“Look at me.”
I met his gaze, and his grip tightened on my legs. “What you did—whatwedid—does not make you a slut.” He took a tentative breath. “Does she call you names often?”
“Only when drinking. She’s more of the passive aggressive, cold-shoulder type when she’s sober.”
“I see,” he said. “That’s not necessarily better.”
I shrugged. “I’m tougher for it.”
“You keep people out. Because of her.”
I looked away, my mind blanking.I keep people out?It wasn’t anything revolutionary, but this conversation was beginning to echo one I’d had with Bill six months earlier. “You think I’m cold.”
“Cold? Baby, no. Why would you say that?” He scooted closer and flattened his hand on my chest. “You’re warm. So warm that you make me warm. I can see you’re hurting from all the things you carry inside.”
I put my hand over his and squeezed. “Bill thinks I’m cold.”
“He doesn’t know you, haven’t I said that over and over? But it doesn’t matter anymore what he thinks. WhatIthink is that you take everything in, and you keep it there. You have to let it out at some point. You can’t shut down with me like you did with him.”
My heart skipped. Most of me wanted that—it was why I was here. But the part of me that feared opening up and letting someone in so deep would always exist. “I won’t hide.”
“Don’t tell me what I want to hear. You will hide, and I will continue to find you. But you have to promise to try. You trust what we’re doing here, don’t you?”
I bit my lip. “It won’t happen overnight, but I’m taking small steps every day. And yes, I’m terrified of this, but there’s no one else I would take those steps for. No one at all.”
He answered with a goofy, almost proud smile. All because I said I’dtryto open up—and with his evident joy as my reward, it made me want to.
I inhaled a steady breath and closed my eyes. “I didn’t really understand how bad things were between my parents until the last year they were together. Dad told me it got harder to hide their big, blowout fights from me.”
David sat back. “You told me she’d been drinking that night.”
I leaned my head back against the tub and kept my eyes shut. “Yes. Dad was really late and he hadn’t called. He’d stopped allowing alcohol in the house, but I guess she had some secret stash because before long, she was drunk.” David took my ankles again and massaged. I gave in to the feeling of his strong hands, of being deliciously shackled by him. “Before I went to bed, she told me that my dad wasn’t home because he was ‘fucking another woman’ and that she was going to leave him in the morning and take me with her.”
“Jesus.”
I lifted my head and looked at him. “I loved my mom, David, butshewas cold. To me and to my dad. I never felt like she really wanted me around. I heard her say once that he loved me too much and that I was spoiled because of it.”
“She called you spoiled earlier.”
I nodded. “Bill thinks I am, too. Because my dad—he’s a tough guy, but he constantly reminded me that I was his little girl, and he’d take care of me no matter what. That I was safe with him.”
“As he should’ve,” David said with a frown. “You’re not spoiled. Not yet, anyway. I plan to remedy that.”
I playfully rolled my eyes, knowing he meant it.
David sat forward and stretched for a kiss. “Keep going,” he said.
As he started to pull back, I grasped his arm. “Don’t leave,” I whispered.
He opened his arms, so I turned around and settled my weight against his chest. “I was terrified by what my mom had told me and couldn’t sleep,” I said. “I didn’t want to leave my dad. I mean, it was the alcohol talking—she never would’ve gone through with ending their marriage, but I didn’t know that at the time.”
David sifted my hair through his fingers. “Did he come home?”
I nodded. “They had a huge fight in the middle of the night. I was so scared. I hid in the next room and watched. My mom was yelling about perfume and sex and lying, and things got very surreal. I can’t remember much more than that. She pulled the knife. My instincts kicked in, and I ran in the middle. She lunged. She stabbed me in the side by accident. There was screaming, the sound of the knife hitting the floor . . . I had this long hair, down to my waist—it was tangled and almost black with blood. That’s the last thing I remember thinking before I passed out, that I needed to wash the blood out of my hair. I woke up in the hospital. My dad cried and apologized—that was the most painful part, watching him blame himself. He promised I’d never see the inside of that house again because he was divorcing her.”
David’s fingers paused in my hair, but then continued threading after a moment. “He sounds like a smart man.”
“I had just started middle school,” I said. “Before that,divorcewas just a word I’d heard because of Gretchen’s parents. Still, I didn’t really grasp the concept. I asked the nurse for a dictionary, and when I was alone, I looked it up to make sure I understood it correctly. In the definition, the word I could never get out of my head wasdissolve. Nothing had dissolved. It’d broken in half, suddenly and without warning.”
