“They can.” In all honesty, I’m not sure how Jonah will react to my friends—particularly Geordie—or how they’ll react to him. But Jonah’s default mode is cool courtesy, which means even in the worst-case scenario, everyone will be able to manage. “Hopefully I’ll spend time with Jonah and Rosalind sometime soon. She seems great.”
Doreen is too smart to pursue the conversational detour I just offered. As ever, she sticks to the point. “So everything is going well.”
“Exactly.”
“Then why did you tell me you were feeling uneasy after that last night in Scotland?”
I sigh. “I shouldn’t even have said anything.”
“Vivienne.” Doreen’s voice is soft. “We’ve made a lot of progress these past couple of years because you’ve learned to be truly open with me. Be a shame to lose that now.”
“We aren’t losing it,” I reply—which is maybe not one hundred percent true, if I can’t open up to her about this. “It’s just that so many things about my relationship with Jonah are difficult to put into words.”
“He’s proved himself trustworthy. You enjoy spending time with him even in a nonsexual way. Jonah Marks has turned out to be an interesting, intelligent person.”
I nod.
“But you feel that he reacted badly on that final night, when you expressed your wishes during sex.”
“I think so. I’m not sure.” I am, though. Something about the silence between us has been—too empty. “He wouldn’t freak out about that, though. Not when we’ve acted out that fantasy in so many other ways.”
“Does that feel like the whole truth to you?”
With a sigh, I admit, “No.”
“What else might be bothering him?” Doreen cocks her head. “I think you have an idea.”
She’s right; I do. Really I’ve sensed this all along. “I guess it could be that—when I admitted what I wanted—he realized that I was fantasizing about it every other time we had sex in Scotland. Pretending he was forcing me, even when he wanted us to make love in a more romantic way.”
She says, “Why do you think that would disturb him, when it’s a fantasy he shares?”
Finally I say what I know Doreen’s been getting at the whole time. “Jonah wouldn’t be angry about the fantasy. He’d be angry about the lie, because that’s how he’d see it. As a lie.”
“How do you see it?”
My rationalizations about “lies of omission” seem flimsy now, and I’m embarrassed to even speak them out loud. “. . . I guess it was a lie.”
How do I even start to tell Jonah the truth? How can I find the right parts to tell?
All I know is that I’m never telling him the whole story. No matter what else might come between Jonah and me, I can’t confess the truth about my rape. I hate even saying the name Anthony.
And then I would have to discover how Jonah reacts when the rape isn’t only a fantasy. When he has to confront the fact that this dark, twisted scenario that gets him off is something that—in the real world—scars people for life.
Once he understood that, either Jonah would come to hate his fantasy, or—or he wouldn’t care.
Either way would mean Jonah and I could never play our games again.
And I can’t give them up.
Twenty-five
Why did it have to be Halloween?
As I sit in front of my mirror, braiding my hair, I tell myself that I’d have been nervous about introducing Jonah to my friends at any time. This is the next big get-together. Ergo this is when I take him to hang out with the whole gang.
But Halloween seems so . . . silly. Like the kind of thing Jonah wouldn’t be into at all.
Then again, I am into Halloween. The crazier the theme party, the more I like it: That’s the New Orleans in me. Might as well find out if Jonah can deal.
Just as I finish buckling my Mary Janes, I hear Jonah’s sedan pull up out front. I open the door to greet him, and when I see him step out of his car, I have to grin. “You wore a costume!”
“That’s the whole idea of a costume party, right?” Jonah pauses, glancing down at the scrubs he’s got on. The pale blue, loose-fitting pants and top don’t disguise the phenomenal physique underneath; he looks just like a doctor. A hot doctor. The surgical cap over his dark hair is the finishing touch.
“Yeah, we’re supposed to dress up. I just didn’t think you’d actually do it.”
“Rosalind borrowed these for me from the hospital supply cabinet.” He says this as if it explains everything. Probably it does. I can hear her telling him you can’t go to a costume party in your everyday clothes without coming across as a total killjoy. “Nothing as elaborate as what you’ve got on.”
“Oh, this old thing.” My getup was sold as “Oktoberfest Fr?ulein”—short poofy skirt, peasant blouse pulled down off the shoulders, high socks, and faux-Teutonic embroidery around the edges. The pigtails aren’t long enough, or blonde, but I left most of my wigs at my parents’ house, so this will have to do.
Jonah laughs. “You wear this often?”
“At least a couple times a year since I bought it my first semester in college.”