“Excuse me?” Vance says, raising his eyebrows. “You want me to apologize to you?”

“This is a joke, right?” I snip. “You threw me off of you last night like I was some used sex toy you’d had enough of, and stormed out of the room like a fucking baby, but you don’t think you should apologize for that?”

“Of course not, Alina,” he answers vehemently. “The way you acted last night was rude, disrespectful to not only me, but also yourself, and it was unbecoming. I was appalled by your behavior, and it got me thinking. So, after you had the nerve to try to climb into bed with me after all of that, I came in here and laid down on the couch for a while. I woke up early this morning, went back to my apartment, and decided to come back here to see where you might have gotten your little ideas from. So, I picked up this book of yours and started reading. Now I understand why you think it’s okay to act that way.”

I clench my jaw as I look down at the floor. Vance's words dance around my head like little gremlins, making me more and more furious as I replay them, because I know he’s not about to say what it sounds like he’s about to say.

“Vance, what the fuck are you talking about?” I say, growling each word.

“This,” he snaps back, picking up the book and holding it in the air like evidence that he just caught me cheating. “This … filth. This … porn, Alina.”

“You read that book?”

“Well, I didn’t read the entire thing, but I started on the page you had marked off, and I was disgusted by what I saw. This is truly disturbing stuff. The way this therapist takes advantage of his patient and subjects her to this abuse.”

“Abuse?”