With a supreme effort I arch my back to peer up into his face, although I can hardly keep my eyes open enough to see. What I do see is a quiet, intent smile, and I know that my swollen eyes are smiling back.
“Hey.” My voice breaks on a croak. Even my vocal cords are mush.
His cheek rests against the back of his hand, pushed between his face and the pillow. “Good morning.”
I groan and burrow underneath the warm, fragrant cover. The night is over. My body doesn’t want the night to be over.
“Can’t get up…fucked me into a pulp.”
His chuckle erupts against me; he seems to be much more awake than I am. Wondering where he gets his energy, I surrender myself to the heaviness that drags at my limbs. Briar Rose. That’s what the Brothers Grimm called the princess in the folk tale who pricked her finger on a spindle and slept for a hundred years until a prince came to kiss her back to life. I could sleep for a hundred years and then some, and a prince and a prick certainly have something to do with it.
“Stay where you are,” he whispers against my ear. “I’ll take the dogs out.”
We spend the day getting to know each other, in bed and out of bed. And in between, we talk. I tell him everything I know about Selena, and he agrees that Hornberger most definitely knew about Selena’s anorexia.
“I told you he enjoys their emotional torment. Go on, off you run!” We are out walking the dogs, and once away from the lakeside path, he takes them off their leashes and they charge into the snowy mush like children. “I found out that Amanda was having an affair one evening when I picked her up at her office. He’d been there, with her, and he knew I’d be there in a few minutes. She was…sucking him off, and he came all over her face, her hair, her blouse. When I turned up, she was in such a state of hysteria that I thought at first she’d been assaulted.”
“But—you said she didn’t give head!”
He shrugs. “Maybe he has a nicer cock than I.”
I look up at him, and I can see that he is flippant rather than hurt.
“She did, eventually, try to explain. I think it’s a combination of factors.” That sounds too coolly analytical even to Giles, and he pulls a face at himself. “She felt bad because she knew that I was disappointed that she didn’t like oral sex, or any kind of sex, really, for most of our marriage. I sound like an obsessive, don’t I? It’s not that. Really, it was more about the way this reflected our whole relationship. Polite. We were always so polite to each other. Friends, at first, but emotionally so cautious, and physically…so wrong for each other. Nick clocked from the start what her weaknesses were, and he liked her to give him quick blowjobs in her office. Just to humiliate her and intensify the disgust she felt for herself. So, to put it another way: a girl with issues about her body, about conforming to expectations, a girl brought up to be hard on herself, will find in Nick the perfect self-harming tool.”
“Are you thinking of Selena or of Amanda?”
“Both.”
I am watching his profile, wondering about the wisdom of getting involved with a man who is still so emotionally involved with his wife. Ex-wife. Perhaps it is a good thing, then, that I am not actually getting involved with Giles.
He glances down at me and smiles.
“You look worried. Don’t be. I’m only trying to explain. I do need it to make some sort of sense, and I’ve never had to explain it to someone I care about.”
That is the closest either of us comes to a declaration. We do not talk about our dead-end situation again. There is nothing more to say. We need to be together, we can’t be together, and that is all.
“But what are we going to do about Selena?” I return to the topic later that day when I am chopping vegetables in Giles’s kitchen. Neither of us was hungry enough for breakfast; I even declined the coffee he offered me because my heart was still racing with the excitement of it all. The excitement of being here.