like sitting down at a table laid with all his favorite foods but not being able to eat any of them. And he hated himself for it.
Even now, he would not accept that his dyslexia was anything but his own personal failure. No matter how much Angie prodded and even begged, he would not get help. By the time she met him, Will had learned all kinds of tricks to hide his problem and Angie doubted his teachers thought of him as anything but slow. His current job was no different. He used colored folders so that he could find cases by sight, and different types of paper so that he could locate them by texture.
In school, Angie was the one who wrote out his term papers, taking dictation on subjects she had no desire to understand. She was the one who had to hear his tape recorder going night after night as he listened to books, memorizing whole passages so that he could contribute in class the next day. By graduation, he had worked ten times as hard as anyone else and still barely passed by the skin of his teeth. And then he went to college.
Angie had never understood why all of this mattered so much to him. With his height and good looks, Will should have grown into the kind of heartbreaker that Angie was always running off with. Instead, he was quiet, shy, the sort of man who would fall in love with the first girl who let him fuck her. Not that Will was in love with Angie; sure, he loved her, but being in love and loving someone were two different things. He wanted her for her familiarity in the same way that he wanted to go to the same restaurants and buy the same groceries. She was a known quantity, a safe bet. Their relationship was more along the lines of an overprotective brother and sister who happened to be having sex with each other.
Not that sex had ever been an easy thing between them. God knew Will had the equipment—before she had gone on the pill, Angie’s diaphragm had been the size of a dinner plate—but there was a big difference between holding a hammer and knowing how to hit the nail on the head every time. Over the years, they had gone backward from that first awkward time in the upstairs janitor’s closet at the children’s home, so that now when they had sex, it was like a couple of bumbling kids sneaking around behind their parents’ backs instead of two grown adults making love. They always had the lights off and most of their clothes on, as if sex was a shameful secret between them. The three-piece suit Will was wearing this afternoon shouldn’t have surprised her a bit. The more clothes he could wear to cover his body, the happier Will was.
This was some kind of cosmic joke, because Angie knew that underneath his clothes, he had a beautiful body. She could feel the muscles in his back when he tensed, her hands wrapped around the curve of his ass, her feet cupping his strong calves as she pushed up to meet him.
Yet, he was ashamed of his body, as if the scars said something bad about him instead of the people who had caused them. She hadn’t seen him fully undressed in at least twelve years. That was what their last fight was about. They had been in his kitchen just as they were tonight. Will was leaning against the counter and Angie was sitting at the table, yelling at him.
“Do you realize,” she had said, “that I have no idea what you look like?”
He’d tried to act confused. “You see me every day.”
Angie had slammed her fist on the table and he’d jumped. Will hated loud noises, took them as a signal that he was about to get hurt despite the fact that he was more than capable of defending himself.
The clock in the living room had ticked audibly in the ensuing silence. Finally, he’d started nodding, then said, “Okay,” as he unbuttoned his shirt. He was wearing an undershirt, of course, and she had stepped forward, put her hands over his, as he started to pull it off.
It was her. She was the one who couldn’t look at him, who couldn’t bear to see the reminders of what he had been through. His scars were not his own, they were souvenirs from their childhood, symbols of