He turns back to the laptop, the glow filling his lenses with light. “Mel is a hard person to please.”
“She’s a perfectionist. It helps that she’s right a lot. She doesn’t believe in being dodgy. She doesn’t believe in being afraid.”
“Oh, she has her fears,” he says, tapping at the laptop. It’s irritating, the way he’s so focused on the screen. I want him to look at me. “A person that given to acting out definitely finds fear to be a major motivator.”
I leave the fire and stand beside the desk. “What do you mean by that?”
He shrugs. “I’ve known Mels. I mean, don’t get me wrong, she’s great. Amazing at what she does. But she’s obviously got some issues. That really calculated flaying out of yourself?” He grimaces slightly, then says, bright and brittle, like he wants to change the subject, “It’s complicated.”
I flex my hand again, looking at the knuckles. Christ Almighty, they’re huge. “You say that like you don’t necessarily approve of what we’re doing.”
“No no,” he says. “It’s not that. It’s just— Look. That sort of thing is really powerful. Writing about your own life? I have tried to write about stuff that happened to me. Stuff about Dad. The trial.”
I think about the night we met again, talking in the dark. The way he focused on something in the distance while telling his story. “I didn’t know that.”
“Well, I did. None of it was very good. But I did it enough to make myself sick. I mean, my hair was falling out. I had insane IBS. I put myself through real hell, and it was because I was trying to scene these moments. You relive all this stuff when you do that. It’s kind of like going into the wiring of your brain and twiddling around, you know? And it can change your memories. I mean, I actually changed what I remembered. I understand this urge, Sharon. You set out to eat the bear, but maybe the bear eats you. And I don’t think Mel’s the kind of person who acknowledges risk and acts anyway. I think she’s the kind of person who ignores risk. And that is a dangerous, slightly self-involved thing to do.”
I put my head down. It’s like a needle going through my neck. Like reading that article the Salon guy wrote about Nashville Combat all over again, but with a greater echo. As it turns out, indictments are even more unpleasant when they’re coming from the people you love.
“Hey,” Teddy says, rising, voice filled with remorse. “Wait.” He puts his arms around me. “I think what you guys do is great. I mean, you ever watch Ryan and Tatum with Mel? We’re all fans. Okay? Me too. Especially me. I just want you to be careful, Sharon. If you feel like you’re doing something adverse to yourself in making this, then stop. You’re still recovering. Give yourself a break. Okay?”
“I’m not going to hurt myself.” I say this into his chest, hot and muffled.
“I don’t think you ever would intentionally,” he says. “But you’ve got your blinders on when you work.”
“I’m okay. I really am.”
He pulls me in tighter, cupping my head in his hands. “I worry about you all the time. You know that?” he says. “All the time.”
He lifts me up and puts me on the bed, rolls me on top of him. I feel his beard against my neck. It makes me forget how much my hands throb. He turns to take one of my fingers in his mouth, then spits it out. “Jesus,” he says. “I just got a mouthful of ink.”
I hold my hand up. He’s right. They’re splattered. “Sorry.”
He tugs my underpants down with his thumbs. “I’m glad I met you at thirty-two,” he whispers. “Not twenty-two. I was rotten at this at twenty-two.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“Yes.” They’re down completely and he lifts up my hips and there is the heat and slight sting of entry. We stop talking.
We live to reach the middle of each other, even after an argument. The best is when I straddle his lap, wrapping my arms around his head, his mouth to my ear. It feels impossible to be closer to anyone than I am to him when we do this, when I can clasp him inside me, pulling gently. And it is during lovemaking, sometimes rowdy enough to be called fucking and sometimes gentle enough to be called prayer, that we loosen our holds on ourselves enough to confess that this has never happened before, to either one of us, maybe not to anyone else ever, and we hope against hope, with gritted teeth, that there will be no end.
—
After New Year’s, we finally decide to let the boys see what we’ve made—the first fifteen minutes of whatever this project will be. We’ll buy wine and Chinese food and invite them over to the carriage house for a screening.
We’re anxious—or I’m anxious, anyway. I spend the bigger part of the morning in Mel’s bathroom with the trots. What if Teddy doesn’t like it? What if it upsets him? What if it’s not good enough to convince him that I am above wrongdoing?