Most of All You: A Love Story(74)

We’re a team. If you hurt, I hurt.

Racer, the Knight of Sparrows

ELLIE

The weeks passed with no further communication from the police. I had to figure they’d just been doing their jobs by questioning Gabriel, although the way they’d done it, and the fact that they’d brought the Platinum Pearl into it, had shocked and shamed me.

They had looked at Gabriel as if he were some pervert when nothing could be further from the truth. Even I had recognized that he didn’t belong in the club the very second I saw him there.

The detectives had twisted things in a way that made Gabriel unrecognizable, and it filled me with anger and a burning need to defend him. And yet, I had no way to do that.

He was everything to me. If I could have crawled under Gabriel’s skin and lived there, I would have done it happily. I felt most complete when he was buried inside me, his eyes closed and his lips parted in pleasure. No other woman had ever put that look on his face. It was mine and mine alone. The sun rose and set in his eyes, and I was so deeply in love with him that I wanted nothing but to spend every waking second in his arms. It was only there I felt completely at peace.

Gabriel had all the things that brought him peace and joy. His work, his sunrise, his wind, and the raindrops on his window. But I didn’t need any of that. To me he was all of those things—I only needed him and nothing more.

Gabriel asked me to stay with him at his house, and so I did. I guessed I’d have to go back to my own apartment at some point, but our relationship was so new and so wonderful that I didn’t want to spend a second apart from him. Luckily for me, I didn’t have to since we worked together, too.

I brought the phone headset with me as much as possible and answered calls in his studio, where I watched him work. If the noise and distraction disturbed his focus, he never said so. He was working on another piece of architectural carving for a library in Germany, a foliate band, he called it, that would go on the front of the structure. It was gorgeous with intricate vines, flowers, and butterflies. If I squinted, I swore those butterflies would start fluttering their wings and come to life. That’s how real they looked.

At times I was in the office with Dominic, and although I avoided him as much as I could, his demeanor was still cold. Mostly he ignored me, but at times I felt so raw and defenseless. It seemed that my love for Gabriel had somehow revealed the most tender parts of me, and I felt exposed, bared in a way I hadn’t anticipated. Or perhaps I had. Perhaps that’s the reason I’d resisted it so fervently. But now … now I was like the works of art Gabriel created: Every sharp edge had been chipped away so that my insides, the parts that made me vulnerable and sensitive, were on the outside, whereas before they’d been encased in a hard coating of stone. It was an irony that I’d stripped for a living and yet I’d never felt more naked than I did now in a full set of clothes. I felt as if one sharp look would make me bleed.

I’d once been hardened against scorn, but suddenly Dominic’s contempt somehow brought up every hurt I’d ever suffered, and I had no armor to protect myself from the memories. I was completely raw. When Dominic glared at me as if I were trash, the names I’d been called when I was a stripper repeated loudly in my mind—trashy whore, cheap slut, piece of ass. And it went deeper, too, to places my mind hadn’t traveled in years—dark, painful places I didn’t ever want to go again.

And yet, when Dominic turned away rather than look at me, I couldn’t help recalling the way it’d hurt so deeply when I’d see girls at school hand out invitations to all the other girls in class except me, the way I’d tried so hard to brush it off, to pretend it didn’t matter. How I’d secretly longed to be included, to be liked, how it was a deep ache in the pit of my stomach that never seemed to go away.

The memory itself made me feel self-conscious and ugly all over again. It made me remember how I’d wondered if it was my threadbare, too-small clothes that made them ignore me, or if it was the fact that I was self-conscious and shy, unwilling to approach them first. Or worst of all, could they see I was unloved and unwanted by the person who was supposed to love me unconditionally, and so were unwilling to take a chance on someone who couldn’t even win a parent’s approval?

I remembered dreaming that someday someone would invite me to a party, and I’d go and everyone would like me, and I’d suddenly have friends and life wouldn’t feel so painful all the time.

I went through whole scenarios as I walked home from school, my imaginings my only company. And suddenly I worried—if I was ever invited to a party, how would I get the money to buy a gift? I couldn’t show up empty-handed. And so one night when my father was passed out on the couch, I stole five dollars out of his wallet and used the money to buy a small makeup kit at CVS. I would take that makeup kit out and look at it sometimes, and it was like a small fire that I kept burning inside, the symbol of my girlish hope that one day I’d be included. That one day I’d be loved.

And then my father’s friend Cory had done what he did. Afterward, I’d crawled out of bed in searing pain, still smelling like him—like sweat and beer—and I’d taken that makeup kit out of the drawer where I’d kept it. I’d sat down in front of my mirror and opened that kit and smeared the makeup across my face, caked it on my eyelids and cheeks and across my mouth so I looked like the ugly, garish, sorrowful clown I felt like inside. I’d stared at myself that way for a long, long time until I was too tired to stay awake anymore and then I’d gone back to bed, not caring in the least that there was blood smeared on my sheets and makeup smudged across my pillow. And, oh God, the memory tore through me like a red-hot knife. It made me want to scream and fall to my knees. I didn’t want to remember those things. I wanted to push them away, forget all about them, but mostly I just didn’t want to feel the emotions they invoked. I didn’t feel strong enough.