The Vacuum

Part 25

Wide green eyes watched as the thirty-something-year-old therapist sat in front of her. Damien always sat with her. He never sat behind his desk. Sometimes they wouldn't even use his office. The last session they had sat at the outside of a coffee shop, drinking while they talked and watched people. He'd ask her what she saw when her eyes caught something. He'd nodded when she told him or smiled at her observations of people. He said that she had a hard time because she understood the darker side of human nature now; the side that people didn't want to believe existed in their world. They said it was unbalanced, depraved but that was just because they didn't want to believe that it was deep inside them. He made her feel like she wasn't insane. She liked that.

Today though they were in his office, needing the privacy as he conducted an 'experiment' with her. Carefully he unrolled and a thimble of white thread.

She licked her pink lips. "Why white?" She asked him.

His brown eyes looked up at her amused. "White's not as threatening as black or red is it?"

She tilted her head, brown curls falling over one shoulder as she watched the fiber move around the spool. "Deceptively innocent is kind of worse than threatening isn't it?" She asked him with a quirked eyebrow.

Damien gave her a little comforting smile. "Would you prefer red?" He asked softly.

Her head shook. "It's fine." She mumbled as he brought the scissors up and cut off the thread.

"You ready?" He asked. She nodded quickly as he looped the thin line around her left index and middle fingers. "Just breath." He reminded her. "It's not rope...you don't have an issue with being held...just tied." Her breaths started to shallow as she nodded. He finished up not noticing her hiding them. "Okay good...I'm going to do your wrists now..." He started to wrap the white thread around her wrists.

Her breathing became deeper, chocking in her throat as the thread disappeared from her vision and transformed into large fraying ropes. The air caught in her chest and was forced out as Damien's calming voice left her head, replaced by the screams of a woman screaming as she was being violated over and over again in front of her eyes.

"Alexandra."

She ripped her wrists apart, snapping the thread and leaned her head down against her knees as Damien coaxed her to breathe, rubbing her back. "I can't...be...like this..."

Alex threw the silent phone to the floor as she sighed in aggravation. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, shaking in her own chest before lowering herself to sit on her heels, resting her elbows against her knees and putting her face in her hands as she tried to breathe evenly. She couldn't believe she had acted like that...reacted like she had when she first came back.

She could have sworn she was actually getting better out here. She felt like she was evening out again finally and while it had not been the purpose of the trip it had worked. She thought he was too... but apparently, she'd been wrong.

Lifting her head she looked back at the once bare wall that she had been working on since she had pulled her shaking and tremoring body from the floor. Now it was covered with prints she had developed over the past two months, pinning up with tacks like the ones she held in between her teeth. Some of them overlapped, covering the wall of the living room.

Numbly she stood up and took the pins from her teeth, setting them on the coffee table before retrieving her joint from the ashtray and lighting it as she picked up another picture. She looked at it rolling around the joint in her lips as she inhaled. She looked at the picture...one of the first that she had taken off the thin-legged spider and the figure that she now knew behind it.