“No. I promise you, it’s not. Whatever your mother did or did not do in a hotel in 1987 had absolutely nothing to do with her death. Nothing.”
“How can you be so sure?” I asked, my face growing hot.
“Because I am.”
“But how? Why?”
He took a breath and looked at me as intensely as he ever had. “Let this one go, Lianna. It’s not making you happy, and it can’t be good for your mental health. And it’s all just a dead end. I’ve done this long enough that I can say that with confidence. So, please, let it go.”
The waitress came over at that moment and topped off our coffee. It only took ten or fifteen seconds, but it was enough. Neither of us completely relaxed, but the thunderheads rising up between us dissipated harmlessly. When she left the table and Gavin suggested we go to a movie that Friday night, I agreed. I didn’t stop thinking about whether Warren Ahlberg was really my sister’s father, but I didn’t bring it up for the rest of that breakfast.
And while I might have raised the issue again when I saw Gavin that weekend, I didn’t. I didn’t before the movie because I was just so happy to see him. And the next morning? I didn’t because the night before I had finally met the sexual ogre he could become in his sleep.
And then, far worse, I had found the first of his lies.
“I KNOW YOU. I know what no one else knows about you.
“I know what you did.
“You are a coward. You are despicable. And I loathe you. I know just how much hurt you have left in your wake.”
For a while, that’s how I would begin my day. I would stare at myself in the mirror and say exactly those words aloud.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
I AWOKE IN the night on my side, my back to Gavin, and felt his hands on my rear. He was prying apart my cheeks with his fingers. His police academy T-shirt, which I was sleeping in those days when I was staying at his apartment, was up over my waist. In the haze that brackets sleep, for a moment I assumed he was awake, too. The room was black. I whispered his name and he said nothing. His breathing was a guttural rustle, a moan uninterested in a response, and I understood. This was his other self. His sleeping self.
I said his name again, louder this time, planning to wake him. (Looking back, I find it revealing that I had been so irresponsible about sex. I was on the Pill and so I wasn’t worried about getting pregnant, but it never crossed my mind to insist that Gavin—or any of my lovers while I was in college—wear a condom.) But then I went quiet. I was curious. I was interested to see what he would do, what this would be like. I told myself I had no reason to be frightened because this was Gavin. I could, I decided, just get out of bed if he became too rough and let him finish himself off. Apparently he had done that in the past. He might follow me, he had warned, but he had said he might not. He never knew what would happen, and he certainly couldn’t control it. As a last resort, I guessed I could wake him. At least I thought I could. The issue—and now its reality gave me pause—was that he was stronger than me. He could hold me down. He might, if I couldn’t rouse him, hurt me.
But he didn’t.
He wasn’t gentle, and he was utterly oblivious to me as a person. The novelty of the experience had me moist, and that helped. But he never bothered to roll me over, and he didn’t care at all about my pleasure: he just pounded hard against me, his hands on my hips. (If there was pain, it was on the skin there, the intensity with which he was grasping my flesh; I tried to pull his hands off me, but they were epoxied there. In the morning, I would have two small, circular bruises from two of his fingers.) It wasn’t violent sex, but neither was it tender. It just…was. And then I felt him shudder, and he pulled out and fell back into his pillow. His breathing went silent as his semen rolled down my thigh and onto the sheets.
It was odd: I didn’t feel as if I had been violated. I felt it was more degrading for him than it had been for me. But I did not feel like I had been a partner—even a person—in the enterprise. It was nothing at all like when we would make love when he was awake. I also had a sense that this was, given his history, a rather tame assignation; the next time might be considerably more violent.
I wondered if tomorrow Gavin would know what he had done. And I pondered this: When it happened again—and I knew it would—what could I do to make it work for me?