“Are you scared?”
“Of having bad sex with you? No. So what if we have bad sex for a few years while we get this all straightened out again.”
“A fewyears?” He tips his head back and groans.
“Well, you promised me eternity, so what’s a thousand days or so?”
He reaches his hand across the console and tucks my hair behind my ear. I pull his hand into my lap. If it were his other hand, I’d spin his wedding band.
“Can I ask…” I glance at him.
“Anything.”
“Okay, so…That night in bed. You laid me down, you were on top of me. We were about to kiss…And then you saw my scar?”
He purses his lips, thinks, and then nods. “I…hadn’t seen it for…well, since you didn’t need the bandages changed anymore. So that was my first time seeing it…you know, as a scar.”
“Oh. Jesus.” Funny thing about brick walls. Sometimes you don’t even realize you’ve been bricking yours into place. “It’s really not bad, you know. As far as scars go.”
I think of Raff’s scar down his arm. Vin’s enormous purple line down his back.
He’s looking like he has an awful lot to say, but he just purses his lips, lets out a deep sigh through his nose. “Okay.”
I decide to veer away from the topic of conversation that clearly pains him the most. “Okay, another question, then. About sex.”
The smile is back in his eyes. “Shoot.”
“So, you don’t want to see my scar when you’re feeling frisky, got it. But…is it…are you also talking about, like, a boner issue?”
He grins at my discomfort. “No. Well, maybe, but I don’t think so. I just mean…Okay…sex for me has always been this clear, calm lake that I can go swim in. I can float around, I can swim, I can…you get it. I just get in the water and play around and…even when I’m all…turned on, my mind is…peaceful. I’m just in a different place. There are no…obstacles.” He points to his head. “But…PTSD has made everything more…prickly? So…now if I want to go to the lake…I have to get through, like, some thornbushes on the way. Worries, stress, annoyances…all these things that just didn’t used to be there.”
I’m gaping at him. “You…you just described howeverythingfeels to me. Like life is just a million miles of thornbushes. Even things I normally love…everythingmakes me so fucking scratched up. I can’t…”
I break off because he’s pulling into his mother’s long, winding driveway. Instead of driving all the way up to her house, though, he idles the car around a curve and I findmyself pulled into the two biggest, strongest arms I’ve ever had the honor of knowing. “I know,” he says low, his nose in my hair.
“But sometimes I can’t tell if life is prickly orI’mprickly. I’m like…I’m like a porcupine who keeps bumping into cactuses. I’m a PTSD porcupine!”
He laughs now. “Yes. Me too.”
“Well, how are two porcupines supposed to make marriage work?”
“I’m pretty sure they manage it in the wild.”
“I love that you think porcupines get married in the wild. New life goal, witness a porcupine wedding.”
And then Vin’s mother comes walking around the curve of the driveway, shading her eyes against the sun. She likely heard us crunch the gravel and then came to investigate why we didn’t pull up to the house. Vin rolls down the windows.
“Hi, Ma.”
She kisses his cheek. “Well, pull on up.”
We do just that and as soon as I step out of the car I’m swarmed by miniature dachshunds by the names of Allen and Rhoda. Vin’s mom adopted them as a pair after visiting them at the shelter for weeks. They were bonded, so the shelter wouldn’t let just one of them go, but Rhoda has diabetes and requires insulin injections, so no one else wanted the burden.
Vin grabs our bags and tiptoes into the house, trying not to step on any tails. “Allen! Dammit!” He stands there, helplessly frozen, while Allen vigorously humps his sneaker. Allen’s had an unrequited crush on Vin for years.
I remove the lovesick pup and pick up Rhoda as well, so she doesn’t feel left out. All of us tromp into the house.
Ramona moved into this tiny little farmhouse nine years ago when she finally got sick of her building in Brooklyn never having hot water in the morning. She wanted to stay in thecity, but anything within her price range was so far out in Brooklyn or Queens that it was literally going to be the same hour-and-forty-five-minute commute to her boys that this beautiful little house is. Besides, she’d always wanted a vegetable garden. How’d she afford it? We have no idea and she’s never told us.
