He wouldn’t touch it, so she put it down between them on the plastic table, while the teenaged girl at the counter gawked. “I can’t do this right now,” she told him.
He picked it up and turned it, so that the diamond faced up. “You should grow up.”
“Don’t. Let’s do this nice.” She was crying as she said it, so she shielded her eyes with her hand like a downward salute, to keep him from seeing.
“My dad died two months before we met,” he said. “You know that, right? Or maybe you don’t. You’re so caught up in your own bullshit, maybe you never even put those two things together. Why do you think I was looking for a woman online? Because I’d become the man of the family, and my aunts and uncles and mother planned this life for me that I didn’t want. So I found my own life. I found you. You’re what I want. The whole package, OCD and all.”
“I don’t know what to say,” she said.
“Try.”
She shook her head. “You have to understand. I can’t think straight. I’m not myself right now…. Ever since The Breviary, I think I had some kind of break. There’s this door I’ve been—”
He jerked up from the table and threw down a twenty-dollar bill, then leaned over her, furious. “After all we’ve been through, you pull this. You’re a real chickenshit,” he said. His mouth was close enough to her ear that she could feel his breath. Then he stalked out of the restaurant, while the stink-eyed waitress gawked.
He was waiting in the white Camry when she got there, which probably hadn’t been his chosen method of dramatic exit. They drove back to the hotel. For a moment she thought he planned to call a taxi from the lobby, but he accompanied her to room seven.
She didn’t dare turn on a light, or listen to voice mail, or watch television. Instead, she sat on her bed, and he sat in his. Five feet apart. Silence. The room was so dark that she could see the shine of his eyes.
“I’m sorry about all this,” she whispered.
He sniffled. Crying or congested? She couldn’t see to tell. “No. I shouldn’t have brought it up. You’ve got things on your mind.”
She could hear the frustration in his voice. The urge was strong, but she fought it and closed her eyes. Tried to sleep. Imagined folding the distance between their beds until it disappeared. The sound of his sniffling was terrible. It ached inside her like thawing frostbite.
She got up and felt her way toward him. The frostbite burned. She climbed into his narrow bed. She was crying again. Chest hiccuping with sobs. A nameless pain, upon which the past and future were both heaped. She was the old Audrey, full of hurt and dreams, and the new one, scarred and bitter.
She took his warm hand. Congestion, not tears, after all. He pulled away, but she held his fingers firm and pressed them inside her nightshirt. After a while, he faced her. She closed her eyes, and felt his breath as he brushed the hair from her neck with his lips.
This moment was new and frightening every time. Like a magic trick you have to trust will work, over and over again. The doubts. Why bother? She wasn’t in the mood. Too tired. Too sad. She wasn’t much good at touching, anyway.
She hesitated, and he waited, done now with coaxing her affection. The duvet was prickly green polyester. Dirty, she guessed. She peeled it from the bed and let it drop. Then pulled off her shirt and trousers, too. He did the same. They were both naked on the sheets. He hid himself, sucking in his belly, and she ran her fingers along it, then kissed his skin until he sighed, and let go.
“What do you like?” he always used to ask. She’d never known how to answer that. Instead, she’d pretended, even though it had shamed her to look at him, and with her smile, lie. She’d never come, not even by her own hand. And every time they’d made love, the lie had gotten bigger, and she’d dreaded it more. But the lie was better than the truth: she was dead inside. A ruined person who would never be normal. Would never feel pleasure, or accept love. There is only so much from which any person can ever heal.
Now, he kissed her, and ran his hands along the curves of her body.