Still Seated

This is the opening of a book I’m writing.
One that’s different from anything I’ve written before.

What follows is the opening scene.

Read it slowly.

There are moments in life that neither ask nor tell.
Some moments devour—
indifferent to consent.

They take—
what cannot be recovered.

I didn’t know that then.
I was counting down, nearly done, already out the door, thinking this era would fade into another.
Still—I hadn’t gone.

His hands, softly interlaced in front of him, palm heels touching, almost the shape of a prayer—
yet with the fingers folded over, tracing down the outsides, gently wiggling.
His hands — long, the skin between translucent and luminescent — always say something.
Together. Gentle.

“Go easy on yourself, Love.”

His smile comes through the loveliness of his accent. Greta’s face softens as his ease settles over her. Her shoulders slide back.

Now his face softens and widens too. I look back to Greta, sitting on cushions on the floor like the rest of us.

The uprightness of her posture — like a string pulls her sternum toward him up on the stage, in his wide chair — fades back. Her height lessens as her back rounds again.

It’s the last day. The room hums with that last-chance pressure — ask now or go home unchanged. Miss the shift only he can deliver. Hands rise faster than they have all ten days.

As usual, he scans the room from the stage—

Where’s the energy? What wants to happen?

These questions are the way the choosing happens.

He always says, “It’s not me. I’m not doing the choosing. Something tells me.”

I do not raise mine. It’s not that I’m hiding or don’t want to grow. He’s soured on me. A steady swing from green, alkaline, sunshine love to something acidic and absent. Disappointed.

When my mother’s death had brought me out of the Byron Bay bubble, and caused me to miss the first part of the tour, I’d expected at least a flicker of sympathy from him. He offered none. That surprised me. And it hurt.

Once it had felt like pure love from Simon. There was never a time that I didn’t feel nervous, somehow wrong. Yet, being with him in Byron. Alone together in his office or kitchen, it was something like intimacy.

Why deepen my descent now?

His sky-blue eyes widen from Greta, then settle into their usual room-scan — half receiving the field, half transmitting into it.

Beyond the glass on the mountain side of the room arid air picks up specks of beige earth and spins them before dropping them again.

Then he does what he never does. His eyes narrow into a rare ferocity and bore into me — even though I haven’t raised my hand.

“Your compulsive use of women to feed your fragile ego is disgusting.”

Hands drop. Side conversations fall silent.

People look around — alert, cautious. No one wants to intrude on this moment.

A few are not yet sure who he’s speaking to.

Heat rises through my chest. He hasn’t said my name, nothing that truly identifies me. Even if others haven’t got it, there’s no point in me dancing around it.

I know it’s me. Still, nothing comes to say back.

He waits a beat.

“Worse. You call it love.”

He turns aside slightly, as if about to spit.

“Love-making. It’s pure, pathetic manipulation.”

My unblinking eyes stay with his, locked to him with a steadiness that pulls the whole room still. I don’t shrink. Don’t defend.

He raises one eyebrow, one half of his face surprise, with a ghost of the old warmth; the other screwed down into scorn.

“Nothing to say? That’s rare.”

The lilt of his British accent is still lovely, his sarcasm edged with a humor I might have laughed at in any other moment.

My breath stays steady, rhythmic, bracing me against the fire pouring off him. The heat drops down through me, into my folded legs.

What can I say to that?

No defense comes. Still, his energy surges through me. I sit taller.

“C’mon. Something clever. Something guarded.”

His eyebrow drops, his face settling into an eerie symmetry.

His head moves in a slow, side-to-side oscillation, disappointment passing over me like a verdict. The corners of his lips descend, and the bottom drops out of me.

The room, the 150 breathless onlookers, fades into half-light. The beam between Simon and me brightens.

“No. There is nothing for you to say. Maybe for once you’re ready to admit it, to see your sycophantic nastiness as the hate that it really is.”

I hear the straw-sucking sounds of people inhaling.

“Misogyny doesn’t even do it justice.”

For the many who don’t speak English well, the words are only partially decipherable. Everyone knows they’re for me.

And even though I know what they mean, they fly over me as his sword plunges into my flesh.

I breathe, and out of nowhere sit taller again. Heat.

“I see.”

I don’t know what I mean, only that it rises out of the buzz running through me — something in me pushing back. I do see, at least enough to meet him.

I won’t look away.

“Do you?”

He lifts his bony left arm as if directing some invisible force at the back of the room.

Then the right one chops toward me, as if it’s discharging the words rather than his mouth.

“Because if you did, you’d probably never touch another woman again.”

The stillness of the room breaks only with Mara’s shaking head, the rust of her hair swaying behind it like a slow, drifting tail. Disgust — another nail in the coffin.

Simon doesn’t turn his head, doesn’t acknowledge her movement. The silence is excruciating.

“But predators don’t usually stop to see what they’ve done.”

He looks around the room now—my eyes don’t flinch from his face. I am aware that other faces move back and forth between Simon and me. Like an accident beside the road, they will look away — embarrassed — if I turn toward them.

My breath stays even, feeding the fire rising in me. I won’t submit.

He returns to me.

“I think we’re done.”

Something shifts — and though I’m on the floor and he on the throne, for the first time I am not afraid of him.

“Yes.”

Instinct answers for me before I can think.

He doesn’t look away though. The silence stirs questions in me.

Done with this moment?
Done forever?

My gut answers. But to which?

He leans forward now, gripping both hands on the arms of the chair.

“If you really let this in, you’d go crazy. You wouldn’t be able to function in the world. They’d lock you up.”

Half sneer, half smile — showing how dangerous his words are, and how little it matters to him.

I wait. Not to see if he’s done. Not out of deference.
Then the response comes out of me, from somewhere other than my mind.

“I will never let that happen to me again.”

As I stare at him, he sits back — as sitting upright is no longer worth the effort, not for me.

Now: soft chair, soft belly, the rest of the room still faded in shadow.
They are silent.
Like a crowd at the Colosseum, watching the spectacle—one gladiator will die.

“No, you are way too controlled for that.”

A parting parry.
A final jab.
His house.
His rules.
The final word.

He turns, the next scan already underway.
Like the way the light used to disappear when we turned off an old TV—pulled into the center of the screen, then gone.

The beam that had been between us dissolves.

An instant inversion.
Spotlight down. Houselights up.
The room opens and I close into myself.
I breathe, keep my back up.

It doesn’t matter that only Simon and I know what I meant.
I will never let that happen to me again.

“Hello Rowan.”

Simon lilts the hello, exaggerating it for his fellow Brit.

Rowan stands, unfurling — all awkward angles and long limbs.

That’s the custom.

Hand up.
If Simon calls on you, stand.

“I just want to say that…”

He looks over at me.
I follow the live current of the group wherever it shifts—
eyes on me, on Rowan, on Simon —
not letting myself fully recede,
swimming hard against the undertow.

Rowan faces toward Simon again.

“I think Daniel’s already doing that. I mean… He—”

I watch the attempt as if from behind glass. Nothing in me moves.

“We’re done there.”
Simon waves a hand, not at me but past me — dismissal, nothing more. He doesn’t look at me.

I don’t yet know we’re not done — and I doubt he does either.

Simon’s eyes scan the crowd.
“Who else?”

Rowan looks back toward me as he sits.
The courage to counter Simon — laudable, even if the outcome was always doomed.

I look at him, expressionless, still too stunned to even know if I appreciate what he did.

Staying present had taken so much energy and now the last cords of attention in me are cut,
and while my body still tracks the group, posture erect, face aimed at the speaker—
I am gone.