He sighed and flagged down a harried-looking waitress, who tucked her hair behind her ear and dug her notepad out of her apron pocket as she approached.
“What can I get you?” she asked quickly, giving him a perfunctory closed-mouth smile before readying her pen.
“May I have the full brekkie, with brown toast and extra mushrooms? And a skim cappuccino with one sugar. Please.” The waitress nodded, then hustled away to put his order in with the kitchen, and his stomach grumbled impatiently. Sure, he’d miss being able to get exquisite French pastry at a moment’s notice, but as he’d told Delphine many times, Parisians, for all their fine cuisine, still hadn’t mastered the art of the full hot breakfast.
Delphine. He drummed his fingers on the table and tried not to think about her. The woman who had loved him until he left the company and they stopped having work in common. Who had barely mustered interest in his new career, if he could call it that. Who had told him that no, she didn’t want to go with him on this trip because actually, she didn’t want to go anywhere with him, ever again.
And so he’d come home alone, and on a one-way ticket. What was left for him in Paris, anyway? Most of their friends were still dancing, so Delphine had kept them in the split. Simply buying a bunch of cameras and calling himself a photographer hadn’t made it so, and no one in Paris had been interested in yet more pictures of dancers. His dreams of being a digital Degas hadn’t panned out. And now here he was: thirty-two but retired, no longer a dancer but not a photographer, no longer totally Australian but definitely not French, no longer in love but not over Delphine. He wasn’t anything. He was just … floundering.
The waitress returned with a large cup of coffee on a saucer, and Nick gave her a grateful smile. She did a quick double take, and then glanced down at the suitcase tucked behind his chair.
“Where are you visiting from?” she asked. A more complicated question than she realized.
“Euh, Paris, I guess,” he said. Her eyes lit up.
“Oh gosh, I want to go there soooo badly. How long are you staying in Sydney?” Also a complicated question. The way she asked it, he could tell she hadn’t pegged him for a local. Which, he supposed, he wasn’t anymore. He picked up his spoon and poked it into the foam to buy some time while he considered his answer.
“I’m not sure, really. A few weeks, at least, and then …” he trailed off. And then what? For the first time in his life, he had no plan, no goal, no project. He’d spent his entire childhood trying to become a professional dancer, then his entire young adulthood trying tobea professional dancer. But since he’d retired, he had the distinct impression that he’d simply walked off a cliff and had spent the last eighteen months in an endless, scrambling free fall.
He said none of this to the waitress, who was watching him expectantly, waiting for him to finish his sentence. He forced what he hoped looked like a carefree smile.
“And then we’ll see where the wind takes me,” he said. She nodded, looking satisfied.What utter shit, he thought. He’d never once gone where the wind had taken him, and he had no idea how to do that. He’d always had a plan. Had always known who he was and what he wanted. And now he was just drifting, aimless and feeling empty.
“What are you going to do while you’re here? See the sights? The Bridge, the Opera House?”
Nick chuckled and took a sip of his coffee. He’d seen the sights. He’d spent his teenage years in a dormitory not far from the Harbour Bridge, and done his graduation performance on the big stage at the Opera House. But there was no need to tell her that. He nodded, pretending to consider the idea.
“I might do. They’re great to photograph.” Then he straightened a little in his chair and met her gaze. “I’m a photographer,” he said, feigning a certainty he didn’t feel. What did a successful photographer sound like?
“Oh, very cool,” she replied, tucking her hair behind her ear again and glancing over her shoulder.
“Don’t let me keep you,” he said quickly.
“Yeah, sorry,” she replied, with an apologetic smile. “It’s peak hour. But I’ll be back soon with your breakfast, Mr. Photographer.”
Mr. Photographer.Nick shook his head as she walked away. God, he was full of it.
Carly stalked along the baking sidewalk, tugging her suitcase over the uneven pavement. A familiar feeling of reproach crawled between her ribs and mingled with her hunger to make her stomach ache. Nick Jacobs’s low, almost pleading voice echoed in her head, matching her pounding pulse.I just needed something to identify it for the airline. He’d looked sincere when he’d said it, but then, he’d also looked sincere when he’d dressed her down and snatched his bag from her hand. Still, if she had a nickel for every time she’d flown off the handle like that, only to spiral into guilt and self-reproach mere minutes later … Well, she’d have made ten cents today. And she’d never have to take another dime of her parents’ money. She’d also spend way less of her life apologizing for her behavior.
She knew there was no excuse for it. She wasn’t a child, and there hadn’t really been an excuse for it even when she was. But it never made a difference to tell herself that in the moment, when her insides felt alight with anger and she knew the only thing that would put out the fire was to unload on the nearest available target. It was such a cliché, the hot-tempered redhead. And if there was one thing Carly hated it was—okay, there were lots of things Carly hated. But one of them was confirming anyone’s stereotypes. She spent so much of her professional life quietly obeying instructions, and it felt good to open her mouth and talk back in her personal life. Or shout back. But once she’d done that, she’d be left smoldering and regretful. Even if, as in the case of Nick Smugface Jacobs, they totally deserved it.
She was smoldering now as she made her way from the hotel back to her apartment, sweating and squinting against the sun. As she darted across the street, she tried not to think about the insults she’d thrown at him or the mortifying things she’d revealed about herself. Even by her standards, that little rant was extreme. Carly Montgomery wasn’t known for her subtlety or her self-control, but she’d never descended to yelling at a stranger about her pelvic floor before. She’d never even told Heather about her pelvic floor issues, and Heather had been her best friend for two decades.
But he’d found the dilators. The stupid, sterile, hideous dilators that she’d brought with her because her physical therapist said she had to work with them every day if she wanted to see results.
And she did. She wanted, more than almost anything, to fix her stupid, broken vagina.
For as long as Carly could remember, inserting anything into her vagina—tampons, specula, and definitely penises—had been agonizingly painful. Sometimes, it was simply impossible. It took nerves of steel to wear a pad under a white leotard and pink tights, but it was that or skip multiple ballet classes every month when she was a teenager, because no matter how many times she tried, no matter how many different sizes or applicators or angles or internet-recommended tricks she used, she simply could not get a tampon more than half an inch inside her. She’d spent hours locked in the bathroom of her childhood home, pressing the tip of the tampon against what felt like a brick wall of muscle. Her body just refused. It closed up, like there was no opening there at all.
And when insertion was possible, it was painful as fuck, even for someone with the kind of pain tolerance you needed to be a ballet dancer. The first time a boy had tried to put his fingers inside her, when she was fifteen, she’d wondered why his fingernails felt so sharp, and why they seemed to have battery acid all over them. When she’d winced and squirmed her pelvis away, he barely seemed to notice her discomfort; he’d just kept pumping his fingers into her as if touching her cervix would dispense a cash prize.
It had been the same story when she’d had sex for the first time, with a different boy. He’d slid his condom-clad penis into her, and she would have sworn the lube was made of fire. After a few minutes that felt like hours, he finally came, and her eyes burned with unshed tears. Her jaw hurt from clenching through the pain. Three weeks later, he’d broken up with her; they’d dated for almost a year before sleeping together, but sex with her hadn’t been worth the wait, he said.No shit, she remembered thinking.I’ll gladly wait another sixteen years before I do that again.
The first time she’d gone to the ob-gyn for an annual exam, at seventeen, she’d raised the problem with the doctor. He’d checked her age on the chart and told her, with a disapproving frown, that she was probably too young to be having sex anyway. When she’d raised it with a different doctor a few years later, she’d been told she wasn’t relaxed enough and to drink an extra glass of wine before sex.
She remembered the frustration that had bubbled in her chest as she searched the doctor’s face for more insights. She’d chosen a woman ob-gyn because she hoped that she’d be more sensitive and understanding than the last one.
“Is it really a good idea to impair my judgment and reflexes right before sex?” Carly had asked skeptically. Then the doctor had suggested that her tolerance for pain might just be a little low.
