The devil inside, p.3
The Devil Inside, page 3
Determined, I undressed them in my mind, replaying dozens of porn clips in my head as I replaced myself with whatever man was involved and them with whatever woman. But it was useless.
None of it aroused me. Not a single spark.
My body never reacted properly, and it pissed me off.
I went back to work, pulling my mask into place so no one would see the devil that had tried to get out while I was on my lunch break.
The hours ticked by. People came and went. At four, I wiped my greasy hands on a shop towel as I stared at the driver of the Camry who was pulling into the open spot in the bay. For a minute, my heartbeat ratcheted. Do I know him?
When he got out, my worries disintegrated. He was a stranger, not one of my poisonous apples, but his hair color and build were definitely triggering. He could have been. He was exactly the type who enticed me.
The stranger was the type of man who encouraged long-hidden memories from my past to surface. Those memories were the root cause of my unwanted urges.
When the man spoke, I couldn’t look him in the eye, hating the way my body responded to him. I mumbled acceptable phrases to let him know I’d take care of his car, then breathed a sigh of relief when he walked away toward the waiting room. I knew without a doubt, if I had a bottle of gin and thirty minutes to kill, he’d be Jameson’s next conquest. And I would not be nice about it.
My cell phone rang when I was under the vehicle, and I ignored it. Ten minutes later, it rang again. It wasn’t often I received personal calls. There were only a few people who had my number, and most of them were in the other room working. The others were my parents, my therapist, and whatever utility companies I used. None of those people could make me jump up on a dime and race to my phone.
I finished my job and checked to see who’d called before wandering to find the car’s owner. Dr. Husein. Figures.
“Fuck me.” I pressed fingers into my eyes and chucked my phone back on the counter.
I couldn’t imagine why my therapist’s office was calling unless it was to change or cancel my appointment. Was she checking up on the group sessions? Could she have communicated with Dr. Mercedes and found out I’d been refusing to participate?
Whatever it was, I’d deal with it later.
In the waiting room, I scanned for the guy who owned the Camry. He was leafing through a magazine, oblivious to the world around him, long limbs stretched out, arm cast across the chair beside him, lush lips slightly parted. I bit the inside of my cheek.
“Mr. Gamble?”
His head shot up, and dark, molasses-colored eyes landed on my face. The breath caught in my lungs. The similarities between this man and another were staggering. Take away fifteen years and he could almost pass for the teenager I’d once known.
It’s not him.
Tightening my muscles, I worked at keeping my mask in place, forcing a smile to my lips as I thumbed over my shoulder. “Your car’s ready.”
“Oh, perfect. I already paid.”
“Then we’re good to go.”
The fucker smiled, and warmth flooded my veins. Temptation followed me everywhere.
We walked back toward the bay at the far end of the garage. The heat of his body, the scent of his cologne, and the tone of his nonstop chatter made focusing difficult. I wouldn’t look at him. When he asked me questions, I answered robotically.
“Did you find a reason why my coolant is constantly low?”
“The lower line that runs to the water pump is showing significant wear. I’d suggest making an appointment and having it replaced before it gives. That’s not something I can do in a drive-up.”
“I understand. Shit. Is that expensive?”
“It’s not bad. You can ask Rusty for a price estimate, and I bet he can work you in this week.”
“I’ll do that. Thanks, man.” He offered his hand to shake when we stopped at his car.
“No problem.” I returned his handshake but focused my attention elsewhere. Those eyes. I didn’t want to see them.
But as he got in his car, the devil turned my head, and I stole a glance. Heat radiated from my core, centering in my balls. Mr. Gamble was a young man in his early thirties. His complexion, his eyes, his build, they all called to the Jameson Davis under the mask.
Our eyes locked, and he smiled that same sultry smile before pulling out of the bay.
That was all it took. My imagination made sexy Mr. Gamble my next conquest. I envisioned pressing his face against the concrete wall in a dark alley, my chest plastered against him as I drove in and out of his body, ruthlessly pumping my hips as I chased that familiar high.
“Fuck!” I slammed a fist against my temple and rattled the thoughts away.
Stumbling out the bay doors, I sucked the cool March air into my lungs through flared nostrils as I wiped every trace of those fantasies from my mind. My stomach soured and lurched. My hands shook. I needed a drink. A smoke. Something stronger.
It was a bad day. My weekend clung to my skin and wouldn’t leave me.
There was no one in line, so I returned to my phone and hit the call back on my doctor’s office number.
“Dr. Husein’s office. How can I help you today?”
“Yeah, it’s Jameson Davis. You called me a few minutes ago?”
“Ah, yes, Jameson. Dr. Husein had something come up this Friday and needs to cancel your appointment. She extended her hours on Tuesday and Wednesday this week to compensate. Are you available to switch to one of those days?”
I tugged at my hair, likely transferring the oil and grease from my hand. “Um … Wednesday would be better. I work late Tuesdays.”
“Okay. Wednesday at four thirty?”
“Yeah. No problem.” I’d have to race out early, but I didn’t figure it would be an issue.
“Okay, I’ll write you in. She also asked me to remind you to bring your journal along.”
Fuck me.
“Yeah. Sure.”
“Okay, we’ll see you then.”
I ended the call and leaned on the counter with my eyes closed. Bring my journal. And when she saw the vast empty pages where I was supposed to write out my mood and feelings every day, I’d get a lecture about taking control of my healing or some shit.
Journaling didn’t help. Gin did.
But gin always had a tendency to turn to sin.
THREE
Oakland
I sat in the parking lot with my forehead glued to the steering wheel, thoughts spinning, my palms slick. Every time I went to an appointment, it took effort to drag my ass inside. Dr. Jennings pried and picked at the wound within me, working hard at unearthing what was at the heart of my clinical depression. It had been coming out of me slowly, painfully. It wasn’t something that was easy to share. I’d spent years repressing it. No one knew the truth apart from my parents, who I hadn’t spoken to in fifteen years.
Not even my wife knew. Especially not her.
But before we got to the part where Dr. Jennings attempted to dissect my past, we had to fumble through the routine, weekly bullshit. The “Define your emotions” and “On a scale from one to ten, one being good, ten being poor, how was your mood this week?” “Did you take your meds?” “Did you drink?” “Did you sleep?” “Did you contemplate ending your life?”
The answers were always the same. Numb. Nine or nine and a half. Yes. Like a fish. Not much. Daily.
I dumped my cell phone and smokes into the cup holder, resigned to my fate.
Dr. Jennings’s practice was on the fourth floor of an office building. It was professionally decorated with standard furniture, unassuming pictures on the walls, and a muted color palette that was neither assaulting nor calming. The receptionist greeted me with a smile and waved me in.
I knocked once on Dr. Jennings’s door and pushed through, finding the balding, middle-aged man on the other side, hunched over his desk. He might not have been my first choice for a therapist, but when Amanda had broken down and begged me to get help five years ago, he was one of the only ones available who didn’t have an extensive waiting list.
“Oakland. Good morning. Have a seat.” He waved a meaty hand at the chair by the window as he pushed back from his desk and joined me in the “Quiet area,” he called it.
I sat and scrubbed at my eyes. They were raw and gritty like they were full of sand, a result of my poor sleep habits.
“I’m glad you’re here. You look tired.”
“I’m always tired.”
“Are you sleeping?”
“Not really.”
“Are the nightmares back?”
“They never left.”
Dr. Jennings took a seat on the plush chair across from me. I wouldn’t face him, but he no longer expected me to. I shifted so I could gaze out the window while we talked. The office walls pressed in on me otherwise and made it difficult to breathe or think.
“Let’s back up a step. Did you bring your questionnaire?”
I pulled it from the inside pocket of my windbreaker and handed it over. Ten questions every week, asking me to rate my feelings and mood. The idea was for me to think hard about the answers and be as truthful as possible. It was a tool he used to know if my meds needed adjusting.
Dr. Jennings examined the form, nodding and stroking his double chin. He was a beefy man, round but soft-spoken and not intrusive, for the most part. He was professional, and we’d grown to have a decent rapport over the years. He knew more about me than anyone, and there was never judgment in his eyes.
“You marked your motivational level as low again. Have you missed any work this week?”
“Um … No. Yes. Well, I went in late on Wednesday and Thursday. Couldn’t drag my ass out of bed.”
“Are you drinking at night?”
“Yeah.” And all day.
“What about recreational drugs?”
“Marijuana sometimes, but I prefer cigarettes. You know that.”
“I’d prefer you smoke cigarettes over marijuana, but we’ve exhausted that discussion, haven’t we?”
“Yup.”
We had more than exhausted it. We had beaten that fucker like a dead horse, and I was glad he was done lecturing me about it. It was also why I never brought up the extra pills I took. The Xanax, the oxycodone, and the occasional Molly. I bought those on the street and liked to make myself lovely little concoctions sometimes so I didn’t have to feel anything. The guy would probably have a coronary if he knew how many things I mixed and matched so I could coast into oblivion and ride the imaginary waves of elation. All so I could cope with being alive.
“Have you been taking your prescriptions?”
“Yeah.”
He touched the last question on the page and quirked a brow. “This number is higher than last week.”
I didn’t have to look to know he was referring to the number of times I had thought about suicide. I could lie, but what was the point?
I shrugged.
“Has something changed to make this number higher? Are you and Amanda getting along okay? Is work okay?”
I chewed my nail, staring in a daze at the traffic in the distance. Four stories up, the view was unobstructed by other buildings—a rarity in this part of the city. In the distance was a concrete park with a basketball court and a few broken swings no one ever used. An adult learning center sat across the street, and all kinds of people came and went. The city bus went past every ten minutes like clockwork, picking people up and dropping them off.
“Oakland?”
“I can’t have sex with my wife. My dick won’t work.”
There, I’d said it. She couldn’t harp on me anymore.
“Okay. Is this a new problem?”
I shook my head and chewed another nail.
“You know, people who struggle with clinical depression often find their sex drive is compromised in some way, shape, or form. Anti-depressants can affect a person’s ability to get an erection or feel sexual arousal. It’s a common side effect.”
“But that’s not it.” The words were out before I could stop them, and I closed my eyes and pinched the bridge of my nose.
“Can you elaborate?”
I remained quiet.
“When you say, ‘That’s not it,’ what precisely are you referring to?”
If I didn’t give him some kind of answer, he would continue to reword the same question over and over again for the next ten minutes, and I didn’t have the energy to keep deflecting.
“The plumbing works fine, just not when I want it to.”
“Okay. So getting an erection isn’t the problem.”
“No, it is the problem. When my wife wants me to fuck her, my dick just flops around like a fucking wet noodle.”
Dr. Jennings stayed quiet until I flicked my gaze to him to ensure I wasn’t missing something.
“Your choice of words is interesting.”
“What? Wet noodle?”
“You said, when your wife wants you to have sex with her—”
“I said fuck.”
“—you’re unable to get an erection.”
“So?”
“Are you able to get an erection when intercourse is your idea and you don’t feel obliged to someone else?”
I clenched my fists and glared out the window, grinding my molars. The thing was, sex was never my idea. It was a chore. A requirement of marriage and couplehood. Something I tried to do for Amanda’s sake. For years, I did all I could to try and force my body to enjoy sex with my wife and want it. To no avail. The harder I pushed, the angrier the beast got. She wasn’t who he wanted.
Dr. Jennings let his question slide and shifted on his chair, the leather creaking under his weight. “You said, and I quote, your ‘plumbing works fine.’ I assume this means you can masturbate without an issue?”
“Sort of.”
“Sort of?”
“Is there something you can give me to make it work? That’s all I need. We don’t need to pick it apart and make a big deal about it.”
“You’re agitated.”
I scrubbed my face. “Of course I’m agitated. Have your body reject everything you tell it and see how happy you are.”
“Oakland, let’s redirect our conversation for a bit and come back to this. Maybe you’ll feel more ready to address the topic later, and we can talk about solutions.” Before I could agree or disagree, he launched us down the rocky road we’d been slowly exploring over the past six months.
“Last time you were in, we were discussing your high school years. You told me that you became ill when you were seventeen. It sounded rather serious, and you mentioned an extended hospital stay.”
“I stayed in a treatment center, not a hospital.” My skin vibrated.
“How long were you there?”
“Eight months.”
“What kind of illness required treatment for that length of time?”
I paused, assessing my answer. “They didn’t classify it as anything in particular.”
“But they treated you for eight months?”
“Yes.”
“How did they know how to treat you if your illness didn’t have a name?”
I shrugged, my fingers twitching for a cigarette, my stomach twisting. This wasn’t what I wanted to talk about.
“Oakland, can you answer my question?”
“I-I don’t know. They just did.”
“What kind of treatments did you receive.”
Flashes of those months erupted across my vision. The sounds, the smells. The pain. So much pain. Hunger. Anger. Fear.
I squeezed my eyes closed and punched a fist against my temple twice to jar away the visions.
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Okay. We don’t have to. Take a deep breath.”
I tried, but it got caught in my lungs. I coughed, choked, and bent in half as I forced my mind in other directions, to more pleasant images.
The well was empty.
“Oakland. After eight months of treatment, you left their care. Does that mean you weren’t sick anymore?”
I wet my lips to respond. My throat turned scratchy and raw. “They … they wouldn’t have let me go unless I was better, right?”
“So you were better?”
“Y-yes. They … removed the sickness.”
But had they? Or had the beast just burrowed deeper where they couldn’t see him? I felt him alive inside me. He wasn’t gone, and he stalked the perimeter of the steel room where I’d kept him locked away for fifteen years. Every day, the seal on the door weakened.
“Oakland. Who treated you? What was the doctor’s name?”
“I … I can’t remember.”
“What was the name of the facility?”
“I can’t remember.”
“Where was it located? Was it here in Toronto? Another city? Another province?”
I shook my head, my heart pounding so hard I clutched my chest to stop the assault.
“Can you truly not remember, or are you just not ready to tell me? Because that’s okay.”
“I … I need a break. Can I go have a smoke?”
Dr. Jennings didn’t speak for a full minute, and fear swamped me, convinced he would deny my request.
“Sure. Take a break. In five minutes, I want you back up here. Can you promise me you’ll return?”
“I promise. I just need a smoke. Gotta clear my head.”
“Okay. Five minutes, Oakland.”
I rode the elevator to the ground level and barreled out the back door of the building. Stumbling across the parking lot, I made my way to my car and found my smokes in the cup holder where I’d left them. Lighting up, I closed my eyes and sat with the door open, the spring breeze cooling the sweat under my arms and across my forehead.
A headache had started at the base of my skull and radiated down my neck. Tension. It had been happening all my life. I popped the glove compartment and rooted through the stash of pills inside, squinting at the contents in the unlabeled bottles, trying to identify them. When I found the tabs of oxy I’d bought the other week, I emptied a few into my palm and took them dry. The bitter taste churned my stomach. They’d take the headache away and lift the weight of my stress for a while.
