CHOSEN

CHAPTER 1

He looked better.

That was the first thing I noticed when he stepped into my office that Monday: nineteen, carved, short-buzzed hair that made every line of his face stand out sharper, black hoodie zipped halfway over a white tank that let his collarbones and most of his chest show.

Four minutes late.

Last Monday he’d been a mess. And on time. His parents were breaking up and he’d barely held it together during session. Now he seemed composed enough to at least put on his usual bright smile and try to perform manageability.

My eyes drifted down to the cut between his pecs for half a second too long but I managed to look away before he could possibly notice.

“Have a seat, Rowan. How are you feeling today?” I said, as he settled into the chair.

Always the chair, never the sofa. Never too relaxed.

“Good. Βetter at least.”

“I’m glad to hear that. Not that there’s something to be ashamed of even if you’re not. That’s why we’re here, isn’t it?”

“Of course.” Bright smile getting brighter. “Thank you.”

Of course.

@RowanVoss at his default settings: model, influencer, adopted at twelve by the philanthropist power couple Richard and Vanessa Voss. Martial arts and ballet classes twice a week, endless laps in their heated swimming pool since fourteen, protein shakes instead of proper meals since fifteen. Even “supportive therapy” sessions before he turned eighteen, with the best in town, if you don’t mind me saying. Me.

“Last session we discussed your father leaving the house. The fight he had with your mother…”

“Yes. It was bad. She was crying.”

“You told me it made you feel… disoriented,” I said, checking my notebook. “That’s the word you used.”

“It did. I found her sitting at the kitchen island in the dark, four in the morning. She was about to leave the house too. She kept saying she couldn’t stay there all by herself. She’d packed a suitcase. But I convinced her to stay.”

“You talked about how her leaving the house made you feel?”

“Yes. That too,” he said, looking past me, at the grey London morning outside my window, doing nothing spectacular. “I kept telling her she’s not alone, that Richard loves her, that she only had to stay there and wait for him to return. He’s half without her. He’ll get it sooner or later.”

“Did your father tell you that himself?”

“No, not really,” he said. “I just didn’t want her to feel like nobody cared. She needed a reason to stay. She calmed down, eventually.”

Eventually…

“And you gave her that reason?”

“I suppose I did. Next morning she’d unpacked the suitcase,” he said, and a faint grin started forming on his face.

I put my pen down.

“You sound… proud.”

“I guess I am,” he said, slowly, picking the words carefully. “I can be really persuasive when I have to, Dr. McKenna, you know that.”

And I still don’t know if I managed to keep my face in place, though I’m certain I tried.

Because I’d heard “persuasive”, and “convinced”, and “eventually” before. About a girl at a liquor store who’d been firm about needing to see some ID, until she wasn’t. About a literature tutor who’d turned a B-minus into an A+, eventually. About a photographer’s assistant who’d insisted her boss’s schedule was really full, until she was convinced otherwise. It always came down to the same thing: his body as currency.

All its parts.

I’d written monitor the first time it surfaced. And I’d tracked it evolving, reinforcement loop after reinforcement loop, until it became automatic. Natural: “Instrumental Sexual Behaviour as primary Conflict Resolution Strategy.” Which was a euphemism for he fucks people to get what he wants. Systematically.

Only this time it wasn’t about getting beer, or grades, or a work appointment.

It was Vanessa Voss. His mother.

Adoptive.

But still…

It couldn’t be real. It had to be me, projecting. I wrote it down as counter-transference.

“Doctor? Is everything okay?” I heard him ask.

No, Rowan. I’m genuinely disturbed at what you’ve just said. Give me a moment.

“Yes, Rowan. I was… thinking. About you… comforting your mother.”

“Honestly, I think she wanted to stay. Like when people say they’ll kill themselves but don’t really mean it. They just want attention.”

“But she wasn’t talking about suicide, if we stick to that metaphor. She had actually taken the leap when you found her.”

“And I stopped her. That was the right thing to do, wasn’t it?” he said after thinking about it for a while. Softly. Grey-blue eyes locked on mine.

Simply adorable.

Irritatingly so.

As adorable as when he stepped into my office for the first time, not sure why he’d been brought to me. Not afraid. Just cautious, like I was some kind of inquisitor. “He’s shy,” his mother had told me. “He doesn’t go out much, he doesn’t have too many friends, especially his age. I mean, you’ll see him… He looks like a centerfold model and doesn’t even have a girlfriend.”

“Or a boyfriend,” I had remarked and she hadn’t flinched.

“We wouldn’t mind,” she’d said.

And I’d agreed to see him.

As I was seeing him right now. Waiting for what I’d throw at him next. Or, perhaps, for my validation.

Not today.

“That’s not for me to decide.”

“Okay. But… what would you think, if we weren’t here?”

The centerfold model who didn’t even have a girlfriend.

I almost smiled.

“Are we discussing what’s good for you, or good for her?”

“Can’t it be both?” he said, tilting his head slightly.

Grey-blue, and clever, and perceptive, and utterly unaware of what he looked like when he was being all that.

Or, maybe, not as unaware as I’d been thinking.

“I’m not sure. Tell me more about what happened that night,” I said.

“I couldn’t really sleep. It was hot. I went downstairs to close the heating and get some water.”

“The heating? Mid-April?”

“Someone must have left it on. I don’t know.”

Someone… who? It was just the two of you that night, Rowan.

“And you ran into her.”

“Yes. No. It was dark. I didn’t see her standing in the kitchen. I opened the fridge and the light went on. She saw me first. Told me not to go around the house like that.”

“Like… what?”

“I was in my briefs. Didn’t even have slippers on. She was worried I might catch a cold.”

He looked at me, as if checking for my reactions. There were none. I just watched his face, which was the least helpful place to look at currently.

“Mothers…” he continued, like he could just change the subject. “You know how they are. Always worrying. Always taking care. Even when they’re falling apart. I hugged her and she started crying.”

“Mothers,” I said, thinking of mine, back in Edinburgh. Dementia, early second stage. Her husband was taking care of her at least. Her second husband, not my father.

“Mothers,” he repeated, nodding.

And I resisted the urge to ask him if he was talking about Vanessa Voss, her legs spread and wrapped around his waist, or about his biological mother. The one who’d brought him here when he was six, hidden in the back of a lorry, telling him to stay still and silent. She died two years later, and that’s how he ended up in the system.

I let him off the hook, for now, letting the next thirty minutes pass the way most of our sessions did. Me, pretending his appearance was clinically irrelevant. Him, pretending to be a cooperative patient. Both of us pretending there was no elephant in the room.

My head though, kept noticing the elephant, trunk and everything: Rowan, no shoes, six feet three more or less. Vanessa, low or no heels on, not more than five-seven. Equaled her face in the cut between his pecs when he hugged her, if my maths was correct.

I listened to his voice, like background noise, talking about his adoptive parents, their marriage, the Voss Foundation, his father’s new apartment, “small, only temporary.” Anything but what happened between 4 a.m. and “she unpacked her suitcase.” And I couldn’t unthink their height difference, of all things.

Or how deep the cut between his pecs was. A perfectly straight division that ran from his sternum down to somewhere I wasn’t supposed to be looking, like some over-excited teenager had designed the rest of him and just lost it at that single, devastating line.

I wondered what it would feel like.

I wondered if Vanessa had touched it that night in the kitchen. When she hugged him and her face pressed against it and her hands found his waist. She must have. You couldn’t stand that close to a body like that and not touch it.

Taste it.

“Divorce has nothing to do with how two people feel toward their children. It only has to do with how they feel against each other.”

Yes, I said that. To a nineteen-year-old who’d just implied, if not stated, he’d fucked his own mother a few days ago.

Adoptive, I kept telling myself.

But still…

He’s not looking for reassurance about divorce, Moira. He just wants you to tell him that what he did isn’t irredeemable, given the circumstances.

“Tell me more about your father’s new apartment,” I managed to say at some point, as if that had anything to do with what was being said in that room that day, pressing my legs together under my desk.

“It’s practically empty,” I heard him say. “A lot of boxes. A couch. A table. No photographs, anywhere.”

I wasn’t listening. I was watching the cut deepen when he shifted in his chair. The way his breathing made it pulse.

Cross your legs, Moira.

I did. Making matters worse actually. Because I knew I was wet before I did. But I didn’t know exactly how wet, until then.

Okay. Stop looking at it now.

I did that too. But I couldn’t stop thinking about the way the fabric dipped into the hollow between his pectorals. I imagined tracing it. Not with my hands.

His voice faded back in, telling me something about his father.

Whatever.

“Do you visit him often?” I asked.

“I don’t know. He hasn’t really been there that long.”

“No, of course not. I mean… Did his leaving the house alienate you, or has it actually brought you closer?”

“I’m not sure. I text him more now we don’t see each other every day, if that’s what you’re asking,” he said, leaning forward.

And if I’d been watching properly, I would have noticed his jeans tightening as he shifted, spreading his legs.

Is he…?

No. He can’t be.

Then again, how was it that visible if he had anything resembling underwear on?

Okay… Stop!

“And your mother?” I asked, trying to save myself.

“She calls me more now. Checks where I am. What I’m doing. When I’m getting home.” A faint smile. “She didn’t use to do that.”

But she does now, doesn’t she?

“It’s fine,” he shrugged. “I don’t mind.”

Of course you don’t. I hope you don’t mind me rubbing my palms on my chair’s armrest either. It’s just me, trying to forget the wetness leaking between my thighs.

More maths.

Her head in that chest. Her belly?

Pressed against his cock. Impossible to miss.

And him, being nineteen. Wearing nothing but briefs.

Hard.

Instantly.

Nothing like her husband.

Hard.

And if her hands moved.

I couldn’t anymore. I uncrossed my legs, wrapped them around the chair’s legs, and locked them there, hoping it would help.

It didn’t.

It only made the images stop arriving gradually. They just came, all at once.

He fucked her. He held her against the fridge and filled her, all of it, until her knees bent. He kept filling her even when she couldn’t stand, even when the only thing keeping her upright was his cock inside her.

That’s what he did.

Adoptive or not.

That’s not what he said.

But that’s what he did. He persuaded her to stay, the only reliable way he knew. The one that should have been stopped by an adult before it became reliable in the first place. He fucked the very thought of leaving out of her head, over and over, until she couldn’t remember why she’d packed her suitcase in the first place.

And all she could do was lick that cut between his pecs as it happened.

I wasn’t listening anymore. I almost felt my back arching against my chair, on its own.

No!

I pressed both palms flat on the armrests.

Noted the state of my underwear.

Noted the perceived flush on my cheeks.

Noticed the buzz coming from my desk.

The intercom. I breathed. I tried to breathe.

“Yes, Chloe?”

“Sorry to interrupt Dr. McKenna. Your one o’clock will be here promptly.”

Which meant: wrap it up. You’re done.

I’d been close, actually.

“Yes, Chloe, thank you.”

No. Not thank you.

God bless you, Chloe, patron saint of professional interruptions.