Today, I saw Lacey again.

I was scrolling through social media, tired from work and the dry weight of lost hours of sleep crumbling the edges of my mind, when I saw her face, smiling winningly from some distant beach. My thumb froze over the screen. My heart tightened. I felt no pain, nothing like a sharp stab of anxiety or the slow, inexorable burn of hate, but I did feel... constricted. Like my chest was pinned in the iron grip of faded memories, many years past, but still raw, still bloodied on my breath.

Twenty minutes later, my girlfriend entered to the sight of me still sitting there, frozen. Reece laid a warm hand on my shoulder, and her caring, worried touch broke the spell. I spoke at great length. I wept into her shoulder.

When my tears finally subsided, we sat there at that cramped little kitchen table, quiet for a while. Reece had taken my hands in hers and was rubbing them gently, like a salve on my skin to quiet my troubled gaze.

“It’s been years, Iona,” she said hesitantly.

“I know.”

Reece examined me with her sweet brown eyes, and concern bled through into her voice. “But it’s still hurting you.”

I took in a ragged breath and sniffled. “I know. It’s just when I saw her face again, I… I’ll unfollow her. I forgot that I added her way back. You know, she hadn’t posted, not for a while, so I forgot that…” I stuttered to a stop. I was rambling.

Heartbeats. Despite myself, I remembered. Screaming. Bitterness. Hate. A spiral of confusion and self-loathing and obsession, bound as surely to Lacey’s whim as if I had been chained. Her angelic blue eyes, sharper than daggers, which I had found so mesmerising–exploring her hot, writhing body, not knowing I had been enslaved, enthralled, blinded. And when I tried to leave- Every moment came rushing in at once. The bitter, the saccharine, the tender, the ugly, all of it rendered dull and yet still stinging in my veins like poison…

“Iona.”

Reece’s voice was soft, but sure. It was a stone in a rushing and raging torrent, and I grappled onto it, struggling to stay lucid over my disassociation.

“Iona.” More insistent. “Please, come back to me. Listen to my voice. You need closure.”

“I have been…” My tongue felt bloated and clumsy in my mouth. “Yes. I need a resolution to it all. I can’t go on like this, with her face ruining me out of nowhere. I just don’t know… how…” My voice broke again and I grasped Reece’s hands tightly. “I’m sorry,” I managed. “We have such a beautiful thing here, and I’m just so sorry that I had to bring in baggage from my last relationship. I’m sorry that… I’m so broken.”

Her eyes were wet now, and she cupped my face with one hand. “Don’t be sorry,” she said. “We’ll fix this. You’re not broken. You’ll overcome it, I promise you.”

-

A month passed. I had unfollowed and blocked Lacey, but the memories were now once again fresh in my mind. There they throbbed, like burns patched across my head, and Reece found me more than once frozen in the middle of the day, halfway through some mundane task, overwhelmed.

Then one day, as I was typing out an email in the kitchen, I saw Reece lug a huge box up the stairs.

“Need help?” I called perplexedly.

“No, it’s fine,” Reece said. “It’s lighter than you’d think.”

“What is it?”

“You’ll see. It’s kind of like what we did last October, with the masks, but… more. I’m kind of hoping it’ll help as well.” Reece paused, midway up the stairs, breathing heavily.

I rubbed my fingertips together in confusion over the keyboard, still bemusedly regarding the gigantic box. “Oh… sure.”

Reece looked at me, then left the box awkwardly balanced on the staircase and jogged over to me. She took my head in her hands.

“Hey. I love you,” Reece said quietly. She bent forward and kissed me lightly on the forehead.

I reached up and rubbed her arms, letting her cradle my head to the sound of her warm heartbeat. “I love you too.”

-

“So I want to apologize beforehand if this turns out to not be… great. I would tell you up front, but I kind of wanted to surprise you, but now I’m not so sure if that’s the right thing to do… Should I tell you?” Reece looked unsure. “Do you want me to tell you?”

I gave Reece an exaggerated look of terror. “That sounds properly ominous.”

That pulled a giggle out of Reece as I mimed huddling in a corner, and she swatted my arm playfully. Then she sobered up. “No seriously. If this turns out badly… just...”

The smirk on my face paused. There was something approaching anxiety in Reece’s face.

“Reece,” I said slowly, quietly. I let my hands slide up her smooth, burnt caramel shoulders, tried to rub the tension in them away. Then I looked straight into her eyes, the light brown flecked with gold, the eyes of the person I loved most in the entire world. “Reece,” I repeated, “Love of my life. I trust you completely and utterly. If I could offer up my heart for you to keep forever in a chest, I would. If the surprise of the next three hours consists of me being chained to the headboard of our bed by a pair of pink fluffy bunny handcuffs, I would agree without hesitation. I. Trust. You.”

Some of the worry evaporated from Reece’s face and she looked down, a soft smile curving her lips. “Really?”

“Yes,” I said, as firmly as possible.

Reece looked back at me. “Great,” she said earnestly. “Let me get the handcuffs.”

I blinked. “Wait. We have-” Then I saw the mischievous grin sliding onto her face, and I groaned theatrically. “Thou art a special sort of knave, lover.”

Reece plucked my nose cutely and patted me on the head. “Alas, ‘tis the truth,” she said. “But perhaps not in the manner thou wouldst expect.”

“Does this mean handcuffs?”

“Not exactly,” Reece said. “You must dream bigger, my love.” She got off the bed, flicked her hair back, and pulled a strap off her shoulder in a satirically seductive manner. “Await my arrival,” she said breathily, batting her eyelids at me. I rolled my eyes in return.

She sauntered off towards the bathroom, then paused at the door frame. “Uh. Like, this might actually take two hours. So if you want to get comfortable, watch some TV…”

I gave her a long-suffering, petulant look. “Why would you need hours to get ready? Don’t leave me out here…”

“Don’t pout,” Reece laughed. “Freshen up downstairs, will you?” She closed the door behind her.

-

It had been more than two hours. I was thoroughly out of my mind with boredom. Occasionally, I could hear the odd scuffle from inside the bathroom, a clear enough indication that Reece hadn’t somehow gotten a concussion and that I needed to fireman-carry her to the car, but other than that I was clueless as to what was happening behind that locked door. I got up and knocked.

“Babe, how’s it going in there,” I called.

Reece’s voice was oddly muffled. “Just about done.”

I grumbled and threw myself back on the bed, clicking the remote a few times past the various cooking channels and reality shows. A few more minutes passed. I was tapping the carpeted floor with one foot, impatient. The two presidential nominees were shaking their fists at each other. The bathroom door was creaking open…

I rolled my eyes and turned around. “Finally,” I started to say, and then forgot how to speak anything remotely intelligible as my entire body froze up.

Lacey.

Somehow, she was there, standing with hips swaying in the middle of the bedroom that belonged to me and Reece. It was her, in the flesh, acutely her, unmistakably her, and that familiar dangerous stare was locked on me. Her gaze was sharp, like polished sapphires, cutting, cutting… And yet even then my gaze explored the rest of her body. Her blond, curly hair. Her button nose. Her flat stomach, her pert breasts, all visible under the paper thin sheen of a skimpy magenta outfit, some kind of satin spandex, that hugged her curves tightly. Curves that I knew well, that I had worshipped, belonging to a woman that I hated wait how was she here-

“Hello, Iona,” Lacey said breathily. That high, sultry voice that even now I flinched at- and yet, it wasn’t quite 100% the way I remembered it…

“How…?” My mouth had trouble forming the words. I realized my hands were shaking. “Reece?”

“What’s that?” Lacey’s voice was like a rapier. It stabbed, it needled, and my clumsy words stumbled to a stop. “Is that the name of that Thai slut you ran off with a few years back? That little bitch that stole my prize girlfriend?”

Even through the blur of confusion, the possessive stung, but not as much as the barb against Reece. “She’s not a slut,” I snapped instinctively. “She’s a wonderful, kind human being and she’s a hundred times better than you could ever be.”

“I doubt it,” Lacey said derisively, poisonously soft voice curdling the very air. “I doubt she could even come close to rivaling me. Her looks? Don’t make me laugh. I could pick any of my housekeepers at random and find a maid more fuckable. Her personality? She’s a mouse without a tail. I could send her scurrying just by being in the room. Her brains? Did she even graduate college? Puh-lease. Harvard is miles above whatever shithole she crawled out of. No. No, I don’t think she’s better than me at all.” Lacey blinked innocently at me, but in a flash her doey eyed-look was replaced by a sneer. A dainty gloved hand pulled a zipper down alluringly, revealing her full breasts, the bare skin of her taut belly, unfolding like a poisonous flower in spring, all the way down until the zipper paused an inch over her crotch. My eyes stayed glued there for a few seconds or an eternity before I caught myself and looked back up at her, face reddening. Lacey snickered. She had seen me looking.

“Me, on the other hand…” Lacey let a taunting finger slip slowly into the hidden recesses of her bodysuit, towards her crotch. The fabric bulged as she curved her finger in and out, gently rubbing and teasing herself. “Mmm…” she said. “It’s been so long, hasn’t it? Am I just like how you remember me? Self-possessed? Confident? Sexy beyond comprehension? I can see you staring, you know.” Lacey curled towards me, constrictor-like in her movements, a viciously coy look on her face. She could tell, tell it true, the anger and desire all mixing together in my heart, quickly and easily observed from the tumult so openly playing out on my heated face. Her satin-coated hand drifted outwards, fully extended like a gesture to something distant, barely brushing my cheek. Her voice was breathy, high but cruelly aware. “I know you want me, Iona. And guess what? I’m fucking wet for you.”

My mouth was so dry it hurt. In the moment, despite how none of it made any sense, any sense at all, all I could see was Lacey in front of me. The feelings battled in my throat, cutting deep gashes into my insides. “I hate you,” I choked out, a weak whisper.

Lacey looked at me for a long, silent moment. The high and arrogant smirk on her face faded away. She appraised me. A pause worth ten heartbeats, then twenty, then so many and many that my eyesight seemed to fade into black, everything except Lacey’s jagged blue stare and the firm line of her lips.

Then she took a step towards me. Another. She was fully in my personal space. God, this person in front of me looked like Lacey, smelled like Lacey. This was her.

Two hands on my shoulders. She rotated with me, a slow dance, until she had positioned herself very intentionally between me and the bed. She leaned in very close.

“You hate me?” she whispered.

“Then. Hate. Fuck. Me.”

I looked into her bright, cold eyes, the numbness building up until it was oppressive, a vast weight of oceanic proportions, brimming and crashing emotion, and–

It burst. My hands went out, almost not of my own accord, brusquely pistoning her backwards into the bed. Lacey toppled backwards, a yelp crossing over her lips, but then my hand was there, covering her mouth. I stared her down, and under my hands she was tremulous, not at all the icy bitch that had spun me on webs and shredded my sanity on pointed words of bitter iron, but a human being, a blonde woman with bright blue eyes and bare, rolling shoulders, delicate arms, a flat and toned stomach that I was now running my free hand down–and here, underneath me, she wasn’t the thing that haunted me. She was just a human being who I had loved, who had hurt me, who had made me feel horrible and tiny with her vile pride, and yet was no different, no witch, nor fae, nor titanic goddess or hellspawn, from any other woman I had known in my life. In this split moment, it seemed laughable (even if only for the split second) that I had let myself become traumatized by this real, acutely fallible human being, this girl named Lacey who I had simply met in college long, long, long ago.

A human being, just carnal flesh under my fingertips.

“Mpph?” Lacey whimpered under my fingertips. Her eyes were round with surprise–and bare-breathed arousal. Her mouth was warm and moist under my restraining hand.

“Get fucked, Lacey.” My fingers slipped under the soft fabric barely covering her crotch, over her slick skin and the hot juices that were pooling there, and into her. Lacey breathed hard into my other hand, and I lifted off her face–she gasped in tensed expectation, “aaaah–” but I now pushed two fingers into her mouth, and she suckled greedily, her blinding eyes finally shut in yielding and quiet compliance. I pushed. She writhed–and I pulled free from her crotch, letting my hand trace a slick line up her belly once, twice, drawing circles overlapping circles before swooping back down and over the small bumps and folds of her clit, rubbing into her in a way that made her squirm. Lacey panted–her air ran hot over my raised hand, and I roughly fondled her tongue and rubbed her saliva over her always-perfect porcelain face, over those hateful lips, and she exhaled with a popping wetness as her hands ran over my body, slipping under my shirt and pulling at the fabric, pulling at my bra, begging for purchase and entry. And I resisted. My body weight, not much heavier than either Lacey’s or Reece’s, pinioned her underneath me all the same–I shouldered one arm down, moved the elbow of my raised arm to deflect her seeking hand, and gripped her supple body with my own like a vice. Lacey whimpered in protest. I looked down at her, full in her saliva-drenched, quivering face.

“No, no. Fuck you, Lacey. You fucked me over so many times in the past.” I spat the words out, relishing each syllable. “Now I’m fucking you.”

-

One sweaty hour later, we lay together on the drenched bedcovers, side by side. She lay beside me, and in the haze of post-coitus I could still sense her as Lacey–there were her pale, pert breasts, the distinct lines of her face and features, the devilish button nose, the locks of golden hair now a messy crown about her. It was her body, Lacey’s body, that I had once forgotten (or perhaps chosen to forget) and then forcibly remembered, and now had known for second after eternal second underneath me and then over me, moving, wriggling, toned muscles tensing against my skin, hands on my breasts, mouth on my neck. And yet, when she turned to look at me, despite the blue eyes, I could sense her as Reece as well, or perhaps more accurately Reece instead, the entire facade melting away to warm and comfortable and safe–safe–familiarity.

“Are you okay?”

I nodded mutely at Reece as she turned to look at me, and yes, it was Lacey’s features returning my gaze, but they were contorted in a manner so un-Laceylike… warm, genuine, compassionate. It was like I could stare through the shell of the persona I had been hate-fucking for the past hour and into the beautiful heart of the person who I loved the most in the whole universe. The specter of Lacey was no more for tonight–Reece shone out like sunlight, banishing my negative emotions and turmoil, guarding me, embracing me.

“How-” my mouth felt like sandpaper, and I paused to wet my lips. “How did you sound so much like her?”

“Practice,” Reece said, now speaking in her own voice. “I took those rusty impersonation skills and put them to the test. It was decent?”

“Scary decent.” I huffed softly. “I genuinely needed context clues and some common sense logic to reason out that Lacey hadn’t teleported into our bathroom. Couldn’t have noticed if I had seen you in the supermarket…” My voice trailed off as I turned to my side, reaching over and playing with one of her breasts. “Fuck that, I’m missing the bigger point here. How in holy hells did you pull off the entire look?” I rubbed her nipple and Reece bit her lip playfully at me. “This feels like real skin. And you… you just look exactly like her. You guys were the same height, so that checks out, but like… Lacey has a different facial structure. Fuck, her hipbones literally extend further out, and her ass is just… different from yours. And yet it feels so fucking real. Like scarily accurate. Don’t tell me it’s like some kind of makeup or Halloween mask, because there’s no way you could get it to look and feel like this.”

Reece giggled. “Let’s just say I put some of my savings towards this. So worth it. There’s this small Swiss-Japanese company that makes bodysuits out of a proprietary medical-grade silicone alternative… it’s some wild stuff. I don’t even know how half of it works. But yeah.” She leaned in conspiratorially. “I’m just gonna say that it encloses all of me, really tight. There’s micropores that let my sweat through, but… they’ve got this replaceable denture system that temporarily binds to the inside of my mouth, letting my saliva through but coating everything. My teeth, my tongue…” Her tone lowers mischievously. “I’m gonna tell you right now that wearing Lacey here turns my entire mouth into an intricate condom. A fucktoy hole. Same for everything happening below. This cunt of mine you just fucked?” Reece brought Lacey’s cupid-like face, and a devilish grin, right by mine, and breathed into my mouth. “That’s Lacey’s cunt, wet with my juices.”

“That’s…” I laughed, embarrassed, and planted her a quick pair of kisses on her neck. “That’s really fucking hot.”

“I know, right? If you’re gonna do a hate-fuck roleplay pseudotherapy session, my dear Iona, I’m not gonna let you settle for less than hate-fucking the actual Lacey.” Her brow furrowed. “Speaking of. I finally have us on insurance, and you probably should stop putting it off and schedule some therapy. Hate-fucking is fun… and pleasurable… but I do want you to check with a medical professional.” Reece looked abashed for a moment. “Perhaps I didn’t have my priorities straight? Sorry, I got caught up with the idea and it did make me really horny for the past few weeks.”

“Nono, you’ve told me time and time again. I’ll take a look tomorrow. And don’t apologize. This really did help. In like a weird and sexy way.” I sobered up slowly, weight creeping back into my stomach. “You know, the real Lacey wouldn’t have even apologized. She’s still out there, and doesn’t give a crap or even remember I exist.”

Reece hesitated. “You’re probably right. But this did help at least?”

I gave her a meek smile and cupped her face. “Yes. Yes it did.”

“I know she lied to you a lot. Lies often hurt and maim and do horrible things to people. But… perhaps… sometimes a lie, even one that you know deep down to be false, can heal instead?”

“Maybe.” I looked at her quizzically.

She breathed out slowly. “Okay.”

“Then I am Lacey. Right here, right now. My name is Lacey. Hear me say this.

“It was unfair to take you through all that. You sometimes pause in the middle of the day while making a sandwich or quesadilla with this lost, falling look on your face. Sometimes you just stand there in the shower, motionless, for hours. You have scars that I made. I hurt you and I shouldn’t have. I’m so, genuinely sorry. Can you forgive me?”

Words escaped me, and I had nothing to do but simply lay there. It is now Lacey beside me, once more, and this time her face is plaintive, meek, free of the domineering vitriol that had carved her pretty face into a mask that haunted my waking moments. There was earnestness in her gaze, intense conviction, and despite the back of my mind understanding that all of this was indeed elaborate deception, not one word felt like a lie. The lead in my gut disappeared.

“Yes. At least maybe.” I turned my head away. “It’ll take time… Lacey. But this helps.”

A hand pulled my chin back. I looked into the eyes of the woman next to me.

“Now hear me as Reece. Your girlfriend. Your partner in crime. I will always be here for you. I will always be here to listen to you. Do you believe me?”

I looked into Reece’s eyes, and I could somehow see the brown behind the blue, the gold flecks for now invisible, but there.

“I… yes. I do believe you.”

Reece smiled at me, and in an instant everything was light again. Weight receded. I felt the grin coming back to my face, and playfully slapped her ass. Reece yelped. “You bitch.”

“Hey, I didn’t slap your ass! I slapped Lacey’s ass. It’s different, see?”

She rolled her eyes, and everything solidified again. Lacey sneered, wriggling into my embrace, and ran an unimpressed hand over my bare flank. She spoke in a high, derisive tone. “Fuck that. Or rather, fuck me.”

And I did.