Confidential(22)

When I came back after doing just a little cleanup, Kate was leaning into Michael and they were speaking in low tones. I sat down, and I would have felt like I was interrupting something personal except that they didn’t let me interrupt; they just kept talking like I wasn’t even there.

It was about Kate’s past drug abuse. There was no way she’d brought that up herself, not in the five minutes I was gone. That meant it had to have been Michael.

When I told Michael her past, I never specifically told him he couldn’t mention it to her. I just assumed he’d know better than to do that with a virtual stranger. This wasn’t a therapy session. This was my family.

She didn’t seem to mind, though. He was telling her, “I get it. That pull. That sense that nothing else could ever be as potent. That everything else is secondary.”

Was he talking about his feelings for me? Or was he speaking from the perspective of addicts he’d worked with in the past? He’d never told me that he had any of his own problems with substance abuse.

“The future is what I care about now,” she said. “I’m not looking to get pulled back into anything.”

“It’s so hard to content yourself with that, though, isn’t it?” I didn’t know what to make of his smile. “That gauzy dream—that’s powerful stuff.”

“No. Prison is powerful stuff.”

“I’ve never been. How long were you in?”

“Three months. It was before my last time in rehab, before I got clean for good.”

“Glad to hear it,” he said, “that kind of confidence you have that it was the last time.”

“She takes her recovery seriously,” I said. That was if you didn’t count the alcohol, and it wasn’t like I’d seen her really drunk since she came out of rehab. “We’re all really proud of her. The whole family.”

Kate gave me a smile that was just a little bit sad. I was lying. I was the one who was proud of her; everyone else in the family was just waiting for the relapse. I’d told her before not to take it personally, that they were all fatalists. That was how they maintained control, so that when anything bad happened, they could say they knew it was coming. Nothing awful is surprising, that was the family motto.

“Are you an addict?” Kate asked Michael.

“Not exactly. A hedonist, maybe, which is a related vulnerability.”

“What does that mean?”

“Pleasure is incredibly important to me.” He shot me a meaningful sideways glance. It kind of turned me on, and it kind of pissed me off. I didn’t want him referencing me like a concubine in front of Kate. Yes, we had incredible sex, but we were a whole lot more than that.

“What about love?” I said.

“You love what brings you the most pleasure. That’s just human nature.”

Love had to be more than that. Otherwise, how did you survive hard times?

Young might have asked me that same thing. Or maybe I gave him the answer: You don’t. I hadn’t.

“There are a lot of ways to get a rush, though,” Michael said. “I’m lucky that way. Like my work, getting to connect with people in really deep ways.”

I could feel Michael’s hand on my knee under the table, reassuring me, but I stood up. “I’ll be right back,” I said. “I left the dishes soaking.”

He must have detected something, because a few minutes later, he was pushing up against me from behind, my pelvis slamming into the cabinets below the kitchen sink. He sucked on my neck in the way that he knew I liked, and without volition, my head toppled backward. I felt fucking helpless. And I never thought I would, but I liked it.

I was no hedonist, but sometimes I thought I might be a masochist.





CHAPTER 16





LUCINDA


I’d seen Dr. Baylor three times this week, all free of charge. He said this was the moment, the open window when we could do the intense work. “You’re ready,” he said. “You’re open.”

He was right. For so long, I’d avoided talking about what happened with Adam, but this really was healing me. It was like having leeches all over my body, sucking out the poison.

It was probably because I was finally calling things by their right names. All this time, I’d been thinking that I was the guilty one, the one doing the seduction, but Dr. Baylor pointed out how well it served Adam to let me believe that. “It didn’t matter if you were the instigator or not. A grown man saying that a fifteen-year-old girl is irresistible?” Dr. Baylor said. “We all have dark impulses. Adults are responsible for resisting them.”

Adam wanted me to think I was the villain when he was an abuser. A predator.

Adam and I had our everything-but-sex affair for three years under my mother’s nose. We stole moments when we could, and because it wasn’t every day, the anticipation was torturously sweet. Adam was practically all I thought about: what it was like to lie in his arms, to whisper in his ear, to roam over his body. Then there was all the strategizing and the choreography to get my mother out of the way and have him all to myself. It eclipsed everything else.

Sometimes I felt like I hated my mother because she’d become this impediment to what I wanted most. The jealousy was so intense, and then afterward, I’d be flooded with shame. She was trying to connect with me, but I couldn’t even look her in the eyes anymore. She asked me what she had done and how we could repair things, but I went monosyllabic. I told her that I just needed my space, and, finally, she had no choice but to give it to me.