Chapter 31 Ethan
Ethan
I’m lying on my back, boneless and weightless and sated, Sophia’s body draped half over me.
She’s lying on her stomach in the crook of my arm, cushiony breasts pressed against my chest and face against my neck, one leg thrown over my thighs and her long black locks painting my torso, my upper arms. My cum trickles slowly out of her body, pooling stickily on my inner thigh, but I couldn’t give a shit.
I like that it’s been inside her. With what tattered shreds of energy I have left, I pull her tighter in against me and let the fingers of my other hand drift idly through her silken strands of hair.
Never in living memory have I felt quite so replete. So at peace. From the way Soph is sprawled across me, I suspect she feels the same.
‘That was exactly what I needed,’ I confess after a few moments of blissful silence.
‘Good. Clearly, it was my pleasure.’ She hesitates. ‘You doing okay, though?’
‘Yeah. I am now.’
‘Was it really that bad?’
I’m unsure if it’s the lingering effect of my orgasm, or the fact that we’re not making eye contact in this position, but I feel marginally better able to handle the idea of discussing my therapy session. ‘No. Not at the time.’
It was… good, actually, in an odd way. That vision, or whatever you’d call it, of myself as a little boy was seriously unexpected and extremely discomfiting.
But as Philip wrapped up our session, I felt a strange sense of something I suppose was peace.
Or relief. Like I was the slightest bit lighter.
That all disappeared in the car. I tried to bury myself in emails but found myself instead looking out the window as my driver inched slowly back through the centre of town from Philip’s practice in Russell Square.
The thing I didn’t raise with him, the thing I couldn’t get through my head, was how angry I felt.
Angry with my father for being such a gigantic cunt, for bullying a kid like that, stacking the odds against him and making the stakes so high.
It wasn’t fair, any of it, and while Philip had me relay that message to my younger self, I couldn’t help but think in the car that I’d slaughter anyone who treated Jamie like that. I’d fucking tear them limb from limb.
But here I am, so terrified of any kind of intimacy with my own son that I can’t engage with him in even the most basic way.
Philip’s chilling line is still with me.
Sounds like he didn’t need to hit you. Sure, my father is an egocentric bully, but am I any better?
Am I damaging my son irreversibly with my own brand of cruelty?
Am I no more deserving of being a parent than Richard Kingsley?
I didn’t love today. It was miles out of my comfort zone, and I’m still not entirely convinced it’s not weird shit, but I do know this: I need to do something to repair relations with my son, and if Soph thinks this is a decent place to start, then I’ll damn well sit my arse in that saggy armchair once a week until I can look myself in the mirror again.
I blow out a shuddery breath and smooth a palm over Sophia’s hair.
‘I can practically hear you spiralling,’ she observes into my neck.
She’s not wrong. I sigh. ‘I got a tiny glimpse this afternoon into the infinite void of my fucked-upness. What if I’m too broken to fix?’
She pushes herself up onto one arm and looks down at me. Her face is still flushed, her lips swollen from the kisses I gave her after pulling out of her and tugging her down on top of me, and her dark eyes are soft.
‘Woah. You are not broken, mister, you hear me? Nowhere near.’
‘I don’t know about that,’ I say feebly. This eye contact thing isn’t so bad after all. Whatever is in her eyes, it’s not pity. It’s fiercer than that, which is a relief. I don’t think I could bear it if it was.
‘Listen to me. I know a lot about this stuff, okay? Every coping mechanism that you’ve developed, you’ve done for a reason.
Even the ones that aren’t serving you anymore or are holding you back.
Look, I don’t know a tonne about your childhood, but I’m beginning to get an idea.
The truth is, if you had a parent who withheld love or who felt like a source of danger at times, the chances are you developed beautiful, self-protective strategies that allowed you to survive before you were even old enough to dress yourself. How amazing is that?’
She smiles at me, and it may be the most stunning sight I’ve ever seen.
‘That is not the hallmark of someone who’s broken,’ she continues.
‘In fact, it’s precisely the opposite. All you’re doing now is working on shedding all that armour so you can live the life you’re meant to live, full of love and connection and wonderful relationships.
And I promise you, the scariest part is showing up.
Over and over. It’s scary for all of us to dig deep like this.
But we practise, and we develop those muscles, and—this is super important—we learn to regulate in between so that we build our capacity to hold all these confronting things.
And the more you regulate, and the more grace you give yourself, the more you’ll find you can handle this. Yeah?’
To think I hired her for her looks. Her sexuality.
Her vibe. She might just be an Oracle. To be honest, everything she’s saying sounds terrifying, but the thought of carrying on like this is even more terrifying.
That memory of my father today really rattled me.
I have to find a way to be a better man than him.
I owe it to Jamie and Elena. And, if I’m entirely honest with myself, I need to find a way to control all these demons that seem to hijack me.
I can’t be at their mercy anymore, and that’s what’s galvanising me.
‘Yeah.’ I extricate my hand from her mane of hair and stroke her neck. Her shoulder. Her skin is so, so soft. ‘When did you get so wise?’
She tosses her head, her smile turning coquettish. ‘Well, my name literally means wisdom, but like, a higher state of spiritual wisdom.’
I groan, but I’m smiling too. ‘Fuck’s sake. Of course it does. So all this regulating stuff you’re talking about—I assume that includes fucking you senseless? Because that totally sorted me out.’
She laughs and lowers herself down so she’s lying in the crook of my arm again, her long, elegant fingers brushing over the hair on my chest. ‘Sex can definitely be regulating, but that just then sure as fuck wasn’t. That was numbing of the highest order.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, when we feel vulnerable or unsafe or dysregulated, we have two choices: regulate our nervous system, or numb it. That, my friend, was the sexual equivalent of bingeing a triple cheeseburger. You can eat your feelings, or you can ejaculate them.’
I laugh and nudge her. ‘That’s ridiculous. That was positively medicinal.’
‘It wasn’t medicine, it was anaesthetic.
And it’s not ridiculous. You were majorly in your sympathetic nervous system when you came in—anxious, twitchy—and I don’t blame you in the slightest. And when you’re activated like that, you can choose to find a way to work that stress out of your body, or you can numb: sex, alcohol, gambling, shopping.
Working. Whatever. The difference is that you’re trying to make the pain go away instead of dealing with it. ’
‘Fuck that. So sex can’t be regulating?’
‘It can be very regulating, when it’s intimate. That was a quick, dirty fuck. When you use someone else to help you feel safe and secure, that’s called co-regulating. That’s what we’re doing right now.’
‘What are we doing?’
‘Cuddling. Skin-on-skin.’ I attempt to pull away, because I do not cuddle, but she wraps an arm around me like a koala. ‘No. Don’t do that. Allow yourself to just enjoy it for a few minutes. It’s good for you, and you deserve it.’
I exhale deeply and reciprocate, banding my arm more tightly around her. I still maintain that that fuck was precisely the medicine I needed and the reason my equilibrium is restored, but this is… nice, too. Relaxing.
‘You know a lot about this stuff,’ I tell her. ‘You’re good at it.’
She rubs her forehead against my chest. ‘If you must know, this is what I want to do eventually.’
‘Seriously? What—therapy?’
‘Yeah. IFS therapy. You can become a practitioner, or, like a coach, directly through the IFS Institute, but I’d like to go back to uni at some point and get licensed as a psychologist first. I honestly believe IFS is the way I want to go, but I want to have all the clinical basics in place first, you know? ’
I don’t know why I’m stunned. Like I said, she’s good at this.
And no matter how well-paid or intellectually rigorous this role is, there’s no doubt she’s overqualified to be anyone’s EA.
The woman is a trailblazer with a devastatingly sharp mind.
Of course she doesn’t want to fuck men like me for money forever.
Still, panic rears its head swiftly, harshly, and I instinctively withdraw my arm, tugging it out from beneath her body and scooting back across the bed, putting distance between us.
I’m right back to being that little boy again, just for a moment—the one who can’t depend on anyone to give him what he needs. Not permanently, anyway.
I want to support her. I really do. She should have everything she wants. She should follow her purpose and be lit up by it. But, for some reason, all I can hear is the screaming in my ears that she’d leave me.
‘Nice of you to inform your boss of your professional plans.’ Even to my own ears, my voice sounds flat and strangled and harsh. Honestly, if I was her I’d kick me in the shin for behaving like such a dick.
But she doesn’t.
She hoists herself up onto one elbow and cocks her head, surveying me. And then she reaches for me, wrapping a soft hand around my neck.
‘Hey. It’s okay. Note my use of the word eventually. This isn’t imminent in any way.’
I lie here and stare at her, stony-faced. I’ll be damned if I’ll let her see the slightest crack in my facade.
She strokes her hand along the ridge of my shoulder and down my arm.
‘That reaction is a part,’ she says softly.
‘Because I know you, Ethan, and you don’t like it when people fail your tests.
Or maybe you do like it, because then they’ve proven you right by bailing on you.
I’m telling you again, I’m not going anywhere.
That’s a long-term plan. I’m only thirty, for Pete’s sake, and I love this job.
’ She strokes over my pec, and my jaw works.
‘I’m not leaving. I’m simply sharing what I’d like to do long-term, because we were having a moment of connection, and you paid me a lovely compliment, and I thought I’d reciprocate by sharing a confidence with you. That’s all this is. Okay?’
Those dark eyes of hers are soft. She has no problem at all looking me in the eye. She hasn’t thrown a hissy fit, or gone all defensive on me, or flounced out of bed. She’s here and, much as I hate to admit it, everything she’s saying is eminently sensible.
I nod, shame coursing through me at the hateful way I just reacted.
Fuck, she’s got my number. And maybe she’s right about the parts stuff, because I can’t deny I feel conflicted, and I know that, deep down, the man I am is as happy for her as he is excited to see what she’ll achieve in this field.
‘Yeah. Of course. Sorry—I’m so sorry. You’re right. ’
‘No need to apologise.’ She closes the chasm I’ve created between us and puts her arms around me again. ‘Like I said, that was a protective part flaring up—one of your bodyguards. They do a great job of keeping you safe. And it’s so much easier once you know what it is.
‘Because you took the first step today to building an open line of communication with these guys, and once you have that, you can build trust. And once you have trust, they’ll start to understand that it’s safe to lay down their weapons.
That you’ve got them. And that, my handsome friend, is when the real magic happens. ’
Fuck, she’s incredible. She’s like a soothsayer. Sophia, she of ancient wisdom. I can feel the power that lies within her as if it were a tangible thing. I lay a hand on her back, revelling in the sensation of being chest to chest with her, of our hearts beating together, and clear my throat.
‘Let me try that again, please. You’ll be amazing at that. You definitely have a special gift. I can’t imagine how many people you’ll help.’
‘Thank you,’ she whispers. She raises her head a fraction so she can put her lips close to mine. ‘And for what it’s worth, I’m so very proud of you for the step you’ve taken today.’
With that, she kisses me.