“Wow.”
“The one at my wrist, the one you noted earlier, it was the first.”
I swallowed and searched for something to say. “It was bad,” I said lamely.
“Very bad,” he whispered. “The kind of bad that divides your life into before and after. The kind that blows you apart into a thousand jagged pieces and you can’t imagine that there will be any way to put yourself together again. So you don’t. You don’t even try, not for a very long time. Instead, you just walk through life a glued together facsimile of a man. All the joy of the world passing through the cracks in your facade like water through a sieve, nothing ever staying, nothing ever filling you up.”
My breath caught in my throat and I felt hot tears prick at the corners of my eyes, threatening to flood my vision.
“I know exactly what you mean,” I whispered, and he crushed me to him.
6
“Is my nose still red?” I asked him. We lay in my bed, my head on his chest, his arms around me, stroking my hair.
I’d made a mess of myself crying all over him in the shower, the recognition of our shared trauma surprising me, overwhelming me. He’d just held me, lifted me in his arms and carried me to my room.
“Let me see.”
I raised my head from his chest and set my chin on my hand.
“A bit,” he said, tapping me lightly on the nose.
“Great.” I rolled my eyes. “That’s a good look.”
“Nonsense, you look adorable. Like the consumptive heroine of a Pre-Raphaelite painting.”
I arched an eyebrow at him. “Seriously?”
“What? That’s a compliment. I love classical babes.”
“So I assume you had Rossetti posters on your teenage walls and not Farrah Fawcett?”
“Farrah Fawcett? How old do you think I am?”
“I don’t know!” I shrieked as he tickled me, slapping his hands away from my ribs. “From how you talk about Shakespeare I just figured you guys were friends.”
“Oh my God. I’m only thirty-two.”
Duly noted, I thought. Filing the information away for the next time my mother decided to interrogate me.
“How is it that you’re a Scrabble champion?” he asked me as we lay in my bed. “I’ve been thinking about it for days.”
“Oh, I exaggerated that a bit, intimidation tactics.”
“Minx.”
“Hey, Scrabble is cutthroat.” I smiled. “And I did play tournaments, actually, at a retirement home I worked at a few years ago.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, after high school I needed to get out of town.” I laid my head back on his chest and traced small circles on his skin with my fingers, choosing my words carefully. “My, uh….my thing…”
“Your thing,” he echoed. “The thing that happened that created your ‘after’.”
“Yes, that.” I nodded. “My thing happened in high school, and afterwards I just needed to get away, from everything.”
“Everyone?”
“Yeah. So I moved to Maryville and took as many crappy jobs as I could. One of which was the retirement home.”
“And your duties there included playing Scrabble?”
“No.” I laughed. “I used to go in on my one day off and play with the residents. I didn’t have much of a social life. I worked nearly 24/7 for three years until I met Sasha and she offered me the job at Clouds.”
“Hmmm.”
“What is it?” I said, looking up.
“I’m curious what your mother thinks of you working there?”
“She’s fine with it, I guess,” I said, rolling to my back. “I’m sure she’d love it if I were doing something else but she’s very much in favor of women owning their sexuality.”
“That’s consistent with her profession, certainly. But you’re her daughter.”
“Yeah, but that philosophy goes double for me and Charlie, actually.”
“Oh?”
“My dad really humiliated her in the divorce. He told the whole town she was frigid and a shrew.”
He turned towards me and placed his hand on my stomach, stroking my skin, his touch warm and firm, reassuring.
“It was monstrous,” I said, turning to face him, my head propped on my arm, and his hand slid to my hip. “Dad had been cheating on her for years, and his excuse was that she was this cold, sexless, bitch that had deprived him of love and pleasure for the entirety of their marriage.”
“Having met your mother, although granted, under extreme duress…I can’t see how anyone could believe that. She’s charming, warm, and clearly very loving towards her family.”
“She is all those things.” I smiled. “She’s also a firecracker, with a vengeful streak, a long memory and the patience of Job. Dad won the short game but she obliterated him in the long one.”
“How’s that?”