We Were Never Here(29)

I’d stiffened without realizing it, and Aaron touched my shoulders. “You all right?”

“Sorry—guess I’m a little on edge.”

“What’s up?”

I twisted and dropped onto the couch next to him. I longed to tell him, to open up about what was really wrong…but I couldn’t. “Just kinda in my own head. I swear it has nothing to do with you.”

“Okay. You wanna talk about it?”

Then suddenly I was crying, tears spilling down my cheeks while another part of me broke off and watched in horror: Get it together, Emily, before you scare off your new boyfriend. “I’m sorry!” I blurted out. “I know I’m being weird.”

“No, it’s okay,” he replied, but his eyes registered bewilderment, alarm. He didn’t exactly deny it—I was being a weirdo. He stood and hurried away, and my heart plummeted. Well, that hadn’t taken long.

    “Here!” He reemerged with a box of tissues, and one made a zipping sound as I yanked it from the top. “C’mere. It’s okay.” He sat next to me and wrapped me in his arms. “What’s going on?”

I’d kill to be able to tell him—I’d give anything to just let it out. Instead I reined in the tears and pulled away. “I’m so sorry. It’s not you at all. I should…I should actually start heading home, though.”

“Oh. Okay.” He looked wounded. “Can I walk you to your car?”

“No, thanks so much, but I’m fine.”

But as soon as I got outside and turned the corner, I regretted my decision. The block was empty now, blackness pooling between the sallow streetlights. I was wearing leather boots with stacked heels, which produced a steady clop-clop-clop against the sidewalk. I tromped down the street under a thicket of tree branches, their buds protruding like goosebumps, and made my footfalls as quiet as possible. Literally tiptoeing around, trying to get home unnoticed. Something moved behind me and I gasped, but it was just a shadow in the beam of the nearest streetlight, a woman crossing the road fifteen feet away. Finally I flung myself into my car and locked the door.

On the drive home, winding through deserted city roads, I thought again of my footsteps, the cursed clomp of my boot. The giveaway that kept me from skulking through the night, unbothered. The irony: I’d been thrilled when Aaron noticed me, and when, tonight, he called me his girlfriend. But on the street, I tried to creep past any other male gazes, ghostlike. That’s womanhood, I suppose, both craving and feeling repulsed by attention.

And not just from men. Take my parents—I skimmed past them like floaters in their vision, a refraction of light in the retina. It wasn’t until college that I began to see their disinterest for what it was: emotional neglect. And yet a dude on the street moaning, “Mm, good morning,” as I passed could curdle my stomach, sour my mood. Which was worse, being invisible or being seen? It was exhausting: the ego, the desire to be noticed—even admired—always dilating and contracting, flapping open and crumpling closed, over and over and over.

    What did I look like to Sebastian when he backed me against the wall, pinned me in place? I pulled into my driveway right as the awful highlight reel looped: a crash of fury and adrenaline as Sebastian’s flesh yielded beneath my teeth; Kristen with the floor lamp; Stop. Stop. Stop.

The sudden give when his body left our arms and tumbled toward the blue-gray water below.

God, I was broken. Tears pricked my eyes one more time as I climbed toward my front door.

Poor Aaron.

He had no idea what he’d signed on for.





CHAPTER 13


“I feel like I shouldn’t be here.”

Adrienne Oderdonk, LMFT, was in her late fifties or so, with curly gray hair and kind brown eyes. A nondescript therapist in a nondescript building with pediatricians and realtors and dentists dotting the directory near the front door. She smiled serenely. “And why’s that?”

“I guess I…got the message that therapy is for the weak.” I’d grown up with negative knee-jerk reactions to it, in fact. When, fifteen years ago, a cousin had switched careers to get her PsyD, my dad had sneered at the concept over breakfast.

“Shrinks are charlatans,” he’d said, as if deeming water wet. He shook open his newspaper and turned the page. “Charging two hundred bucks an hour to listen to suckers talk about their feelings. But hey, more power to her.”

“Do you think it’s for the weak?” Adrienne asked.

“Well, I’m here because I think I should be stronger, so I guess that confirms it.” My laugh was like a bark.

“Let’s try to keep ‘should’ out of the conversation.”

“Right.” I took in the spiral-bound notebook on the side table next to her, the clock ticking down our fifty minutes together. The box of tissues on the coffee table, anticipating snot and tears.

Priya had recommended Adrienne, and I’d skulked into her waiting room like a kid sent to the principal’s office. I felt weird about going to a therapist after Kristen warned against it last year, but I wasn’t sure I had a choice: I was almost thirty, in my first grown-up relationship, and on the brink of screwing everything up.

    “When you say you want to be stronger, what do you mean?” she asked.