The First Taste(73)

“Hey,” he says, calling me back to the moment. “Where are you?”

“I’m here,” I say, drawing my knees to my chest. “We should dry off. The water’s getting cold.”

“Oh, no you don’t,” he says, nabbing my ankle again. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“Not nothing. Something. I can tell.”

I sigh. “Really, Andrew. I’m not your girlfriend. You don’t have to do all this with me.”

“Tell me what upset you.”

“For Christ’s sake, I’m not upset. But when you tell me sex is all a man needs to be happy, it doesn’t sit well. I’m still trying to work through my issues with Reggie, so I don’t really think it’s healthy to—”

“Whoa,” he says. “Back up. I didn’t say that’s what I need to be happy. I’m talking about how you trusted me in the bedroom. The other night, in the hotel, when you let me blindfold you? You took care of me by letting me take care of you.”

I shake my head and wave my palms. “Fine. I don’t know. You’re right—let’s drop it.”

“God damn, he did a number on you, didn’t he? What are these issues you mentioned?”

“None, nothing, not a one.” I try to pull my leg back, but he won’t release it.

“If it has to do with sex, I need to know,” he says, and I don’t think I’ve ever heard him so determined. He’s bordering on angry. “You let yourself be vulnerable with me—that’s a lot of responsibility on my shoulders.”

“Okay, it won’t happen again. Promise. Now, can we please—”

“Amelia.” He levels me with a look. “What is it? He made you feel bad about your body? Is that why you have issues with your diet?”

“It’s more . . . complicated than that. And you and I? We don’t do complicated, Andrew.”

“I’m willing to try. I wish you would too.”

I sigh, looking from side to side, trying to figure a way—physically and conversationally—out of this. In the end, though, he’s right. Andrew is in dangerous territory, and he doesn’t know it and that’s not fair to him. “When you and Shana were together,” I start, “and one of you didn’t want to have sex—say, maybe, she was tired from being up all night with Bell—how did you handle it?”

He looks over my face. “I don’t understand the question.”

“How did you handle it if you wanted sex and Shana didn’t?”

He’s quiet for a few seconds, probably trying to put himself in that position again. Great. I’m trudging up painful memories for both of us. “I still don’t understand,” he says. “If she didn’t want it, I guess I turned over and fell asleep. Or went to watch TV. Or I went and jerked it in the shower. What are the other options?” His face falls. “I already told you, I never cheated on her. Are you saying Reggie would leave and find it somewhere else?”

“No.” I shift against the back of the tub. Even though the water is cooling down, it seems to be getting warmer. “I mean, eventually he did with Virginia. But a few months before the affair started, we were growing apart. We both worked a lot. I think Reggie felt me slipping away and got more controlling.”

“How?”

“When he wanted sex, he didn’t handle it like . . . a normal person. He would push and push. He’d try to coax or guilt me into it, saying if he’d wanted someone to tell him no, he wouldn’t have bothered getting himself a wife. Basically insinuating that I owed him.”

“You owed him?” Andrew asks, shaking his head in disbelief. “That’s utterly ridiculous.”

“That was when he was sober. When he’d been drinking, he’d call me names, he . . .” These are only things I’ve told my therapist, and hard as it was, hell if it wasn’t a lot easier than laying it out for my new, naked lover who, so far, is too shiny and perfect to hear this kind of thing.

“Keep going,” Andrew says, “otherwise I’ll be forced to fill in the blanks and that won’t be good.”

Part of me wants to include Andrew. As great as Dianne has been at coaching me to get past Reggie’s sexual harassment and emotional abuse, I’ve felt alone a lot of the time, and Andrew—he asks questions. He wants to know. I take a deep breath. “He’d accuse me of getting it somewhere else and call me a whore. Or on the flip side, I was ‘too lazy to even lie there and spread my legs.’ He’d follow me around the apartment, insisting, calling me names. A few times he blacked out and cornered me,” I swallow, glancing around the bathroom, “once in here.”

Andrew’s eyebrows are in the middle of his forehead. All his angles, his jaw, his nose, his shoulders, seem sharper, more alert. “What would he do?” he asks.

“It wasn’t often. He made me touch him until he got hard. A couple times he pinned me to the bed until I gave in. I’d just do it to make him stop.”

“Jesus,” he says. “That’s force.”

“No,” I say. “I mean, yes, my therapist has said the same, but we were married—”

“So? No wonder you don’t like to be restrained.”