Page 101 of Bend
“Fiona, do you want to talk about this? Should I come back tomorrow? Or not at all? Daddy’s trying to get me pulled off the case.”
“Why?”
“He says I’m not experienced enough. I don’t know the real reason.” She shook her head. “Point is—”
I grabbed her hand over the table. “It has to be you. Don’t leave me.”
“Tell me what happened. I know you don’t remember, but what was with you two? Did he cheat on you? Did he hit you? What would have made you snap?”
I rubbed my eyes with the heels of my hands. She didn’t understand us. No one would.
“Drazen pledge,” I said.
“I’m your lawyer. Anything you say is under attorney-client privilege.”
I held up my hand. “Are you opening pledge or not?”
“Fine.” She held up her hand. “Pledge open.”
I relaxed. Between myself and my seven siblings, six sisters and one brother, opening a pledge meant nothing said could be repeated and only the truth could be spoken.
“This is so hard to explain,” I said.
“It’ll get easier after the first ten times.”
“I don’t know where to start.”
She crossed her arms. “Start by not stalling. Assume I know you use drugs. Assume I know you’ve had more sex in the past three years than I’ve had in my life.”
“We had an open-ish relationship.”
“Okay.”
“The ish part is that…” I swallowed. “Up until a few months ago, my other partners were limited to people we knew, at parties he threw.” I didn’t mention the knottings. I wasn’t ready to tell her I had been a fuckable art object, because I’d have to explain that I’d never been in such control of my sexuality as I was in this open-ish relationship.
“And why did that change?”
There was a relief in her question, because it didn’t judge the excesses, only the switch to normalcy.
“We fell in love.” The blade of those words cut through the dullness of the meds, and snot and tears flooded my face.
“No,” Margie said. “You stop right now.”
I tried to tell her I couldn’t, but I was beyond speaking, beyond using my mouth for anything but breathing thick cry gunk. I could barely breathe without croaking—how could I speak a whole sentence? “I couldn’t have hurt him.”
“Fuck.” Margie had always been impatient with outbursts, yet she always knew what to do about them. She swung her chair to my
side of the table as if she was flinging it in a bar fight and sat next to me, putting her arm over my shoulder. I fell into her. She said nothing and stroked my hair.
“He went away, and I couldn’t keep it together,” I croaked. “I have a hard time without sex. I need it. But he understands me. We worked on ways to make it work. Why would I stab him?”
“He’s not saying. Is it possible he came after you, and you stabbed him in self-defense? Maybe he surprised you at the stables?”
“I don’t remember. I swear I don’t. What I was even doing there? I haven’t been to Branwyn in forever.”
“You have a chipped molar. Do you remember when that happened?” she asked.
“No.”
