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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