No. I can’t say it. I shake my head.
“Recently?” she coaxes.
“This year.”
She stares at the bottle of bubble bath, unblinking, and shivers.
“Help me out?” she asks, rising from the tub.
I wrap her up in a big towel, but the mood has completely changed. “Are you all right?” she asks. “Maybe you should put on some pants and we can talk?”
I have no idea what one thing has to do with the other, but I go to the living room to put my shorts back on and flop on the couch on my back, staring up at the ceiling. Fuck. One good day. That’s all I want. One day without pain eating through my heart. That’s what I want for her too. Why is that so fucking hard?
She sits on the couch next to me, trying to read my face, with the towel still wrapped around her thin frame.
“Can I get you anything?” she asks. “You don’t look too good right now. You’ve gone pale.”
I bark out a short, sarcastic laugh. “A lot of alcohol would be great. Can you lift the ban?”
“Absolutely not.” She lays her hand on my chest, over my heart, and traces my ink. “Do you want to talk about her?”
I throw my arm over my face to cover my eyes. “No. Never.”
Tabitha
After he told me about his daughter last night, he succumbed to what appeared to be an emotional stress migraine and shut down. At least, that’s what I call them when I get them, and I get them a lot. It’s kinda like a brain overload. His grief has also dragged him into a very dark place, and for some reason I just didn’t expect that in him, or for it to affect him so deeply. I felt such an intense need to console him but I was at a loss as to how. I know from experience that you really can’t console a person in grief. Words are useless space fillers. He is so incredibly closed up, and I have no clue how to get in other than to give him what he seems to want so badly; my submission.
I sat with him on the couch for hours with Sterling in my lap, unable to sleep myself but comforted by both of them sleeping near. I quietly left not long after midnight and slept alone in his bed.
He’s not on the couch this morning, though, or anywhere in the house from what I can see, and for a moment I panic, thinking he left me here. But then I see him outside, sitting on the dock, playing a guitar. I slide the glass doors open and walk across the woodsy yard. The music he’s playing is beautiful and haunting, the kind of sound that goes straight through you and awakens your emotions and gives you chills. It’s the kind of music that I would play on repeat over and over and over again until it was impossible to unhear it.
My heart skips a beat as my eyes rove over him from behind. He’s shirtless, his wide, muscled shoulders flexing as he plays the strings, his long black hair hanging down to the middle of his spine, covering the tattoos that adorn his entire back. His head is tilted down slightly as he plays. I sit next to him and just watch him, his fingers gliding effortlessly over the strings, the song drifting over the lake. He is such an enigma, this rock-hard man with the bad attitude creating this ethereal, soul-touching sound.
When he finishes the song, he opens his eyes very slowly and meets mine.
“That was incredible,” I say in awe. “I didn’t know you played the guitar.”