The First Taste (Slip of the Tongue #2) - Jessica Hawkins Page 0,84
trying to figure a way—physically and conversationally—out of this. In the end, though, he’s right. Andrew is in dangerous territory, and he doesn’t know it and that’s not fair to him. “When you and Shana were together,” I start, “and one of you didn’t want to have sex—say, maybe, she was tired from being up all night with Bell—how did you handle it?”
He looks over my face. “I don’t understand the question.”
“How did you handle it if you wanted sex and Shana didn’t?”
He’s quiet for a few seconds, probably trying to put himself in that position again. Great. I’m trudging up painful memories for both of us. “I still don’t understand,” he says. “If she didn’t want it, I guess I turned over and fell asleep. Or went to watch TV. Or I went and jerked it in the shower. What are the other options?” His face falls. “I already told you, I never cheated on her. Are you saying Reggie would leave and find it somewhere else?”
“No.” I shift against the back of the tub. Even though the water is cooling down, it seems to be getting warmer. “I mean, eventually he did with Virginia. But a few months before the affair started, we were growing apart. We both worked a lot. I think Reggie felt me slipping away and got more controlling.”
“How?”
“When he wanted sex, he didn’t handle it like . . . a normal person. He would push and push. He’d try to coax or guilt me into it, saying if he’d wanted someone to tell him no, he wouldn’t have bothered getting himself a wife. Basically insinuating that I owed him.”
“You owed him?” Andrew asks, shaking his head in disbelief. “That’s utterly ridiculous.”
“That was when he was sober. When he’d been drinking, he’d call me names, he . . .” These are only things I’ve told my therapist, and hard as it was, hell if it wasn’t a lot easier than laying it out for my new, naked lover who, so far, is too shiny and perfect to hear this kind of thing.
“Keep going,” Andrew says, “otherwise I’ll be forced to fill in the blanks and that won’t be good.”
Part of me wants to include Andrew. As great as Dianne has been at coaching me to get past Reggie’s sexual harassment and emotional abuse, I’ve felt alone a lot of the time, and Andrew—he asks questions. He wants to know. I take a deep breath. “He’d accuse me of getting it somewhere else and call me a whore. Or on the flip side, I was ‘too lazy to even lie there and spread my legs.’ He’d follow me around the apartment, insisting, calling me names. A few times he blacked out and cornered me,” I swallow, glancing around the bathroom, “once in here.”
Andrew’s eyebrows are in the middle of his forehead. All his angles, his jaw, his nose, his shoulders, seem sharper, more alert. “What would he do?” he asks.
“It wasn’t often. He made me touch him until he got hard. A couple times he pinned me to the bed until I gave in. I’d just do it to make him stop.”
“Jesus,” he says. “That’s force.”
“No,” I say. “I mean, yes, my therapist has said the same, but we were married—”
“So? No wonder you don’t like to be restrained.”
I ball my fingers into a fist. Having a hand around my wrist is the simplest way to make me feel helpless. “Actually, I’ve never liked it. This obviously didn’t help, but I’ve refused it with partners I had before him too.”
“And Reggie knew that?”
“Yes.”
He shakes his head. “Have you confronted him about this?”
“No. I’m still working on it with Dianne, and I’m not ready to go there with him. Not sure if I’ll ever be.”
Andrew lets go of my ankle so fast, it’s almost like I’ve burned him. “Jesus Christ, Amelia. Why didn’t you tell me all this before? I wouldn’t have been so overbearing, so dominant. At the hotel. Just now, in your bed.”
“No. You’ve helped me without even realizing it,” I say, shaking my head. “You have no idea how great you’ve been.”
He stubs out the cigar harder than necessary. “I’ll kill him. I’ll really kill him.”
“I didn’t tell you this to make you angry,” I say. Without thinking, I reach out and take his hand, trying to call him back to me. “I want you to understand. Why I sometimes freak out. Why I’m so grateful to you for respecting me.”