“I GREW UP on a private compound. In the middle of nowhere in Washington, surrounded by forest so thick you couldn’t see anything but trees.”
“Doesn’t sound so bad. Kinda nice, actually,” Penelope said.
“It was not nice. I promise you that. I hated it.” He couldn’t even look at Pen right now. He had to keep going. “I have three brothers. They’re much older than me. They lived there, too, but I was alone most of the time.”
That was Bishop’s most persistent memory of his childhood—being alone. Since so many areas of the compound were off-limits to him, and the woods were strictly prohibited, by default, he hardly left his room. When he was younger and would go searching for his dad or older brothers, he was met by scary-looking men who would turn him away. Sometimes those men were walking even scarier-looking dogs, so in his room, Bishop felt safe.
“I read a lot. I had an endless supply of books. And a tutor who was very strict and kept me busy.”
“Oh, my… So, did the tutor teach you other things, too?”
Bishop cut his eyes to Penelope’s grinning face. “This is serious, Pen. I’m not fucking around with this story. Will you just be quiet and let me talk? I need you to hear this.”
She dropped her chin to her knees she was already hugging to her chest. “Sorry.”
“The only time I saw my dad and brothers was at dinner.” It was an intimidating nightly affair where Bishop felt either ignored or openly rejected because of his eyesight. As time went on, his older brothers began looking more and more like the big guys walking the mean dogs, and Bishop felt even less inclined to try to talk to them. “I didn’t talk much. I just listened to them talking about the family business. I was led to believe we raised guard dogs.”
Looking back, Bishop knew his brother and dad had been careful about their words, purposely choosing terms and phrases to make Bishop believe they trained and sold expensive guard dogs. As the years went on and Bishop got older, he asked his father repeatedly if he could help with the business, but his father always refused due to Bishop’s vision issues.
The words his father used haunt Bishop to this day. “Your sight’s not good enough, son. The bitches could escape if you were involved.” Bishop had thought he’d meant the female dogs who made up the elite breeding stock of the alleged canine facility. That’s exactly what his father intended for him to believe.
“I felt left out. They wouldn’t let me be a part of the business even though I asked about it over and over. My dad always blamed my vision, but one day he caved and said I could help with the books. It meant everything to me. I didn’t have to feel like such an outsider. I felt like I was contributing like my brothers.” Bishop looked up at the bar cart, wanting a glass of whiskey to go with this story, but it wasn’t even lunchtime. He reminded himself to keep going, even though every step forward in the story dredged up memories he wished he could banish forever.
“The transactions were recorded by hand in these thick, dark journals. Dates of acquisition, levels of training, orders, sales. Everything was written in numbers and codes. I caught on quickly, both to the system and to the fact that my dad didn’t want me asking questions.”
“Oh no,” Pen breathed. “He was cooking the books?”
Bishop smiled ruefully. “I wish it had been something like that.” In retrospect, Bishop had spent countless hours agonizing over whether he should have known, though the only real clue he had was the household help.
He continued with that part of the story. “There were always beautiful, young women around. Girls who cooked our food. Girls who cleaned the house. Girls who delivered my laundry.”
Pen remained quiet and Bishop closed his eyes, the memory becoming more raw. “They were very quiet—so quiet I thought maybe they didn’t speak English. They never looked at me or spoke to me, but if I ever saw them around my brothers or father, the girls looked scared.” Bishop had assumed the women were simply as intimidated by the other men as he’d been.
“When I was young, none of this meant much to me, but when I entered my teenage years, the young women became much more interesting, especially because I was so isolated.”
Interesting was an understatement. His hormones had been raging, like any teenager’s, and the young women were gorgeous, and dressed in uniforms that couldn’t possibly have been typical maid attire, he’d realized, looking back. Their clothing covered their bodies, but just barely, and was tight enough to highlight every curve of their jaw-dropping figures. Those women had sparked a lot of fantasies in his head.
He glanced over at Penelope, but she was quiet now, her face neutral. She nodded at him, and he got the distinct impression that she was starting to sense the abyss—the dark place where his tale was heading.
Bishop turned away from her, filling his lungs with a bracing breath. “I remember that week clearly, because two new things happened, and in my life back then, nothing new ever happened.”
He hung his head. The weight of the words he’d have to say out loud nearly crushing him.
Penelope seemed to understand this. She reached out and touched him lightly. “What happened, Bishop?”
Her voice was so sweet, and shame stabbed at his heart. She was so innocent that she shouldn’t even hear a story like this, but it wasn’t fair not to tell her. Not when she only wanted to get closer to him. She had to know why he couldn’t do that. Why he didn’t deserve her esteem.
He closed his eyes to shut out the room. “It was a few days after my seventeenth birthday, and my dad made a rare visit to my bedroom to tell me what a great job I’d been doing on the books, and that he was proud of me.” That part of the memory always hit Bishop like a sucker-punch to the gut.
He tented his fingers over his eyes and rubbed at the corners. His shoulders rounded, and he wished he could disappear.
“I would have killed to hear that from my dad,” Penelope murmured.
“Yeah,” Bishop said bitterly. “Me too, and the pride I felt over it just makes me sick now.” He shook his head. “He said he hadn’t thought there was room for me in the family business, but with my skill in accounting, maybe there was after all.” Bishop looked up at the wall, his eyes unfocused, seeing instead that room far away in Washington, where everything went to hell.
He cleared his throat. “And I was all, ‘Yeah, dad! Great, dad! I want to help.” His words cut off as his throat closed, and he had to sit a moment, mentally clawing back the monster of despair that was rising up in his chest so that he could continue.
He risked a glance at Pen, and she had lifted her chin off her knees, her eyes wide. He felt sorry for her. He knew the awful things that were coming, and likely, she couldn’t even imagine.
“Next thing you know, one of the girls started talking to me. Said her name was Cerise, though I’m sure that wasn’t her real name. She seemed nervous, maybe scared, and I just thought maybe they’d been instructed not to talk, since none of them had spoken to me before.” He shrugged. “She was maybe a year or two older than me, at most, and after a day or two of small talk, I thought we were friends. I had no one else to talk to, and of course, she was gorgeous. I was feeling pretty excited about these new developments in my life.”
He paused and looked over at Pen. She stared back at him, her face open. Though her eyes looked troubled, he could tell she was there for him. Seeing her faith in him crumble was going to kill him.
She smiled, but it didn’t reach her eyes, evidence that she was faking her calm demeanor. Her heart was probably pounding as hard as his was, waiting for him to drop the bomb.
But this was more than a bomb. This was a goddamn nuclear warhead.
“It’s okay, Bishop. Just tell me.”
He smiled at her, knowing it looked sad. It wouldn’t be okay.
“I was attracted to her, and spent a lot of time fantasizing about her. Then one day, I thought my dreams had come true. When she came in, she closed the door behind her and locked it. She was trembling.”
He rested his elbows on his knees and held his head in his hands, continuing to push the words out of his mouth. “I jumped up and asked if she was okay. She said she was nervous, then before I knew it, she was in front of me and kissing me. I was tall already, and she was tiny like you. I had to lean down to kiss her.” He glanced at Pen. “It was my first kiss.”
The side of Pen’s mouth curled up. It was a cute gesture. A cute gesture for what should have been a cute moment—his first awkward kiss—but this was nothing but ugly. He returned his head to his hands.
“The worst part, Pen, is I had this feeling in my gut that everything wasn’t right, but I ignored it. This beautiful girl knelt in front of me and offered me something I’d only dreamed of, so I didn’t let doubts get in the way.”
He mashed his lips together, disgusted with himself. A feeling he knew all too well.
“There was a moment when maybe I should have figured it out. Maybe stopped it before it went too far, but I didn’t.” Silence stretched as he played through the memory in his head, torturing himself with it like he’d done so often through the years.
“What was it?” Her voice was soft, understanding. He didn’t deserve her.
He closed his eyes. “She asked me to fuck her throat.”
Penelope stayed quiet, and Bishop knew exactly what she was thinking about. That he’d done that to her twice. Shame rolled through him on a wave of nausea.
“Even with my lack of experience, that seemed like an unusual request, so I asked if she was sure. She answered, ‘He wants me to.’”
Beside him, Pen gasped softly, but he pushed on, knowing it only got worse.
The corners of his mouth pulled down and his tongue tasted bitter. “I heard the words. I’m sure of it. But at the time, they made no sense. Who? Who would want her to do that to me? We were having a private moment no one knew anything about, or so I thought. I asked her and she told me she’d said that she wanted it, as if I’d misheard her.” He shook his head. “I chose to believe her. So, I took what she offered.”
He mentally ran through the questions he had so many times before. Had she stammered? Should her lie have been obvious to him? Years hadn’t made the questions any more answerable or the guilt less heavy.
Bishop forced himself to continue the story, leaving out the graphic and unnecessary details. How he’d thrust deep into Cerise’s mouth and reveled in the tight squeeze of her slender throat on the sensitive crown of his cock. How he’d buried himself in her until her chin touched his balls, and then moaned in elation as he’d emptied in her.
She’d smiled up at him and licked her lips as her eyes watered and she coughed. The look on her face had been rapturous, as if he’d treated her to an incredible sexual experience by allowing her the privilege of choking on his erection and cum. Looking back, he knew that’s exactly what she’d been forcibly trained to portray to any man who raped her mouth.
“One of the things that continues to tear me up inside is how much I liked it.” That hurt him to admit.
Pins and needles tingled through his fingers and he realized he’d been gripping his hands together with such force that he’d cut off his own circulation. He shook them out, taking a deep, shuddering breath.
Pen touched his arm again. “You didn’t know, Bishop. Not really. And of course it felt good. It was supposed to, wasn’t it?”
He looked at her, not wanting to continue the conversation, but knowing he had to. “But I still like it, don’t I? It, I don’t know—” He tore his fingers through his hair, frustrated. “—it triggered something in me.” Something dark and visceral. “I still crave it like that. I did it to you the minute I had the chance.” He winced, hating himself.
She frowned. “I’m not sure that means what you think it means. You had a satisfying sexual experience under some really bad circumstances. And it was pivotal. Your first sexual experience. I’m no expert, but I don’t think it’s so deviant that it stuck with you.”
Theoretically, she was right. He’d gone into the study of human sexuality entirely because of this encounter. Two things haunted him that he thought maybe studying female sexual response could help him understand, perhaps even overcome.
One was his desire for rough blowjobs. How he could still crave them while simultaneously being disgusted and horrified at this memory? The other was how could he not have realized Cerise wasn’t genuinely enjoying their encounter? Wasn’t even a willing participant? These two things kept him deeply ashamed. Made him swear to stay far away from women so he wouldn’t inadvertently hurt another.
He’d learned in his studies that sometimes, when you’re young and your sexuality is still developing, a particularly powerful sexual experience can create a strong preference for certain acts or types of stimulation. In the extreme, this is how fetishes are developed. And though Bishop had learned this, it didn’t help his disgust with himself that many of his masturbation fantasies still involved a deep, throat-fucking blowjob.
Clearing his throat, he finished the awful tale, pulling no punches. “After that, I raped her on my bed.”
“Bishop, this story is awful.” Pen’s voice didn’t sound so steady and understanding anymore. “But I don’t think—”
He cut her off. “It was forced sexual intercourse. It doesn’t matter that I wasn’t the one forcing her. I was the one who fucked her. It was my penis that was used as the weapon. I raped her.” His words were sharp and stabbing, and Pen cringed away from his hostility. He realized how crazed he must look, if his demeanor matched the angry chaos in his head.
He forced his tensed muscles to relax, and unfisted his hands. “Sorry, Pen. I’m not a monster.” Shaking his head, he corrected himself. “I’m trying not to be a monster. I’ve been trying all these years.”
He spared Penelope the details about how after the blowjob, Cerise had crawled onto his bed and seductively stripped her clothes off. Then she’d beckoned him over and helped remove the rest of his. Less than an hour later, he’d fucked her twice and was resting under his covers with her in his arms, feeling like he’d died and gone to heaven.
That’s when his world turned to hell.
He squeezed Pen’s hand. “The story is coming to an end. I promise.”
“I can listen,” she said. He could tell she was trying to look brave and unaffected, but she was shaken. He could see it in the slight trembling of her bottom lip. The way she blinked a bit too often.
“We were in bed and I’d just started thinking how I needed to get her out of there before we got caught when I heard the sound of a key in the lock. I panicked instinctively, but there was no time to react. My father came in and closed the door behind him.”
Pen’s mouth dropped open and she sucked in a breath, her face blanching. Bishop looked down at his hands hanging between his knees, devastated over what he’d done and what that girl had been through. Devastated to have to relive it.
“Cerise cringed against me, terrified.” He shuddered, remembering the strange predatory smile on his father’s face. Even now, so many years later, a chill crawled up Bishop’s spine. “I opened my mouth to say something—sorry there’s a girl in my bed, or something similar—but he cut me off. He said since I’d been so helping out so much lately, he’d decided it was time to let me in on some of the perks of the family business.”
“Oh my god,” Pen breathed, and Bishop couldn’t look at her.
“He said, ‘This one’s not bad, huh?’ pointing at Cerise.” Bishop swallowed, feeling like he was speaking around cotton. “He told me her training was complete, but he just hadn’t been able bring himself to sell her yet.” Bishop swallowed hard again, and then dragged the words out one by one, like fishhooks from his throat. “He said she was one of the best cock-suckers they’d ever produced.”
His last words were barely intelligible through the hoarseness of his emotion. Pen was quiet, so he went on. “I was in shock, I guess. My brain was still trying to compute what he was saying, because I just couldn’t believe it. I stared at him with my mouth open like a moron while he slithered his disgusting eyes all over Cerise.”
“Bishop, you don’t have to tell me the rest.” Pen’s voice was small, sounding very much like the young girl she was. But he’d come this far. She needed to know how the story ended.
“My father got even uglier then.” He left out the actual words he remembered coming out of his dad’s mouth, “Bitch, you made sure he fucked your face good and deep, like I told you, right?” Cerise had nodded like his dad was holding a gun on her. She’d seemed that panicked.
Bishop slid his eyes to Pen, who was staring at her knees. He didn’t blame her. Of course she couldn’t look at him.
“He had this awful shark’s smile on his face, and he winked at me,” Bishop said. “He told me she was ‘a little aggressive with the teeth’ when they’d first snatched her, but she’d come around after they’d pulled one of her molars out.”
“Oh god,” Pen choked. “Oh, that poor girl.”
He nodded. “If I was still confused by then, I wasn’t anymore. They’d snatched her. They’d trained her. I thought of all the transactions I’d recorded—dates of acquisition, training levels completed, sales—and I think I nearly passed out.”
“Bishop.” Pen touched his shoulder, and he breathed out, relieved she could at least still bring herself to touch him.
“He said, ‘Your brothers like her too.’” Bishop’s voice cracked, and Pen started to say something but he cut her off sharply. “It gets worse.”
His guttural statement was like a bomb he’d tossed between them, and he felt her flinch, the warm spot where she’d touched him now empty and missing her.
“I remember fireworks exploding behind my eyes, like my brain wasn’t getting enough air. I couldn’t think.” He closed his eyes and shook his head hard, wanting the memories to shatter against the inside of his skull and turn to dust so he could no longer remember the story.
“Cerise was literally quaking next me, clinging onto me, and that’s when I realized I’d participated in raping her. I think I was on the verge of hyperventilating, and that’s when I saw my father unfasten his belt.” Bishop swallowed back bile, even now feeling the panic of that moment.
He didn’t tell Pen the next part. His dad had snapped his fingers and barked an order at Cerise. “You ain’t done suckin’ yet, bitch.” As scared as she was, the naked girl sprang from Bishop’s bed as if she was being chased. She’d been on her knees in front of his dad before the older man even had his zipper down. Bishop didn’t want to think about what his father and brothers had done to the poor girl to get her to respond like that.
Bishop finished his horrible tale. “I ran to the bathroom attached to my room and turned the faucet on full-blast to mask the sound of my vomiting. Survival instincts told me I had to hide my reaction from my father. I figured rejecting the family business would not bode well for me, but no way in hell was I going to stay and participate, even just by doing the books. I started thinking of how to escape.”
That was when Bishop had realized he could hear noises coming from his room—the noises of his father doing the same things to that young girl that Bishop had just done to her. He’d flushed the toilet again to hide his dry-heaving, and then stood there, digging his fingers into his scalp. He’d flinched when his father called out to him.
“Come out here, son. Put her to work and spend some quality time with your dad. She’s got holes available.” There was the loud smack of a hand against flesh, and the girl yelped.
Bishop had forced his voice to sound calm when he yelled back that he was getting in the shower. He’d turned on the water but curled up on the floor of the tub, letting the spray drench his face, and thinking maybe the shower would drown him and that wouldn’t be such a bad thing.
He stayed like that for a long time before he finally stood up and scrubbed himself raw, yet still, he wasn’t clean.