Chapter 3: The gynecologist bed

SCARLET ♠️

Ten years.

I sat across from him and thought, ten years and I felt every single one of them collapse like they had never existed.

He hadn’t changed. That was the thing that undid me first, before anything else,  the simple, unfair fact that Ray Lionel had not changed. He was still tall, still broad across the shoulders, still carrying himself with that particular stillness that had always made me feel like the rest of the world was moving too fast. His hair was darker than I remembered or maybe the office light was different. 

His jaw was the same. His hands were the same. Everything about him was the same and I had spent 10 years telling myself I was over it and apparently I had been lying to myself for 10 years.

He was looking at me the way he used to look at me when he was trying to figure out what I was thinking before I said it.

I dropped my eyes to my lap and started rubbing my thumbs together.

“Scarlet.”

His voice. Lord, his voice!! still that same low, unhurried register that used to make me feel like whatever he was saying was meant only for me even in a crowded room. I pressed my thumbs harder together.

“Don’t tell me you’re rubbing your thumbs.”

I went still.

“Scar.” There was almost a smile in it,  not mocking, something warmer and more dangerous than that. “You walked in here yourself. Don’t tell me you’re confused about why you came.”

That was the thing about Ray. That had always been the thing about Ray. He knew me,  not the surface version I showed the world, not the careful composed Mrs. Benson that eight years of marriage had polished into something almost unrecognizable.

 He knew the version underneath. The one that rubbed her thumbs when she was anxious. The one that went quiet when she was hurting. The one that was sitting in this chair right now trying very hard not to fall apart.

My heart was beating so loudly I was mildly surprised he couldn’t hear it.

I made myself look up. Made myself breathe.

“I’ve been married for eight years,” I said. My voice came out steadier than I felt. “And I don’t have a child. I came to check myself, to know if I am medically fit to be a mother. If the problem is mine.”

Something shifted in his expression. He leaned back in his chair slowly, file still in his hands, and looked at me with a careful attention that was both professional and something else entirely.

“You believe you can’t conceive?” he asked. “Or you want to be certain that you’re healthy?”

“Both,” I said. “Eight years is long enough to stop wondering and start knowing.”

He nodded. Set the file down. Picked up his pen and turned it in his palm, a habit I recognized, the thing he did when he was thinking.

 “There’s a support group that meets here. Women who are on similar journeys,  trying to conceive, navigating the process. It might help to…”

“No.” The word came out quickly. “I can’t be seen. I don’t want” I stopped. Steadied myself. “I just need the examination. Privately. That’s all.”

He looked at me for a moment longer than necessary. Then he stood.

“Alright.” He gestured toward the examination bed behind me, clean, clinical, positioned against the far wall with a paper sheet folded across it. “You’ll need to remove your trousers. I need to examine you properly.”

I turned and looked at the bed. Then I turned back.

“I’m sorry?”

“It’s a standard gynecological examination, Scarlet.”

“I understand that, I just…” I stopped. Pressed my lips together. “Is there another way?”

“There isn’t.” His voice was completely professional. His eyes were something else. “Have you never seen a gynecologist before?”

The honest answer was embarrassing enough that I almost didn’t give it. “No, I haven’t.”

He didn’t laugh. He didn’t even smile. He simply held my gaze with the patience of a man who had done this a thousand times and the awareness of a man who understood that this particular patient was not simply nervous about a medical procedure.

“I’ll step out,” he said quietly. “Take your time.”

He gave me three minutes. I used all of them, climbing onto the bed, arranging myself, staring at the ceiling and having a very firm conversation with myself about the difference between a medical examination and anything else. This was clinical. This was necessary. This was a doctor doing his job and a patient receiving care and the fact that the doctor in question had once known my body in an entirely different context was completely irrelevant.

I was still having that conversation with myself when he came back in.

He snapped on his gloves with the practiced efficiency of someone who had done it ten thousand times. He positioned himself with clinical precision. He explained each step before he took it, his voice measured and even, nothing in it that I could point to as anything other than professional.

And then he began the examination.

I gripped the edge of the bed.

The moment his fingers made contact I felt it, a wave of sensation that had nothing to do with medicine and everything to do with memory. 

10 years of careful forgetting undone in an instant by the specific, devastating familiarity of his touch in my Pu**y. My body remembered him before my mind could stop it. Every nerve ending awake at once, my breath going shallow, a heat spreading through me that I had absolutely no business feeling in a consultation room at ten-fifteen on a Thursday morning.

“Ahh…”

I moaned as the sound escaped before I could catch it. Small. Involuntary. Mortifying.

I pressed my lips together hard.

“Relax.” His voice was different now, but. still controlled, still professional, but with something underneath it that he was working to keep there. Something pressed down and barely managed. “I need to complete the examination.”

I stared at the ceiling and breathed through my nose and thought about anything, Ruth’s voice, the cold breakfast, the compound this morning,  anything that was not the feeling of Ray Lionel’s hands and the 10 years years of muscle memory currently staging a complete revolt against my better judgment.

It didn’t entirely work.

My fingers found the edge of his coat without my permission, gripping the fabric as the examination continued, my body reacting to his touch as he dipped his middle finger inside me. with a honesty that my mind was desperately trying to override. It was warm everywhere. I was aware of every point of contact, every careful professional movement, and the specific torture of a body that remembered being loved by these hands and could not pretend otherwise.

This is a medical examination, I told myself firmly, meanwhile i was already dripping wet from getting horny for my gynecologist who is my ex boyfriend. 

He is your doctor.

You are a married woman.

I told myself all of it. I believed approximately none of it.

He removed his gloves and stepped back and I sat up and neither of us said anything for a moment that lasted considerably longer than it should have. 

He was looking at the wall just to the left of my face. I was looking at my hands in my lap. The silence between us had a texture,  thick, aware, full of things that a consultation room had no business containing. Then he cleared his throat and said, very carefully,  “I’ll have your results within forty-eight hours.” And I nodded and got dressed and when I was about to leave his office he stopped and said; 

“Scar, eventually we need to talk about what really happened between us” 

I didn’t say anything but I nodded and walked out of his  office knowing with complete certainty that I was in a great deal of trouble.