said, my words a jumbled mess at best. “I just…I don’t know why. It just happened. I thought I was fine….”
“You are fine,”
Reyna said, trying her best to reassure me even though she really had no idea what had just happened other than I had what probably looked to her as a nervous breakdown. “It’s just me and you here. No one else is around. We’re safe inside you place. Just me and you.”
“Oh, God.”
I felt the tears returning to me. “What did I do?”
I looked around more and finally realized I’d crawled into a corner just as I’d done that day.
“You got really upset,”
Reyna said, her voice still smooth and calm. “We were on the couch and you stood up suddenly and walked over here, came here to this corner and just sat. You were staring at the wall and mumbling something over and over.”
“What?”
I said to her, fighting off another crying fit. “What did I say?”
“I’m not sure,”
she said. “Something about ‘I watched you change, I watched you change.’ You just kept saying it over and over.”
I let out a painful breath as I could feel my chest tighten and hear my heart pounding. My ears were ringing as if I’d just walked out of a live rock concert.
“Christ,”
I said, realizing what had happened. I looked down to the floor and wiped my face with my hands. “Jesus Christ, I’m so sorry.”
“Really, it’s OK.”
Reyna was going out of her way to be kind to me. “Sometimes things go sideways and we don’t see it coming.”
She smiled at me and stroked my hair. “If anything, at least this can turn into one hell of a first date story.”
I was genuinely surprised by her comment and looked back up to her. I tilted my head at her, quizzically so.
“First date?”
I said through my anguish, realizing she was trying to use humor to help calm me. “Is the slave auction a secret dating service that I was never aware of?”
Reyna smiled with amusement.
“If you really think about it,”
she said, “that’s kind of what happens with the slave auctions.”
Reyna laughed a little which caused me to also laugh. “You see it’s all role play anyway so when you’re purchased by someone you’ve never been with before, it’s kind of a trial run to see if either of you likes it. If it’s not so great, both of you part ways amicably. But if you like it, then you add them to your friends list and probably spend more time together or have another session. That’s how I’ve come to understand it.”
“That actually makes sense,”
I said to her. “A trial run…that’s a good way to put it. I’d never thought of it that way.”
“It’s really fun at times,”
she said. “I’ve met a few nice people there…and some terrible ones.”
“How terrible?”
I asked, genuinely wanting to know. Reyna’s attempt to distract me from my melt down was starting to work.
“You were my 4th time doing it,”
she said, giving me much more insight into the whole “Slave Auction”
role play scenario that I’d never really thought of. “The first one was pretty good. We had fun for a time. The last two though were not so good. I just didn’t get along with them. I didn’t mind the degradation or the name calling. I’m fine with that sort of thing. They were just…not good! Was like they had no idea what I was trying to accomplish with my time here even after we discussed it.”
“You mean what was in your bio?”
I asked, having looked over her profile briefly. “I think I remember something about ‘Forget Latina Pride, Suck White Cocks?’”
I had to hold back a laugh as I recalled it.
“Yeah,”
Reyna said, confirming that that was indeed what was in her profile as strange as it sounded. Still being paired with Reyna, she was able to share her HUD with me and brought up her profile and sure enough, there were several photos on it that read almost those exact words or something close enough to them. In the text fields, she also went into great detail about her controversial and often frowned upon kink known as “Race Play.”
“I can’t say I’ve ever seen that sort of commitment to a kink before,”
I said, still looking at her profile through the shared screen. After thinking for a moment, I looked over to her. “So…is this kink…is it real? Is this something you’re really into or is this just part of the role play?”
Reyna looked down and smiled for a moment as if she’d been asked this question before.
“It’s real,”
she said, looking back up to me. “People ask me that all the time.”
I gave her a half-hearted smile to try and ease any tension my question may have induced.
“It’s something I’ve never really seen much of,”
I said. “Even in my line of work it’s pretty rare to see something taken to that level.”
“I get that a lot,”
she said firmly. “People…like to give me shit about it. They think it’s stupid or they figure I have to be trolling or lying. They call me all sorts of things and the whole time I have to let it go.”
“I don’t judge you,”
I said which seemed to calm her some. “My clients…they often come to me and ask that I do certain things for them. Some of them just want sex and others want me to treat them a certain way or say certain things, act a particular way.”
I felt Reyna drop her arm from behind me and immediately reacted to it. I turned my body and watched as she sat across from me and shook her head.
“I don’t get people sometimes,”
she said, resting her left shoulder against the wall and still holding my gaze. She rested her hands in her lap. My eyes followed her fingers, her nails covered in a cream white polish. Her hands moved slowly as if they were meant to convey a message to me, but I couldn’t figure out what at the time. “Some of them are just….”
Reyna’s voice trailed off.
“Cruel?”
I said which caught her attention. I looked back up to her eyes and felt her looking over my face and body.
“Yeah,”
she said, the disdain in her voice apparent. “I’ve always been so open with it. I put it in my profile so when people look to engage me they know exactly what they’re getting. I don’t want them to be surprised when they come talk to me, we get to know each other, and then I hit them with ‘So do you wanna slap me around and call me a border bunny while I suck a white man’s dick?’”
The room fell silent for a moment. I wasn’t sure what to say. Reyna looked back up to me and saw that I was still staring into her. Slowly, a smile began to break out across her lips and I felt one coming across mine. We sat there in silence a moment and let the weight of her words sink in.
“I have this thing I say to my clients,”
I said as fought the urge to reach out for her hand. “When they come to me and ask for some of the strangest, most out there stuff…and I don’t mean the obvious things. I mean the really specific things…like wanting to call me Mommy or asking me to treat them as if they were my son. And no, not that diaper-wearing stuff. I mean an adult man talking to me as if I were his actual real life mother. A 36 year old representation of his mom.”
I looked back down to her hands. “We all have our things. We all have these…kinks that we seek and often times crave. If we don’t get them, often times we feel this emptiness inside us like something isn’t where it should be or something doesn’t seem to work right.”
“I know that feeling,”
Reyna said as she noticed me looking at her fingers. “We all have those things that look insane to others but make perfect sense to us.”
“We all have out kinks,”
I said, giving into my urge and taking Reyna’s left hand into my right and running my thumb over her fingers. “We all have our things. And often times those ‘things’ are birthed through trauma.”
I looked back up to Reyna, her hand still in mine. “Our traumas shape us more than any of us would like to admit. Because of them, we find solace in the weirdest places.”
Reyna broke out into a small laughing fit which culminated in her sitting there with me, stoic and solemn.
“They really have no idea,”
she said, a broken smile masking her pain. “They always think they know. They give some bullshit blanket answer and think ‘this is it! This is how the world works and everyone fits inside one of two definitions! Everyone else is lying!’ God damn it.”
Reyna looked down again and shook her head. “They think we’re all the same and just assume they know what’s best for us. They think they know how we should handle our trauma. Like they’re the fucking authority on how we should all react.”
“Like they fucking know us,”
I said as I could tell Reyna was getting worked up, a mass of rejection and ridicule coming to the surface that she had been pushing way down into herself for some time.
“Do you wanna know why I do this to myself?”
she asked, knowing I would say yes. “All my life I’ve been talked down to by white people. Not all of them. Some of them are good, but some others…they just don’t care that I’m a person. They just think of me as some ‘illegal’ that’s feeding off the government and living off their tax dollars. And now with all this stupid Donald Trump shit, it’s like it went into overdrive. Almost every day I run into some ‘DT’ Republican and they’re like ‘Where’s your ID? What are you doing here? Get out of my country!’ It’s like fuck you! I was born here! My mom was born here! I have just as much right to be here as you do! Where they fuck do you get off telling me I don’t belong?”
“Racists,”
I said, having felt the sting of racism before in my life growing up in the Southwestern United States. “They’re so insecure about themselves that they feel the need to talk down to others.”
Reyna shook her head again and continued.
“Every day I hear hate thrown at me for simply existing. I didn’t ask to be Latina and I didn’t ask for my skin to be this dark. It’s just who I am and my heritage, be it Native American or Mexican or whatever people want to call it, it’s just me. It’s what I know.”
“It’s what we both know,”
I said to her, bringing up my profile in our currently shared HUD. “I make it clear on my profile who I am, too.”
“I know you do,”
she said. “Ana…when I saw you there at the auction, I saw your skin and I just had this feeling so I looked at your profile before I went on stage. I saw you had marked that you were Latina. Nowhere near as dark as me, but still. I knew you were like me. You probably knew. You knew what it’s like to have to deal with this crap.”
“I do,”
I said. “I grew up in Texas and I’d get some of it thrown my way from time to time.”
I chuckled a little as I thought of the things I used to be called when I was still there. “The used to call me a ‘White Mexican.’ From a distance I looked white, but once you get up close and take a good look you can see my features are pretty different. Dark thick hair, wide hips, thick legs, a little bit of an accent when I’d get upset.”
Reyna laughed at this remark and I could tell she knew exactly what I meant. “You’re right about the ‘DT’ thing. I was still in Texas when all that started and it really did get worse. It was as if him being president gave all these racists permission to crawl out of the woodwork and just be awful people because they thought ‘oh, there’s one of us in office! Now we can say whatever we want!’”
“I always get asked where my bag of oranges is,”
Reyna said, remarking on a common racist trope that Latino people often sell fruit on the side of the road as a form work. “I’m like…fuck you. I ate them, bitch!”
Both Reyna and I laughed hard at her joke, it finally having broken the building tension of such a heavy topic. “And then the ones that are like ‘learn to speak American! Learn English!’”
“Oh,”
I said, steadily bonding with her on the common racism we’d both faced. “They always say that crap when I speak a little Spanish. The whole time I hear them talking all I can think of is I speak far better English than they do and they want to get after me for speaking a 2nd language?”
“Right?”
Reyna said back to me. “What’s so wrong with knowing more than one language? Like it’s some crime that I’m more educated than they are.”
Reyna and I spoke more and joked about our personal experiences with racism. As we bonded and she told me more of the reasons why she had the kink she did, it began to make a strange kind of sense to me. It opened my eyes and made me realize more and more why some of us have the kinks we do. So many of them, even my own, are tied to trauma and often times that trauma can or has defined who we are so we lock in on certain aspects of it.
“If I have some white man constantly getting after me and abusing me,’ Reyna explained, giving me more direct examples of her thinking and reasoning behind her kink, “then over time those hurtful things he says to me just don’t affect me the way they used to.”
I adjusted myself on the floor and eventually ending up leaning against the wall as well as I stared at her warm eyes while she explained. “If I have them slap me and call me a mouth whore and a spic and all the other worst things you can say to me, over time those words lose their power. They start to feel like nothing because I’ve heard them so much. Me hearing those words, it’s sort of like….”
Reyna paused as she thought of a way to explain it.
“Exposure therapy,”
I said, offering her a way to help her get her point across. “It sounds an awful lot like that. If you are forced to face your fear over and over, but in a somewhat controlled environment, you can sometimes overcome that fear and work through it.”
Reyna paused and looked at me as she digested my words.