But what if she could? What if she could do it? Let Haley
strip away her clothes. Let her touch her body. Let her give her
pleasure without the pain. What then? She’d used the pain as a
way to heal. She’d used control as a way to move beyond the
past. What would that mean now if Haley was capable of
making her feel all the things she shouldn’t feel? It didn’t
mean she could keep Haley. It didn’t mean she had any more
right to be doing this with her than she did before.
Claire couldn’t bear to let Haley undress her. That would be
too intimate. While Haley watched, Claire twisted the lock on
the door. She took a few steps, and she unbuttoned her blouse
and pulled it away from her skirt. She shed the silky black
fabric like she was undressing at the end of the day, except this
time she didn’t carefully place the blouse in a pile of things to
be dry cleaned. This time, she let it fall to the floor. She was
always so neat and tidy, because she liked to have control over
every aspect of her life, and that blouse hitting the wooden
flooring was like a layer being stripped away that wasn’t
clothing. A layer of her control, a brick out of the walls she
held around herself. She unzipped her skirt and let it pool
around her feet.
This isn’t me. Stop. Stop, stop, stop. You’ll be destroyed.
And you’ll love every minute of it.
She kicked off one heel and then the other, ignoring the
throbbing ache in the balls of her feet, because while she loved
the way the heels looked and the extra five or six inches they
gave her, depending on which ones she chose, she hated that
her feet protested them more and more as the hours of the day
wore on. She nearly sighed in relief as she reached around her
back to undo the lacy black bra. The underwire was stiff and