She raised her eyebrows. “You … Googled it?”
“I searched for ‘broken vagina’ and ‘dilator,’ and a bunch of stuff came up, and I read it.”
Carly burst out laughing. She couldn’t control it. It was half amusement, half discomfort. He Googled it. It was the kind of thing Heather would do, she thought, and then she pictured it, and only laughed harder. The idea of Nick Jacobs sitting down at his computer and typing in the words she’d yelled at him, tapping in “broken vagina” and letting Google take him down the pelvic floor rabbit hole—it was too much for her at this hour. But then she thought about the last time she’d had this conversation with a man, and what a disappointment that had turned out to be, and a laugh died in her mouth.
“Well, I’m glad you finally learned that Google is your friend,” she said, once she’d collected herself. When she’d first tried to find information about painful sex online, when she was still a teenager desperate for answers, there’d been almost nothing out there. What a difference a decade made.
“I learned a lot, though I think my algorithm is a bit messed up now,” he said, smiling. His biceps flexed and relaxed as he crossed his arms over his chest, and she had to will herself to look somewhere else.
“And now you know why this can’t happen again. I can’t have sex with you.”Even though I really, really want to.
He didn’t say anything in response. He just watched her, and she kept talking to fill the silence. Just to put off the moment when he’d do what she needed him to do, which was to concede that she was right. That there was nothing here and couldn’t ever be.
“I made myself a promise that I wouldn’t have sex with anyone until I’m better, and there’s so much other stuff I need to focus on right now, with the wedding and the promotions schedule, and I don’t break my promises,” she went on, reciting the words she’d repeated to herself all night. Hearing the words come out of her mouth without really feeling them on her tongue. “So, yeah. That’s why it can’t happen again.”
He leaned back and nodded slowly, like he understood. His eyes looked a little puffy, she noticed, and she could have sworn he was still wearing the same shirt he’d worn last night. She had a feeling she wasn’t the only one who’d slept poorly.
“Can I ask you a question? You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.”
“Okay,” she said warily.
“According to Google, there are different kinds of, uh, broken vaginas,” he said, and she couldn’t help but smile faintly at the words. “Some people can’t handle being touched at all, some can’t even wear tight clothes. Some can do those things but can’t handle penetration.” He paused and swallowed, and she watched him gather the courage to ask. “Which are you?”
“The third one,” she said. “I wear tight clothes for a living, with no problem, thank God. I can be touched. And it’s not like I can’t handle penetration,” she said.
“The armada.”
“Right,” she said, with a grim smile. “I can handle it. It just hurts like hell when I do it. But I can do it.”
“Spoken like a true dancer.”
She nodded. Angela had said something similar during their first appointment. In a gentle voice, a voice that seemed calculated to probe but not to blame, she’d asked why Carly hadn’t stopped sooner. Hadn’t listened to her pain sooner. Angela knew the answer, of course, but she’d wanted Carly to know it, too: she’d spent her whole life pushing through pain, ignoring discomfort, dancing even when her body begged for rest. Ballet had taught her to keep going even when she knew something wasn’t right.
“And I don’t want to hurt like hell anymore. Every time I do it, it only makes things worse, and I’m working really hard to make things better.” No one could ever accuse her of not trying. She might be a mess and a menace and occasionally a brat, but no one could say Carly Montgomery didn’t try. Just like no one could say she didn’t keep her promises.
“That’s why you have the dilators,” he said. It wasn’t a question.
“Yes,” she sighed, looking over her shoulder at the door to the bedroom, where the white plastic columns were stashed in their ziploc bag in her nightstand. “I guess you read about that, too.”
He made a noise of assent. “How’s it going?”
She looked back at him sharply, remembering the pointed questions that had lain just under Carter’s words when he’d asked something similar.How long are you going to make me wait? How long am I going to have to settle? How long will I have to put up with this?Her answer then hadn’t satisfied Carter, but it was the only answer she had to give Nick now, so she gave it.
“Slowly. I think it’ll be a while before I can have sex again, if … if it ever happens.” It struck her as extremely strange that she was having this conversation with Nick Jacobs, someone she’d known for less than a week, and liked for even less than that.
He was watching her again, his face impassive. Except for his eyes, which were the color of the waves at dawn, and were fixed intensely on her face. She wanted to look away, wanted the conversation to be over, but she made herself hold his gaze.
“So, anyway, that’s that. We have more important things to do, and there’s only two weeks until the wedding, and I have a broken vagina. Plus, I’m a menace andtu veux me tuer.” She said all of this as briskly as she could, squeezing the back of the couch and feeling the stuffing contract beneath her fingers.
“That’s not true,” he said quietly.
“Yes, it is,” she replied firmly, almost relieved that they were back to bickering. “We absolutely have more important things to do, and the wed—”
“The last part’s not true,” he interrupted.
She felt her eyebrows jerk up, and for a moment she couldn’t think of what to say.
“Nick,” she started, but he interrupted her.
