Chapter 14 Mehar
MEHAR
The last few days had been almost normal, which was suspicious in itself because normal wasn’t something my life did well.
I’d been texting Bryce every day, just to make sure we stayed in touch.
We were out from underneath our father’s thumbs.
He sent me a sonogram photo yesterday and I stared at it for a long time, tracing the outline of the tiny head with my finger.
My little brother was about to be somebody’s father. The world was strange.
I’d also gotten an A on my dermaplaning practical, which Mrs. Pak announced in front of the whole class with a rare nod of approval that felt like receiving a medal from a four-star general. I was good at this. I was building something. And some days that felt like enough to keep me steady.
Today was not one of those days, because today was Wednesday, and Wednesday meant Janelle.
Her office was in a brownstone in Dupont Circle on the second floor, with a waiting room and a sound machine outside the door that was supposed to muffle whatever you were crying about from the other patients.
I sat on her couch with my legs crossed and my hands in my lap and my walls up the way they always were at the start of these sessions.
Janelle sat across from me in her chair with her notepad and that patient expression she wore like a uniform.
“You mentioned last time that the work you do outside of school gives you a sense of power,” Janelle said, clicking her pen. “I’d like to explore that more today if you’re comfortable.”
I wasn’t comfortable. I was never comfortable on this couch. But that was the point of therapy—being uncomfortable in a safe space until the uncomfortable thing lost its teeth. At least that’s what Janelle told me, and I was paying her two hundred dollars an hour to know what she was talking about.
“I’m a dominatrix,” I said.
I just put it out there. No preamble, no softening, no easing into it.
I’d been dancing around this for months and I was tired of the dance.
Janelle’s face didn’t change. She didn’t wince, nor reaction.
She didn’t shift in her chair, didn’t do any of those subtle therapist tells that let you know they were judging you while pretending not to.
She just nodded and wrote something down.
“Tell me about it,” she said.
“I have a space. Clients come to me. Men, mostly. Powerful men; judges, executives, politicians. They pay me to dominate them. Physically, psychologically, sometimes both. I have a whole persona. Dame CoCo.” I paused, waiting for the reaction. There wasn’t one. “You’re not surprised.”
“Should I be?”
“Most people would be.”
“I’m not most people. And I’m not here to judge what you do. I’m here to understand why you do it.” She leaned forward slightly. “When did you start?”
“About seventh months ago. After I had the ectopic pregnancy. After that guy broke my heart and wrecked my body with that cursed pregnancy.” I uncrossed my legs and then crossed them again because I couldn’t find a position that felt right.
“I needed money. While I was recovering, I came across femdom. I saw someone post about it in a Facebook group. There was this powerful woman, humiliating men for money. And they loved it. She was in control and they couldn’t touch her. I wanted that feeling.”
“The control.”
“Yes.”
“Mehar, I want you to think about something.” Janelle set her pen down and looked at me directly.
“You grew up in a home where you had no control. Your father controlled every aspect of your life—what you wore, what you ate, when you spoke, how you prayed. Then you married Ahmad, and that control transferred to him. He controlled your body, your movement, your sense of self. For most of your life, power has been something that was done TO you, not something you held.”
I didn’t say anything because my throat was doing that thing where it closes up when someone says something too accurate.
“So when you step into that room as Dame CoCo, you’re not just earning money.
You’re rewriting the script. You’re taking the dynamic that terrorized you, a powerful person exerting control over a vulnerable one, and you’re flipping it.
You’re the powerful one now. The men on their knees are stand-ins for every man who ever had power over you. ”
“Is that bad?” I asked, and I hated how small my voice sounded.
“It’s not about good or bad. It’s about function.
Right now, domming is serving a function for you—it’s giving you a sense of safety and agency that was stolen from you as a child and again as a wife.
The question I want us to sit with is whether that function is healing you or just managing the wound.
” She picked her pen back up. “There’s a difference between processing trauma and performing the opposite of it.
One moves you forward. The other keeps you locked in the same room, just standing on the other side of it. ”
That hit me somewhere deep. I looked at the window because I couldn’t look at her.
“The control you feel in that room, does it follow you out?” Janelle asked. “When you leave a session with a client, do you feel more at peace? Or do you feel the same hunger for control in the rest of your life?”
I thought about the cage. I thought about Thad on his knees in a warehouse with destroyed legs. I thought about the switchblades on my nightstand and the gun in my purse and the way I backed into parking spaces so I could pull out fast.
“The same hunger,” I admitted.
“That tells us something important. It tells us the domming is a coping mechanism, not a resolution. It’s managing your need for safety without addressing the root of why you don’t feel safe.
And until we address that root—the trauma from your father, from Ahmad, from all of it—the hunger won’t go away no matter how many men kneel for you. ”
I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand and pretended I wasn’t crying. Janelle pretended she didn’t see. We had an unspoken agreement about that.
“I’m not telling you to stop,” Janelle added.
“That’s your choice, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with the work.
What I’m telling you is that if you’re using it as your primary source of safety, we need to build other sources.
Real ones. Ones that don’t depend on someone else being beneath you for you to feel okay. ”
The session ended ten minutes later with Janelle assigning me a journaling exercise about moments where I felt safe without being in control.
I couldn’t think of a single one. Then I thought about that booth at Ray’s with my shoulders down and oxtail on my fork and a man sitting next to me who I couldn’t scare away with a knife. I didn’t write that down.
I walked to my car feeling the way I always felt after therapy, raw, cracked open, and vaguely pissed about it. The drive home was supposed to be twenty minutes of silence where I put myself back together before I had to face the world again.
I made it about six blocks before the steering started pulling hard to the right.
“No. No, no, no.” I gripped the wheel and guided the car to the curb, already knowing what it was before I got out and looked.
The front right tire was completely flat, pressed against the rim like a deflated balloon.
I crouched down and saw the problem immediately—there were at least four nails embedded in the rubber, clustered close together in a way that felt deliberate but was probably just bad luck because that was the only kind of luck I had.
I stood up and kicked the tire because it felt good even though it accomplished nothing.
Then I pulled out my phone and remembered that I had said no to roadside assistance when I got my insurance because I was trying to save thirty dollars a month and past Mehar was an idiot who present Mehar would like to have a word with.
I was scrolling through tow truck numbers, trying to figure out which ones were scams and which ones would actually show up in less than two hours, when a Maybach pulled up behind my car.
Of course it did.
Quest Banks stepped out in a charcoal suit with no tie and his sleeves rolled up to his forearms and I swear to God the universe was testing me personally.
“You gotta be kidding me,” I said.
“Flat tire?” He walked toward my car with his hands in his pockets, looking at the damage with that calm assessment he brought to everything.
“I’m handling it.”
“By standing on the sidewalk kicking your tire?”
“That’s step one. Step two is calling a tow truck. Step three is you driving away and pretending you never saw me.”
He crouched down next to the tire the same way I had, examining the nails. “You got a spare?”
“No.”
“I have a friend who runs a tire shop and has a tow truck. He owes me a favor. I can have him here in about an hour.”
“I don’t need your help, Quest.”
“You need somebody’s help. Your tire looks like it lost a fight with a nail gun.
” He pulled out his phone and dialed before I could argue.
“Yo, Darnell. It’s Quest. I need a favor—I got somebody with a flat on…
” He looked at the street sign. “Vermont Ave, near the Dupont Circle Metro. Honda Accord, front right tire is done. You free?” He listened for a second.
“Cool. Appreciate you, bro.” He hung up.
“He’ll be here in about forty-five minutes. ”
“I didn’t ask you to do that.”
“You’re welcome.”
“That wasn’t a thank you.”
“I know. But it should’ve been.” He leaned against his car and looked at me with that half-smile that I was starting to realize was his version of restraint. “You wanna stand on the sidewalk for forty-five minutes, or you wanna sit in the car where there’s air conditioning.”
“I’m fine standing.”
“Suit yourself.”