Chapter Text
The year Conrad turned sixteen, his mother hired a babysitter.
It was a ridiculous notion — even to Conrad himself. He'd been running the household since the year his mother sat both her boys down at the kitchen table — Conrad, fourteen, Jeremiah ten — and said the words I have cancer like she was testing its weight in her mouth. After that, responsibility had just quietly attached itself to Conrad. Homework always checked, table set for dinner, dishes done, beds made before the school bus came, lunch packed for himself and his brother. He'd just started doing these things because it felt like the right thing to do, and no one had told him to stop. And then when Conrad turned sixteen, the cancer came back — more aggressive this time, less willing to be reasoned with. Susannah was in the middle of treatment, grinding through it the way she did everything: quietly, without complaint, and he'd overheard her on the phone with a friend one night, her voice thin and tired:
He's sixteen going on forty. I don't know how to help him. I don't even know if he knows he needs help.
And that was how Conrad met Vera.
She was nineteen, a part-time student at some college, taking only three classes per semester, and answering a listing Susannah had posted in the neighbourhood Facebook group. She came three days a week — helped with groceries, drove Susannah to the occasional appointment when Conrad had football practice, kept an eye on Jeremiah in the afternoons, made sure dinner happened on the nights Adam wasn't home, which was most nights. She was, objectively, doing Conrad's job. He knew that the moment he saw her. She was also, objectively, extremely hot—he knew it within three seconds and resented her immediately. Dark hair, soft features, button nose, and a dimple on her right cheek that appeared whenever she smiled. She'd shown up that first day in cutoffs and a loose shirt, bag over one shoulder, sunglasses pushed up into her hair, and looked around the house with mesmerized eyes. Conrad had stood in the kitchen doorway and felt two completely contradictory things happen in his body at the same time — attraction, sharp and inconvenient, and a cold string of irritation down his spine that had nothing to do with her personally and everything to do with what her presence meant.
Wasn't he already doing a good job taking care of the house and his family?
He'd been doing this for two years. He hadn't complained once and never asked for help. Conrad never made it anyone else's problem, because it wasn't anyone else's problem, it was his — he was the oldest, it was his responsibility, that was how it worked, and he'd accepted that without question. And his mother had looked at all of it and decided it wasn't enough. She had gone and found someone else to do what he was already doing, which meant either she didn't trust him to do it or she thought he couldn't handle it, and he didn't know which possibility bothered him more.
His father, predictably, was nowhere.
Conrad had stopped expecting otherwise from Adam around the same time he'd stopped believing in a version of his family that held it all together. He was twelve when he'd found those disgusting messages on Adam’s phone. He hadn't meant to find out Adam was a cheating coward. Conrad had just picked up his dad's phone to check the time, and then couldn't unsee what was already in front of him. Explicit texts, associated with pictures he really did not want to see ever again, and it introduced him to a whole other life; his idol was apparently living in the margins of this one.
But even before the messages, before the affair, before any of that, Adam had always been a man who loved his sons by yelling at them. Not the kind of yelling that came with a raised hand or any sort of physical abuse, but the type of love that came with a pointed finger and a voice that filled a room and words that damaged beyond repair.
You need to be perfect, Conrad.
You need to be better than this.
You're the oldest — act like it.
Demands dressed as motivation and criticism delivered at a volume that made it impossible to mistake for anything else. He'd yell about Conrad's grades when they were only B+, his attitude when he was moody, the way he loaded the dishwasher, the way he spoke to his coach on a bad day, the way he breathed too loudly in the mornings — anything, everything, a rotating catalogue of failures that Conrad was expected to absorb without flinching because flinching made it worse. And Conrad didn't flinch. He learned not to by the time he was eleven. He stood there, took it, let it pass through him, and understood, in the way a child understands things without the language for them, that being good meant being still, and being still meant being quiet, and being quiet meant nodding, and doing what Adam said meant the yelling stopped faster.
Conrad never touched another adult’s phone without asking again.
So when Vera came three days a week, Conrad was polite to her the way he was polite to all strangers in his life, and he couldn’t help but develop a crush on her within the first two weeks that he hated himself for because it felt like a betrayal of the irritation he was supposed to be feeling. When his mother mentioned, at the end of June, that Vera would be joining them at Cousins for the summer, Conrad had smiled and said sounds good and gone upstairs to his room and put on the latest single "Nude" by his favourite band, Radiohead, until the wanting dissolved into something quieter and more manageable, which was the closest he ever got to feeling better.
The power dynamic between him and Vera was built into an unspoken arrangement so seamlessly that neither of them had to acknowledge it, and Conrad — who had been raised by a father who expressed love through spending money and a mother who expressed need through silence — was already fluent in the language of doing what he was told.
It started with small things. Whenever no “adults” were around, Vera would boss Conrad around, all the time. He couldn’t say he enjoyed it. Then again, he’d never once told her no.
Grab me a glass of water while you're up.
Can you turn that down? I'm trying to read.
Move your stuff off the counter, Conrad. I need to make lunch.
Can you do the dishes? I’m tired today.
Nothing strange. But there was always a certain tone to it and with Vera everything was just different. A casual certainty, an assumption of compliance that didn't invite negotiation — and Conrad responded to it the way he responded to all authority: automatically, without question, with a part of his brain that had been trained since childhood to equate obedience with safety.
The difference was that with Vera, the obedience felt different, and he didn't know why.
When his father told him to do something, it landed like a ton of bricks — heavy and necessary. When Vera told him to do something, it landed like a hook — small, precise, and pulling at something within him that he couldn't see. He'd find himself thinking about it afterward for hours. Not the request itself, but the way she'd said it, the way she'd looked at him while she was saying it, the way his chest had tightened, just slightly, in a direction that was not unpleasant.
Conrad was sixteen, and he'd kissed three girls, at different parties, clumsy and brief and never led to anything else, which meant he'd never had sex. He'd never thought about what he wanted from sex beyond the vague, generic assumptions that sixteen-year-old boys make based on pornography and locker room talk — that he'd be the one in charge, that he'd do the things, that wanting anything else wasn't even a category.
He didn't know that the small pull he felt when Vera told him to do something was connected to anything beyond the simple fact that he was a sixteen-year-old with a crush who wanted to be noticed by the girl he liked, even if she was way older than him.
Dr. Reyes, his therapist, would later explain it to him in simple terms — that the pathways for arousal and the pathways for safety are closer together in the brain than most people like to think, and that when a child grows up in an environment where love is unpredictable, and control is the only reliable currency, those pathways don't develop separately.
They merge.
The thing that makes you feel safe becomes the thing that turns you on. The hand that holds you down becomes the hand that holds you up. And if the first person to activate that circuit is someone you're already attracted to, someone who embeds the command in the dynamic so smoothly you never even see it happening —
Then it doesn't feel like programming, Dr. Reyes said once, carefully. It feels like the first real choice you've ever made.
Even if, years later, you're still discovering that it wasn't even a choice to begin with.
It was a Saturday evening, in the middle of July, when everything changed for Conrad.
The whole family had gone to the beach; it was one of the good days where Susannah had energy, Jeremiah was in a good mood, and Adam wasn’t there.
Conrad had been swimming for most of the day, body surfing, mostly, getting knocked around by waves in a way that felt productive, physical, like he was burning something off, even though he couldn't have named what. Around five thirty, he'd had enough. He walked back to the house — a five-minute walk from the beach through a narrow strip of scrubby coastal trees — to rinse off before dinner. The outdoor shower was attached to the side of the garage, a concrete slab with a wooden enclosure and a rusted nozzle that ran lukewarm at best. He turned it on, stripped halfway from his diving suit, kept the rest covering his lower body, and stood under the water with his head down, letting it run over his shoulders and back.
He heard the gate open and close and didn't think anything of it. People came and went from the house all day during beach season. He assumed it was Jeremiah.
Hey.
He turned to find Vera standing just inside the gate, still in her swimsuit, drying her hair with a towel. She'd left the beach, too, apparently. He hadn't noticed her leave.
Hey, he said, and then became immediately, acutely aware that he was half-naked under the shower and she was standing six feet away and looking at him.
Everyone still down there? He asked.
Yeah, your mom and Jere are still enjoying the sun —
She dropped a towel over the fence rail and walked closer, then stopped at the edge of the shower platform, just outside the spray, and Conrad stood there with water running down his face and his hands at his sides and felt something happen in his body that he had never felt before. It was the feeling that came before arousal — the thing that happens when your nervous system recognizes a pattern it's been waiting for without knowing it's been waiting. Every muscle in his body went to the same place: still.
Can I ask you something? Vera said.
He wanted to be sarcastic and tell her, "Right now??" but only the word sure came out as he closed his eyes and let the water hit him in the face as he looked up.
You do everything I tell you to, don't you, she said.
Conrad pretended he didn't hear her. Shifted his weight. Kept his eyes closed.
Conrad.
Yeah.
Has anyone ever told you that you're very easy to direct?
He should have said something. He should have laughed, or deflected, or done any of the things he did in every other social situation to keep himself at a safe distance. But Vera was standing there with her eyes steady and her voice level and his entire sixteen-year-old nervous system was doing something it had never done before, which was not managing the moment, and the absence of management felt like standing at the edge of a cliff and feeling the pull of gravity not as a threat but as a relief.
I —
It's okay. She stepped onto the concrete, into the edge of the spray, and the water hit her shoulders and ran down her swimsuit, and she was close enough now that he could smell sunscreen and salt.
You don't have to talk. You're good at that, right? Not talking. You always do what I tell you to do.
Something behind his ribs felt tight.
You can just stand there, she said, and her voice was so quiet it was almost lost under the water, and stay still... she whispered as she reached up and put her hand on the side of his neck — the same place his father's yelling landed, the same place where he held all the tension he never let anyone see — and she didn't squeeze, she just held him, and Conrad felt his shoulders drop and his chin tilt forward and his whole body go to a place it had never been.
This feels good, right?, she said, and it did.
The word hit him somewhere below the sternum, and he understood, in that single moment, with the clarity of a door opening, that maybe there was a version of himself that didn't have to hold anything. A version of him that could stand still and be told what to do and not feel trapped, but released. That the thing he'd been running from his entire life — the loss of control — was, in the right hands, the thing he'd been running toward.
He was sixteen. She was nineteen. He had a crush on her. She was in his house every day. She'd been telling him what to do all summer in a voice that mapped perfectly onto the neural pathway his father had already carved — obedience equals safety, stillness equals survival — and she had walked through that pathway like a door that was already open. He didn't know any of that then. He knew only that her hand was on his neck and the water was running, and he felt, for the first time in his life, like he could just …. stop overthinking.
What happened after — the things she did, the things she said, the way she guided his body and his breathing and his silence with a precision that should have alarmed him and didn't — he remembered in fragments. Sharp, sensory fragments that would come back years later in Dr. Reyes's office and land on the air between them like something physical.
Her hand moved from his neck to his hair. The warm press of her body against his. Her lips on his neck. Her voice saying stay still and his body staying.
The devastating sensation of being completely at someone else's mercy and finding out that mercy felt like the absence of weight.
He didn't touch her. Not that first time. She didn't ask him to, and he didn't think to, and that was the part that rewired him — the discovery that his pleasure didn't require his action. That he could receive without reaching. That someone else could be the architect of the moment, and he could simply exist inside it, and that existing inside it was enough.
It lived in the wrong place inside him — not the pleasure itself, but the fact that the pleasure and the wrongness were indistinguishable, folded into each other so tightly he couldn't tell where one ended, and the other began.
He came apart standing under that lukewarm shower with her hand down his swimsuit and her voice in his ear, and he'd never felt anything like it — not the physical part, which was overwhelming in its own right, but the psychological part, the part where he let go of everything he'd been gripping since he was a young boy, and it didn't kill him.
After that first time, it became a pattern between him and Vera, even when she turned twenty that summer. In the kitchen, after Jeremiah left early to catch some waves. On the back porch at dusk sometimes. Once in the living room with the curtains drawn while his parents were at a hospital appointment and Jeremiah was at a friend's house and Vera told him to sit on the couch and not move and he didn't move for twenty minutes while she sat across from him and touched herself and the arousal of just seeing that — the sheer, unbearable arousal of being told to stay and staying — was more intense than anything he'd experienced.
She never asked him what he wanted. She never checked in. She never took care of him after they did what they did. She told, and he did, and the doing was the wanting.
Conrad thought all summer that it was love. He thought it was normal. He thought it was what happened when you liked someone, and they liked you back, this private language of commands and compliance that existed in the afternoons when no one else was home.
She'd been placed in a position of authority over his household, and she'd identified — whether consciously or not, and he would later know the answer to this during his therapy sessions — the exact shape of his vulnerability and pressed on it with a calm, unwavering consistency that his sixteen-year-old brain interpreted as interest and his twenty-one-year-old brain, sitting in Dr. Reyes's office, was starting to interpret as something else entirely.
Vera left at the end of August after she got a research position in another state. She'd said goodbye in the kitchen the same way she'd said everything — directly, without sentiment, without apology — and told him that what they'd done was over and he should find someone else to "mess around with."
She didn't say you'll need to find someone your own age. She didn't say this was a summer fling and I'm the adult here and you're just a kid. She didn't say anything that would help him navigate what happened to him, what he'd have to unlearn and relearn about himself and his own autonomy over his own body, or what would actually work for him when it came to the push and pull relationship he had with control. Vera just left. And Conrad was left with a body that had been taught to associate surrender with safety and a brain that had been wired to associate both with a twenty-year-old who'd walked out of his life with no further guidance.
It was a survival strategy that had been sexualized before he was old enough to understand what sexualization meant. A door that had been opened by someone who should never have had the key. It was the thing his father built, and a stranger continued, and by the time Conrad was old enough to look at the framework of it and understand what had been done, the walls were already load-bearing, and taking them down meant admitting the whole structure might give.
Nicole Richardson was eighteen, the same age as Conrad, a Cousins local, and during the last summer before Conrad left for university, she worked at the ice cream shop two blocks from the beach and had a laugh like a car alarm — loud, startling, impossible to ignore. She'd walked up to him at a bonfire in late June and said, "You down?" and when he looked at her from over his beer and said, “Right now?” and saw her tilt her head towards his car, he followed her like a lost dog for the rest of that summer.
Nicole didn't have Vera's precision or her stillness. She was soft-spoken and warm and laughed during sex and called him babe, and she had this habit of just taking what she wanted from him without asking, which he discovered he liked so much that it almost frightened him.
She'd steal his keys and drive with the windows down, left hand on the wheel and the other on his thigh, and he'd sit there feeling something loosen in his chest. She'd pull over on the back roads without warning, cut the engine, and look at him with this expression that was more instruction than invitation. "Just sit back," she'd say, and he would, and she'd lean across the console and pull his cock out and stroke him slow, licking her palm first, getting him wet, twisting her hand on the upstroke until his hips were jerking and he was making sounds he didn't know he could make. He'd come all over her fingers with the engine ticking as it cooled and the trees dark on either side of them, and he'd feel for just those quiet minutes, at peace.
She'd text him after midnight — I'm downstairs — and he'd find her at the edge of the pool with her feet in the water, and they'd swim out past the shallow end and she'd wrap her legs around his waist and her arms around his neck and tell him to stay still, and he would, and something about her in charge of where they moved, him trusting her to keep them both afloat, felt like a metaphor he wasn't ready to examine. She'd grind against him slowly underwater, his shorts pulled down just enough, her hand between them positioning him where she wanted, and he'd grip the edge of the pool and let her use him exactly how she wanted to use him.
Once, on the beach, very late, she'd pressed him down against his own jacket and held his wrists above his head and sunk down onto him, riding him slowly in the sand with the moonlight behind her. Sand was getting everywhere — in his hair, on his back, grinding between them where their bodies met — and some rigid part of his brain was screaming about it, cataloguing every grain, already resenting the shower he'd have to take and the clothes he'd have to wash. But then she shifted her weight, pinned him harder, and that voice inside of his head just... stopped. His mind went completely quiet. No list-making, no second-guessing, no low-grade anxiety humming underneath everything. Just the weight of her on him and her hands on his wrists and the sound she made when she rolled her hips a certain way. "You're so easy to take care of when you let me," she said, and Conrad had felt that sentence rearrange something structural inside him, permanently.
Summer ended, and Conrad left for Stanford, and Nicole didn't stay in touch after that. She wasn't cruel about it — she just wasn't that kind of person. But a few texts that got shorter, then nothing. He told himself it was fine, it was just a summer thing, that's what summer things were for, but somewhere underneath that he couldn't shake the feeling that he'd done something wrong, or worse, that he hadn't done enough.
That he'd been too passive, too easy, too willing to follow, and that eventually even the girl who said she liked him got bored of him. It was the first seed of that particular doubt — the one that whispered maybe the problem wasn't that he hadn't found the right person yet, but that there was something fundamentally unkeepable about him.
Then his first semester started, and he met Megan.
Megan used to pin his wrists above his head during sex all the time. She wasn't trying to be dominant; she just liked the angle, but he remembers the way his whole body responded to that kind of restriction, the way his hips moved differently when he couldn't grab her. He came harder those nights than he ever did on his own.
With Dana a year later, it got more intense. She'd push him onto his back and ride him slow, edging him until he was practically begging, and the desperation itself became the best part.
Not the orgasm— the wanting. The ache of not being allowed to finish, she had noticed that and started doing it on purpose, holding him right at the edge and watching his face. "You like this," she'd say once, and Conrad couldn't deny it, he fucking loved it. His cock was throbbing and he was gripping the bed frame and he'd never felt more present in his body.
After Dana broke up with him because he was "too controlling", he started noticing the pattern when it came to sex. Every time a woman took charge—even if it was in small, casual ways—he felt more turned on than the sex itself could account for. A hand on his chest pushing him down. A whispered, "Stay still." The feeling of being told what to do, even something simple, hitting somewhere below his stomach and spreading outward.
The thing that really confirmed it, though, was a little embarrassing. Spring break, sophomore year, some girl he'd picked up at a bar whose name he thinks was Jessica. They were going at it in her hotel room and Jessica was a bit wild—scratching his back with her long nails, which he actually liked, but also moaning in this exaggerated porn-voice way that made him want to laugh. He was inside her, trying to stay focused, when she suddenly leaned down, kissed him, grabbed his face, and then slapped him.
His brain couldn't even distinguish if it was playful or real; all he felt was the heat of her palm against his cheek, transported towards his cock, and he came immediately. He had about three seconds of mortified silence to be grateful that this was happening during spring break in Florida and not with some girl from campus who'd tell everyone he knew by Monday morning.
It was hard to keep lying to himself after that.
There was a brief thing with another girl named Kate who tied his hands with a belt once, almost jokingly, and he finished so fast and so hard but she didn't laugh it out like Jessica though, she just looked at him differently after that. She made him feel like she had just seen something he hadn't shown anyone yet, and after a while, she just never texted him again.
He started googling what was wrong with him, typing in vague phrases like "Men who like being told what to do during sex" and "why do I like being dominated during sex." That led him down a rabbit hole into forums and articles and eventually to words like submissive and dominant and BDSM.
It was like finding a translation for a language he'd been speaking his whole life without knowing it had a name. The porn he watched shifted too. He stopped caring about the standard stuff entirely—skip past the sloppy blowjob, skip past the vanilla missionary. What got him off now was watching a man get restrained, get ordered around, get put on his knees. A woman snapping her fingers and him complying. The psychological part of it. The power exchange. He'd watch it and think that, I want that, and then close his phone and stare at his ceiling with this dull ache in his chest because he had no idea how to actually ask for it.
Every girl he'd been with had stumbled into it accidentally. None of them had chosen it. And he couldn't imagine walking up to someone and saying, "Hey, so I want you to tie me down and edge me and slap me around a little." The few times he'd tried to hint at it—suggesting she hold his wrists, asking if she wanted to be more in charge—he got weird looks. Sometimes that polite weirded-out smile that meant I'm going to pretend you didn't just say that.
By the time Conrad was twenty-one, he'd stopped pretending it was coincidental. The best sex of his life—the sex that actually worked for him and made him feel something other than vaguely disconnected—always involved the same element.
Someone else being in control, and Conrad surrendering his body to them.
So he gave up on finding it and went back to hooking up whenever he wanted to get laid, and that was the end of it. Somewhere along the way, the wanting started to feel less like a preference and more like a sickness, like there was something wired wrong in his head, some fundamental brokenness that made him need this thing he couldn't have and couldn't even talk about without sounding like a freak.
Normal guys wanted to fuck the girl.
Normal guys wanted to take the lead.
Normal guys wanted to be in charge.
Normal guys didn't lie awake at night aching for someone to take their autonomy away from them. Conrad started wondering if Dana had been right about him all along—not that he was too controlling, but that there was just something off about him, something that didn't work right, and eventually everyone would figure it all out and leave him too.
What happens when you stop moving, Conrad? Not physically. I mean — what happens in here,— she'd tapped her temple — when there's nothing left to manage?
Dr. Judy was the sports therapist assigned to Conrad by the athletic department during his sophomore year, after he'd torn his UCL in the third game of the season and spent six weeks on the sideline for the first time in his life. She was sharp, neat, and had a way of asking questions that made them sound casual right up until the moment they weren't.
Conrad had liked her, and he’d been less fond of what her job had uncovered. The injury itself wasn’t the worst part; it was the fact that everything in his life had to slow down during his healing process, and he had to sit still for a bit, and that was the worst part of this whole ordeal that he was trying to manage.
He hadn't known, until he was forced to stop, how much of himself he'd been outsourcing to movement. The daily five-mile runs at five in the morning. The weekly practice sessions. The physical, measurable output of his body doing what it was supposed to do — he'd been using all of it the way other people used drugs, and without it, he had nothing between himself and the noise in his head. He'd lasted a couple of months before Dr. Judy had noted that what Conrad was describing as pain in his head didn't sound like a response to an injury, but instead sounded like something that had been there a long time before the injury gave it room to re-surface.
And that’s how she referred him to Dr. Reyes, his psychological therapist.
He started therapy during his junior year, once bi-weekly, he would lie down on the leather couch that smelled faintly of Jasminum sambac and answer mundane questions and wait to feel fixed, but that feeling never came. Instead, what the sessions had given him, over the course of a few months, was a list of new vocab.
Compartmentalizing.
Hyper-vigilance.
Avoidance.
Maladaptive coping.
Words that sounded clinical, as if they belonged to someone else's file, except Dr. Reyes kept using them to describe him, and Conrad would sit there and nod and take them in. And then one day, the breakthrough — if one can call it that — came from an observation, not a question.
You run a team, Conrad. Dr. Reyes said one afternoon, about five sessions in. You're at the top of your class. You manage your mother's medical schedule from sixty miles away. You've told me you haven't missed a single obligation in five years. That's not discipline, Conrad. You’ve become a man who doesn't know how to stop.
Plenty of people are disciplined—
Plenty of people are disciplined, but what you’ve described to me isn’t just discipline. You're afraid of losing control over every single aspect of your life.
He didn't flinch or say anything after that because he didn’t have anything useful to say.
What do you think would happen, she continued, if you just... stopped?
Stopped what?
Everything. For one day. No schedule. No list. No one to manage, nothing to prepare for. Just living in the moment.
I do live in the moment.
Conrad.
He'd opened his mouth to give her a proper answer, and nothing came out.
Not because he didn't know the answer, but because he'd spent his entire adult life making sure he never had to sit with the question long enough to find out, and now Dr. Reyes had placed it in front of him like a glass of water and was waiting to see if he'd drink it.
I don't know, he said, and the truth of it scared him more than any amount of yelling ever had.
Because deep inside of him, he did know. Somewhere beneath all the architecture of his life — the schedules, the standards, the pre-med track and the captaincy and the five a.m. runs — he knew exactly what would happen if he stopped. The noise would come in. The accumulated weight of every single thing he'd absorbed ever since he was a kid and held and never released would fill the space where the control used to be, and he didn't know if there was a floor underneath it. He didn't know if he'd hit rock bottom or just keep falling with no final landing to catch him.
Dr. Reyes let the silence sit for a long time after that.
Can I ask you something personal?
He nodded.
When was the last time you felt at peace? Not productive or accomplished. At peace. Where your mind had shut off, and you didn’t think of anything.
The answer came to him immediately, and felt so wrong that he almost didn't say it. But Dr. Reyes was looking at him with that patient gaze of hers that made lying feel like more work than telling the truth, so he just said it.
When I was sixteen, he said.
When a stranger's hand was touching my body, and I let them fuck me, he thought to himself and immediately felt the shame start to creep in like a tight hug around his body.
A pause.
Can you tell me more about that?
He couldn't. He couldn't tell her about a summer in Cousins and the way his body had gone somewhere it had never been. He couldn't tell her that the last time he'd felt completely, mercifully still was when someone else had told him to be still, and that the fact that he'd been sixteen and she'd been nineteen and she'd been hired to watch his little brother made the memory something he couldn't hold up to the light without flinching — which was the one thing he'd trained himself not to do.
He couldn't tell her that the only context in which he'd ever replicated that stillness was sexual and submissive, and that drawing a line between those two data points in front of another person felt like handing someone a map to the part of himself he'd spent the most energy burying.
It was a long time ago, he finally said. I don't remember the specifics.
Dr. Reyes didn't push. But she wrote something down, and he spent the rest of the session with his jaw tight, wondering what she'd written and whether it was accurate and whether she called him fucked up, too.
It came up again two sessions later, differently.
You mentioned that when we first started, relationships hadn't worked for you for a while now. That there's a pattern of things going well and then falling apart around three months.
Yeah.
Can you tell me what the three-month mark tends to look like?
Conrad exhaled through his nose.
The point where the relationship stops being casual and starts getting real. Where she expects something from me that isn't just ... physical. I guess you could say, it gets harder for me when I have to actually let someone in … so it’s just easier to end it.
And letting someone in feels like what?
He thought about it. Really thought about it, which was harder than any question Dr. Reyes had asked him, because the answer wasn't a word — it was a sensation. The feeling of standing at the edge of something high and knowing you were about to step off.
Like a lot. It's a lot. It makes me feel like I'm losing control, he said.
And losing control feels like what?
Something bad.
Always?
The silence that followed was the longest silence of Conrad's life inside that room.
Not always, he said, quietly.
Dr. Reyes didn't say anything, and his hands stayed flat on his thighs, and his breathing was even and controlled.
Conrad, she said, gently. I want you to know that nothing you say in this room is going to change how I see you. And I want you to know that there's a difference between something being difficult to talk about and something being shameful. They often feel the same, but they're not the same.
He nodded. He appreciated the sentiment. It didn't make his throat any less tight.
Is there something you want to say that you're afraid to say?
No.
Okay, she said, and moved on, and he was grateful and sickened by the gratitude in equal measure.
That night, lying in his bed in the dark, he let himself think about it. Not the full memory — he still couldn't do that, not without his body responding in ways that made the shame feel indistinguishable from the arousal, which was its own specific hell — but the remains of it.
The logic of it.
What he wanted in bed was to not be in charge. To have someone else take the wheel and tell him where to put his hands and how to breathe and whether he could move, and in that specific, narrowly defined context, the loss of control felt safe, because letting go, especially in that moment, meant he didn’t have to anticipate, didn’t have to calculate outcomes or brace for the moment something slipped out of his grasp. It meant he could exist in a single second without wondering what would come next or what it would cost him later.
It was the only place he wanted to trust someone else with the reins, because the boundaries were clear, the rules spoken or silently understood, and the ending inevitable. There was comfort in that structure—in knowing exactly how far things would go, and that he could step back into himself afterward, intact.
He'd never been able to explain that to anyone because how do you explain to someone that the thing that scares you most in life is the only thing that makes you feel immense pleasure too?
And the fucked up part — the part that sat in his chest like a stone he couldn't swallow and couldn't spit out — was that he knew where it came from. He wasn't stupid. He knew that his father had spent years teaching him that stillness and obedience were the only reliable ways to stop the noise, and he knew that Vera had walked through that exact doorway and turned it into something sexual before he was old enough to have a say in it, and he knew that what she'd done — whether she meant it as exploitation or not, whether she understood the harm she was building on or not — had wired him in a way that he couldn't unwire by himself.
The pathway to feeling good was forged in trauma, and his body didn't care about the source — it only cared that the signal traveled, and that when it arrived, everything went quiet.
And the more fucked up thing was what Dr. Reyes had said to him at their session two weeks later,
You've built a very impressive life, Conrad. I just wonder sometimes if you're living in it or just maintaining it.
The control he maintained over every other area of his life compensated, mostly. His grades. His team. His carefully managed schedule that left no room for variables he hadn't accounted for. He hooked up when he was drunk enough not to care, which scratched nothing and left him feeling vaguely hollow in the mornings, and ran five miles every day, and kept everything filed under not important and not yet and later, when there's time.
He was, by most metrics, fine.
Isabel Conklin, on the other hand, was a variable he had not accounted for.
And now she was standing sixty miles north of where she was supposed to be, in a UCLA jersey on a Stanford rec field, and Conrad's carefully managed schedule had not prepared him for the way she looked in person — realer than any photo, realer than anything his imagination had constructed on many separate occasions — and the game hadn't even started yet.
He was, for the first time in a long time, not entirely sure he had this under control.