“She seems to think you hate her, by the way,” he said. “She has some weird discomfort with you.”
Discomfort? Was Angeni onto Sasha?
“Oh,” she said. “That is weird.”
“I told her it was weird. I told her you love Freya.”
“I do love Freya.”
After a beat, she said, “Did I do something wrong?”
“Oh, no. No, no, no,” he said. “She’s got these insecurities. You have to understand ... Ang had a rough upbringing. Lots of trauma.”
That word again—trauma. It was everywhere. Everyone and theirtrauma. Everyone and theirchildhood wounds.
“She has some abandonment stuff. She lashes out when she feels threatened. Pushes people away before they can push her away,” he said.
Sasha took mental notes, adding this information to her Angeni Anthology.
“It’s like all these things are tangled together. Freya, the book project, our marriage ... You.”
Sasha was something for them to discuss, something for them to untangle. She was a potential cause of upheaval.
“I think you can take me off that list,” she said. “I’m not trying to cause any trouble.”
“You’re not. I promise. You’ve been a friend to me. Really.”
She found herself staring at his chest, and he must have noticed, because he said, “The tattoos are kind of weird, right?”
“Oh, um, I don’t know. They’re tattoos.”
“I was totally drunk when I got them, don’t even remember getting them. Isn’t that awful?”
“Could have been worse. Could have been a tattoo of Donald Duck. Or Betty Boop.”
He laughed. “True.”
“I like them, actually,” she said.
She did. They suited him. They looked like something he would have chosen sober.
“I’m sure the tattoo artist had deep thoughts behind the designs, but I wouldn’t know.”
“You could assign meanings to them now. Like, retroactive meanings.”
He nodded thoughtfully. “I like that. I never thought of that.”
She studied the swoosh of ink that traversed his pectoral muscles.
“That,” she said, pointing, “could be like an ocean wave.”
He glanced down, chin to chest, then up at her.
“Wow, yeah. An ocean wave. That seems ... right.”
He kept his eyes on her for an awkward length of time, so awkward that she had to look down at sleeping Freya on her chest.
“Anyway,” Sasha said. “You and Angeni don’t have to worry about me. I’m just here minding my own business.”
