15. Deargán
DEARGáN
I’d been greatly anticipating our next session.
My skin buzzed as she practically drifted into my therapy room and silently took a seat. Not in my chair but the one I’d positioned for her. The patient’s chair.
“Good morning, Rua.”
My eyes stayed on her mouth, waiting for the correction. I wanted to see the exact moment the name landed, whether it slid off her or lodged somewhere deeper.
She flinched. It was slight, almost imperceptible, but it was there, my attention attuned for the smallest recoil, like I was starving for any sign she could be bent.
“I’m not Rua.”
I turned away to the sideboard without a visible flicker, as if her defiance was irrelevant and not irritating, and busied myself with the tea. I measured the leaves and let them fall into the strainer without spilling a single flake.
The kettle had already boiled. The porcelain cups were laid out precisely where they always sat.
I took the stopper off a vial and held it between my fingers. I hesitated for exactly one breath. Not because it was wrong, but because I preferred to win clean.
Then I discreetly slipped the powder into her cup.
I added milk, then stirred.
I told myself it was necessary. I told myself she’d thank me when she remembered. When she understood.
My hand didn’t shake as I carried the tea over and set hers down first.
Then I sat back down across from her and waited.
After a moment, she reached for the cup, almost absentmindedly, and lifted it to her lips.
My gaze stayed on her throat as she swallowed and imagined the drug dissolving, seeping into her synapses, loosening what logic kept bolted shut.
She placed it back down on the saucer.
She’d almost drunk the whole cup. More than usual.
Good girl.
I leaned forward slightly, letting my voice soften. “How long did you stay in your chair after I left you?”
Her gaze snapped to mine, guarded.
“It’s not my chair,” she snapped.
Damn it. She was still blocked. The lock in her subconscious still held.
She resisted beautifully. But I was going to undo her.
If her mind wouldn’t open through logic, I’d reach it another way.
I’ve always been good at finding cracks.
I leaned back and took a leisurely sip of my own tea as I recalibrated.
“What does this room smell like to you?” I asked, dropping my voice low and soft. “The scent, does it hum? Or pluck like a guitar?”
Her posture didn’t change, but her nostrils flared ever so slightly.
There.
A crack. Like a pulse under my fingertips. I cataloged the shift in her breathing, the tension gathering along her collarbones.
She didn’t know I’d read her session notes. Not the summaries. Not the sanitized clinical pages her therapist placed into her file.
No, I read the raw ones. The personal notes. The observations scribbled in margins like small lines of poetry. The parts where her therapist underlined words twice.
Bergamot = strum of a guitar chord.
Blood is a high-pitched screech.
The sound of breaking glass when she wakes up with bruises she can’t explain.
She heard smells. Even more so when her emotions were heightened. Scent-induced auditory synesthesia. But that was not the part of her file that interested me most.
Buried deeper in the notes, half-developed and underlined twice, was another observation her previous therapist had not seemed to know what to do with.
Possible mirror-touch variation under heightened emotional states.
Inconsistent presentation.
Not reliable enough to test in standard sessions.
I had read that passage more times than I cared to admit. Not because it was clinically fascinating, though it was, but because it explained too much.
The way she sometimes reacted to proximity before I had touched her. The way her breath altered at the smallest shifts. The way her body seemed to answer currents I had not yet visibly set in motion.
It was a rarer type of synesthesia. A more intimate one. Not just hearing the world wrong. Feeling it wrong.
They called it mirror-touch synesthesia.
I called it a doorway.
I rose from my chair and let her eyes track me. Tension wound through her body like a tightened bowstring.
I moved slowly around the room.
The room belonged to me. The chair belonged to me. Even the air between us belonged to me. She was the only thing still fighting that fact.
I paused beside her and let my fingertips brush the back of her chair before catching a lock of her hair and rubbing the silky strands between my fingers.
“I wonder what I sound like to you.”
I leaned down, close enough to feel the warmth of her skin, noting the way her breath shuddered between her teeth.
“I wonder if my scent-song changes when you’re afraid of me,” I whispered near her ear.
She flinched, sharp and involuntary, her head snapping up to glance over her shoulder at me.
“Why did you say that?” she demanded.
“Say what?”
“Scent-song. Why did you call it that?” Her voice cracked.
“You call it that.”
Her lips parted, the fight stumbling in her throat. “B-but I’ve never said those words to you. To… anyone.”
“But Rua,” I said softly, “you have told me. You’ve told me so much about you that I’m in your head. You just don’t remember it.”
Her breath caught, sharp enough that her shoulders lifted before she could stop them. Her fingers dug into the chair arms, knuckles paling as if she could push away from me, from the truth I was laying out before her.
The pulse in her throat fluttered visibly. She swallowed once, then again, her mouth parting as if she wanted to speak and couldn’t find the words.
She didn’t know what belonged to her anymore. She was beginning to question. That was my opening. That was the turn.
Her pupils widened and her focus softened, her eyes going glassy.
Something tightened in my chest.
The drug was taking hold. I could be a little more… experimental.
I kept my face neutral and let one hand rise, as though the motion meant nothing.
Then I slid my fingers across the front of my neck until I was gripping my own throat.
Her reaction was immediate.
Not large. Not obvious enough for anyone but me.
But I saw it.
Her breath caught. Her fingertips twitched against the chair arms. The muscles in her own throat moved in a swallow, as if her body were echoing mine with a slight delay.
Interesting.
I let my hand fall, trailing down my chest, then brushed my fingertips over my left nipple.
Again, that mirrored response. Her mouth parting, a flush climbing up her cheeks and her own nipples poking out against the fabric of her dress.
It worked.
Not perfectly. Not every time. But under heightened emotion, the connection between observed touch and a resulting sensation inside her was detectable.
A slow, dark satisfaction unfurled in my chest. She had a fault line after all, and now that I had found it, I wanted to know exactly how far it ran.
I crossed to the vase on the far table and plucked a single black baccara rose from its water. I returned and stood directly in front of her. “Eyes on me.”
She had to lift her head to meet my gaze through her lashes, her mouth parting on a shallow breath.
I studied her properly, my face inches from hers. It was the first time I’d seen her this close with her eyes open.
Her irises were gray, yes, but not flat. They fractured with flecks of storm-cloud blue, winter green, and amber, light caught in places that refused to dim.
If I were a kinder man, I might have said they were beautiful.
I brushed the rose down her neck and across her collarbone, watching the goosebumps race across her skin and underneath the thin cotton of her dress. I let the petals drift lower, careful, controlled as I traced the swell of her breast.
Her breath hitched, lips parted.
Her brows pulled together, just slightly, as if she couldn’t reconcile what was going on.
A tight breath slipped past her parted lips. The pulse at the base of her throat began to flutter faster, visible and erratic.
And beneath it all, buried under the recoil and the panic, there was a hitch in her breathing that didn’t match fear at all.
I brushed the rose petals down her belly and over her thigh to the bare skin of her knee. Her chest rose faster and her fingers clutched the arms of the chair.
I paused, giving her ample opportunity.
But she didn’t push the rose away.
A flush climbed her neck in a slow bloom, staining her skin as her thighs pressed together on instinct.
“I wonder how my scent-song changes when you’re turned on,” I murmured as I dragged the rose up her inner thigh, lifting the hem of her dress an inch, then two.
Until the tips of the petals hovered just shy of where she needed it, barely any pressure.
“Or perhaps when you’re close to orgasm?”
My restraint was deliberate, the promise of touch instead of the touch itself. I wanted to see if she would lean into it, if she’d tilt her hips forward even slightly. Whether she’d choose it.
She had to choose it.
Because I didn’t just want her to remember.
I wanted her mind aligned with mine.
I craved the moment she looked at me and chose me willingly.
Her thighs trembled. But she didn’t. Not yet.
Her fingers twitched where they gripped the arms of the chair, knuckles white with restraint. She was trying not to give herself away, but her body betrayed her, one swallowed gasp at a time.
That was enough. More than enough to keep pushing her boundaries.
I leaned down, hovering my mouth near her ear, holding the rose in place without moving it.
“Your breath’s hitching. Your body’s listening to me, even if your mind refuses. Do you know what that means?”
I paused, taking in the flush along her throat and the tremor in her bottom lip.
She didn’t pull away. Didn’t speak.
“Deep down,” I said quietly, “you know I’m not your enemy, Rua.”
“Yes…” she finally breathed, her hips rocking forward and crushing the rose, petals slipping loose and fluttering to the floor.
Interesting.
Perhaps fear wasn’t the most efficient entry point.
Pleasure bypassed resistance. Pleasure was quieter. More intimate.
The thought unsettled me. Not because it was wrong, but because it felt personal.
I snapped on a pair of disposable latex gloves as I walked toward my shelf of vintage medical tools.
I told myself this was treatment. I repeated it until it sounded clinical. But there was a part of me, deep down, that didn’t fully believe it.
I selected a vintage vibrating massager, long and slim with a rounded tip, inspecting it as I turned it over in my hands.
Until the late 1920s, they used to use them on women to calm “hysteria.”
It would be perfect for my experiment.
I returned to her chair, dragging my own directly in front of her, and laid out my tools, the device, tissues, and alcohol wipes as if readying for an operation.
I folded up her skirt, careful not to touch her skin, ignoring the triangle of cream cotton, already damp.
I wiped down the vibrator with an alcohol pad, slow and methodical, then flicked it on. The low buzz swelled in the quiet room, mechanical and menacing.
Her spine snapped straight against the chair, her breath coming in short, sharp pulls. Her head lolled as she tried to focus on the device. “Wha…”
“This is treatment, Rua.”
I held her thigh down with my free hand, slipped the tip under the folded hem of her dress, and pressed it against her clit.
The second it touched her, her mouth fell open on a broken sound she tried to swallow.
Her brows drew tight, confusion cutting through the pleasure as her arms strained hard against the armrests, tendons standing out in her wrists.
Her hips jerked forward before she could stop them, then back as if she could outrun the sensation.
For a moment she fought it, teeth sinking into her bottom lip, breath shuddering through her nose.
Then something in her gave. Her shoulders sagged, her head tipping back against the headrest as a long, unsteady groan spilled out of her, surrender threading through her body despite herself.
I tore my gaze away and fixed it on the far wall, on the framed certificate that hung perfectly straight, on the Rorschach inkblot painting, on anything that wasn’t her face.
This was just an experiment. Treatment. This was necessary.
Long, loud moans left her mouth without restraint now, cutting through the heavy buzzing, the sound making my jaw clench.
I tried not to hear it, tried not to catalog the way her breathing changed, the way her warm, soft thigh trembled under my hand still holding her in place.
My body reacted anyway, an unwanted tightening I did not permit myself to acknowledge. A slight clench of my hand into her flesh.
It was an involuntary physiological reaction. Nothing more.
I kept my jaw set and my movements clinical, steady, disciplined.
Her gasps quickened, her moaning growing higher in pitch.
Only then did I glance at her. Just to confirm. To ensure the most reliable experiment.
Her mouth was open and her eyes glazed over, her hips rocking in jerks against the device.
She was perfectly dissociated. Her higher reasoning was entirely bypassed. She was operating purely on instinct and nerve endings, locked in a trancelike state.
Her mind was open to me.
Finally.
I lowered the vibration speed to hold her there, balanced on the edge.
Then I reached over with my free hand and pressed play on a recording.