Chapter 5 Mehar #2
I’d felt nothing. Not satisfaction. Not guilt. Not even the cold power I used to feel when I first locked him in there. Just… nothing. Like checking a task off a list. Feed Thad. Pick up dry cleaning. Schedule bikini wax.
Janelle didn’t know about the cage. She got the trauma. She got the insomnia. She got the rage. She did not get Dame CoCo. She did not get the storage unit. Some doors I opened in this room. Others stayed locked.
“The insomnia, the rage, the need for control, well, those aren’t character flaws,” Janelle continued.
“Those are adaptations. Your brain built them to keep you alive. The problem is your nervous system doesn’t know the war is over.
It’s still fighting. Every minute. Because safe is not something your body has ever learned to believe. ”
My eyes were burning. And I blinked to hold back tears. I focused on holding my face still. I wasn’t about to fall apart on this couch. I didn’t do that. Not in front of people. Not even her.
Then her voice shifted. Still clinical but something underneath cracked open. Something that sounded less like a textbook and more like a woman.
“C-PTSD is significantly under-diagnosed in Black women. The diagnostic criteria was built around combat veterans and natural disasters. It was not designed for a woman who was sexually assaulted by her husband every night for years but couldn’t name it because her religion, her family, and her community told her it was her obligation.
” She shook her head. “The clinical framework was not built for us.”
Us. She said us. And that one word cracked open a door I’d been leaning my whole body weight against for a very long time.
“Black women are not allowed to be traumatized. We are allowed to be strong. Resilient. The ride-or-die. The one holding everybody together while our own shit falls apart in silence. So our trauma responses get misread. Every time. The hypervigilance gets called aggression. The numbness gets called coldness. The rage gets called attitude.” She paused.
“The world gives a Black woman a stereotype instead of a diagnosis. And she internalizes it. Believes something is fundamentally wrong with her. When the truth is nothing was ever wrong with her. Everything was wrong with what was done to her.”
That’s when it hit me. Not slow. Not gradual. All at once. Like a wave I didn’t see coming.
Every man who ever called me crazy. Every time one of my mothers told me to pray harder.
Every time I’d been called too aggressive.
Too difficult. Too MUCH. And I believed them.
Added it to the running list of everything wrong with Mehar Ali.
Too broken to love. Too damaged to trust. Too angry to be soft.
And this whole goddamn time. It had a name.
The tears came before I could stop them. I didn’t want to cry. I never wanted to cry. But my body didn’t give me a choice. It just… broke.
“You are not broken, Mehar. You are injured. Injured people can heal.”
“The walls you built saved your life,” she continued. “I’m not asking you to tear them down. I’m asking you to see that what saved you then might be trapping you now. Right now you’re living behind walls that protect you and imprison you at the same time.”
“So what do I do?”
“Show up. Sit on this couch. Tell me the truth even when it’s ugly.”
Tell me the truth even when it’s ugly. I almost laughed. If she knew the full truth—the cage, the clients, the leather and the locks and the men who paid me fifteen hundred an hour to be on their knees—those kind hazel eyes might not be so kind anymore.
But she didn’t know. And I wasn’t ready for her to.
“But hear one thing before we end today,” Janelle said. “You are not too much. You have been through too much. And until you learn that difference in your body and not just your mind?” The corner of her mouth lifted. “We got work to do.”
I grabbed my bag. My keys. My phone. Put all the pieces of Mehar back in place the way I did every time I left this room.
“Janelle? Thank you. For…”
“I know,” she said.
And I believed her.
In the hallway, a man in a suit stepped off the elevator. It was completely normal, completely harmless, and my body tensed anyway. My shoulders went up and my jaw tightened. Just being in his presence sent rage into my chest. I felt like he was disrupting my personal space. This was so not normal.
I made it to my car before the second wave hit and cried until my head throbbed. Not because I was sad, but because my soul was tired. An exhaustion that runs so deep that sleep can’t touch it because it ain’t in your muscles, it’s in your spirit.
Twenty-six years of survival. And I was just now learning that surviving and living were not the same thing.
My phone buzzed. Text from Zainab.
Zainab: You good? You’ve been quiet since the recital.
I checked the rearview. Swollen. Red. A whole mess. Nothing concealer and sunglasses couldn’t handle. I’d been hiding damage behind beauty products since I was fourteen. At least now I knew why.
Me: I’m good. Just processing. Therapy was heavy today.
Zainab: Want me to come over? I can bring the babies. Idris learned how to blow raspberries and it’s the funniest thing you’ve ever seen.
I almost smiled. Almost.
Me: Tomorrow. I need a night to sit with this.
Zainab: Okay. Love you, sis. I’m here whenever you’re ready.
I wiped my face. Fixed my lashes. Reached for the ignition.
Then my phone buzzed again. Not Zainab.
A booking notification from my website.
Dame CoCo—Session Request
Client: SenatorDC_55
Service: Full submission, 3 hours
Rate: $4,500
I confirmed the booking. I needed the release of domming someone.
Then I started the car and merged into the nightmarish DC traffic.
So I had C-PTSD. I was injured, not broken.
Living behind walls that protected me and imprisoned me at the same time.
And somewhere in the middle of all that, a man whose hand on my thigh had made my nervous system do something it had never done before.
And a booking tomorrow night that would put all those walls right back up where they belonged.