"Is it that bad?" he asked. "AmIthat bad?"
I dropped my forehead to his sternum. I needed to shake off the oppressive weight of this moment. It was swelling inside me, choking me. "I am enough of a mess on my own. I can't add another ounce to it."
"Don't do that," he rumbled. "Tell me I'm a condescending asshole, tell me I'm nothing more than the guy you hate-fuck on Thursdays. Hell, just tell me I'm an ugly son of a bitch. But don't you dare tell me I'm going to screw up your life, Sara."
I lifted my shoulders as I glanced around. "I have one question for you."
He sifted his hands through my hair. "You know you can ask me anything. No need to dick around about it."
"When everything happened in the ER, and the two of us were hustled out of there and upstairs to the Chief's office while we were covered in glass and blood, he called you in first. What did you say? How did you explain what'd happened?"
He stared at me, the corners of his eyes crinkled and his scowl soft enough to touch. "I said it was an accident. I said we'd had a strongly worded discussion about a case and the rest of it was a million-in-one shot."
I bobbed my head because I'd figured that much. He wouldn't have complied with the group therapy if he'd blamed me for the entirety of the incident. "What was theoutcomeof that conversation?"
"Same as you," he said with a heaving eye roll. "Eight weeks of counseling and an emphatic request to not create more problems."
"Except it wasn't the same," I said. "There's a formal reprimand in my personnel file and I got a lecture from the Chief that included the word 'tantrum' and a detailed reference to my father and all ofhisprofessionalism. Apparently there was some expectation of apples and their short fall from the tree."
"That's bullshit," he said. "But you know it's institutional bullshit, not bullshit I've caused. You know the difference and I'm not going to let you pretend otherwise."
"These two months have been difficult for me. This has been stressful, Sebastian. I told you before, you have all the power. I have a formal reprimand and a reminder to play nice. So, when you ask me if it's been that bad? Yes. This has been bad for me. Have I discovered that, under all your growls and scowls, under your arrogance and contempt for the entire world, you are not the miserable asshole you want everyone to believe you are? Also yes. Yeah," I added when he looked out at the ocean, "you're not the only one who knows how to hide."
A moment passed when it seemed the only next step would be wrestling each other into the water, but then Sebastian let out an aggrieved sigh, saying, "I don't want to go home to screaming at each other outside your door and—"
"Be real. You love screaming at me outside my door. That has a pretty high rate of positive return for you."
The stare he gave me said he didn't appreciate my attempt at humor. "I don't want to go back to fucking and fighting only to go home alone afterward. Fuck, Ireallydon't want to go back to watching a visiting professor hit on you and—"
"If you think I am going to another one of those dinner parties, you're insane," I muttered.
"—and not have the right to make it clear to everyone that you're my screech owl."
I shook my head. "Is that supposed to be a term of endearment?"
"I don't want to walk down the hall and have to pretend I don't know you in a way no one else does. Do you hear me right now? Because I'm not promising I'll never fight with you again—god, that's out of the question—but I'm saying it doesn't have to be the way it was. We can start over—or start where we are right now. We can start wherever you want, but I need you to want it too."
I was so certain that I knew myself. That I knew my mess, my perfectionism, my savagery. I knew what I wanted, what I needed, and what I believed.
I wassocertain.
Until this man with his dark eyes and dark moods showed up and sent my perfect little stack of index cards flying. Every last one of them, flying. It didn't matter to him whether they were color-coded and alphabetized, whether some were creased and dog-eared while others were taped together. He'd scooped them back up and he'd taken good care of those cards, but his handling meant they'd never be quite the same.
And I was so very certain that there was something dangerous and destabilizing about his card-throwing entrance into my life that I'd never considered the possibility that I'd choose to keep him around.
All those times we'd hurled insults at each other and fought over little scraps of nothing, I'd coded that as toxic. Filed it into my deck of cards as very bad for me, must avoid.
The sex—which I'd participated in willingly, which had crushed my preexisting notions about pleasure and how I experienced it—had been very good, but also very bad. It existed in the risky borderland where hate wasn't hate and enemies could fight on the same side so long as they both got what they wanted. Very bad. Must avoid.
And all those moments when it wasn't sex or anger or any of the other things we did to each other, those were just the in-betweens. The timeouts. The cease-fires. If we could've been gentle and generous with each other, we would've done that from the start.
Those moments when we'd stopped being awful, they were the exceptions. This was the exception. Nothing we'd found here this week was the rule.
That was how I'd organized these index cards, all without considering whether I had any of it right. Whether I was so busy being a mess, a perfectionist, a savage-hearted bitch that I didn't pick up on Sebastian playing an entirely different game. Whether I was allowed to forfeit my game and choose his instead, I still had to figure out.
"I need to think about that," I said. "I—I just need some time."
He gathered my hair up in his hands, let it fall. Then he did it again. "Time," he repeated.
