longer than two weeks. He was reading some sort of a report and I, in one of his shirts, had plucked a collection of Hemingway’s journalism off of a pile.
It was all so domestic, so peaceful. As if there were nothing between us that might cause strife. And maybe there wasn’t. Maybe it was all some huge misunderstanding. Half-truths and distorted perspectives. Fallible narrators simply trying to do what was best.
Daniel and I had some sort of unspoken agreement to not talk about the past, but if we didn’t, how would I ever reconcile the two versions of him I knew?
“Why did you hate my father?” I asked before I could stop myself and then waited breathlessly for his answer.
He glanced over at me, at my naked legs. I smiled at that despite the seriousness of the conversation.
“Are we going to fight about this?” He placed the stack of papers on the coffee table. Moved over to the side of the sectional on which I was lounging. I stretched out, lifting my legs and he took them into his lap, stroking them.
“I just want to know.” I wanted to figure out how the Daniel I was getting to know could be the same as the mythic one I had resented my whole life. “Is it because your mother turned to him … after … ?”
“My father killed himself.”
I stilled in shock, yet Daniel’s hands still stroked my legs, rhythmically, but almost by rote, as if all of his emotion, personality, had fled his body.
“Kidney failure,” I said, shaking my head. “That’s what the paper said. That’s what my father thinks.”
Daniel’s hands tightened briefly on me before they relaxed and I realized then how tense he was beneath the casual exterior. “Everybody lied because it was an insurance issue and so many people depended on him for their livelihood. I learned by accident much later.”
A ripple of unease ran through me but I forced it away.
“I know,” he said, his voice low, answering my unspoken doubt, my discomfort with the deception.
“So what does that have to do with my father? It was suicide, not murder.” I felt completely insensitive saying that but I needed to understand.
He looked away. “He found out about the affair. “
“I don’t understand,” I pressed. I only knew pieces of the story, and it wasn’t fitting with what he’d said. Daniel’s father had died, and in his wake his mother had turned to my father.
Daniel faced me again, raised an eyebrow silently. I didn’t like what he was suggesting. It made my father seem rather immoral. But then again, there was my mother to testify to Mark Anderson’s womanizing ways.
“On that I’ve evened the score.” His expression was dark, almost frightening. Surely, he meant the past, destroying the company, sending my father to jail, but maybe he meant this. After all, sex as a revenge for sex was a far better analogy than money for sex. I formulated the question in my mind. Imagined asking him to clarify just how he had evened the score. He slid my legs apart, shifting so that he was crawling between them, covering me with his body. The weight was welcome, familiar, and strange all at once. I could feel him hard against me through the thin barrier of his cotton pajamas.
“Are you using me?” I whispered, struggling to stay strong, to remember what I wanted to ask even as his mouth found skin.
“Are you using me?” he returned, his voice a breath against my ear.
I didn’t answer because I didn’t know. And maybe he didn’t know. Maybe we were both simply drawn together because of the past and because of this attraction.
It might be wrong, terribly, terribly wrong, but it felt so ridiculously good.
“I don’t want to talk about the past,” he whispered, which of course made me want to do exactly that.
But the tip of his tongue was trailing across my neck and I was nearly gasping as I prodded. “But the past is everything that’s between us. If you take that away, what’s left?”
“An enjoyment of each other’s company.”
I laughed. More likely, he was simply enjoying the nipple he was now sucking on through the thin barrier of his shirt. “You talk with world leaders and celebrities. I still don’t understand what you can find interesting about anything I have to say.”
“Sex.” There was humor in his tone and I knew he was teasing me, but hearing it said aloud still hurt. I struggled to cover my emotions.
“Which