“Why not?” she asks. “What happened? Didyoufuck up?”
I look at her eager face, just waiting for the juicy gossip, and I know I can’t tell her. Bianca isn’t the kind of friend you tell your darkest secrets. And even though I didn’t mean to tell King, I did. And somehow, that brought us closer.
Or so I thought.
In truth, it just scared him away. I expected him to think I was tainted, even to pity me so much he couldn’t think of me in a sexy way because every time he tried, he just thought about me being molested and lost his desire. I didn’t think he’d leave me altogether. I also didn’t expect him to still want me. But this morning, he did. I felt it when he kissed me, and god… A little shiver goes through me when I remember it stretching me open last night.
But there’s no way I can tell Bianca any of that.
I can’t tell her that I’ve changed my mind, that being on my own isn’t the best thing in the world. Now that he’s given me the freedom I wanted all along, it only tastes bitter. I told myself that’s what I wanted, to be a young widow, free of all obligations. But maybe all along, it was just an excuse to keep people at bay, to keep anyone from getting close enough to know the truth.
Now that someone knows it… In a way, I was relieved. Last night, when he held me in the bathtub until the water got so cold we were both shivering, when he didn’t try to touch me or press the issue, I felt closer to him than I’ve ever felt with anyone. For a moment, I didn’t have to carry the burden on my own. For a moment, someone knew even the worst parts of me, and he helped me hold up the sky.
Until he fucking left, that is, leaving me to hold it all on my own. Only now do I realize how heavy it was all those years, that I was weakening, slowly crumbling under the weight of it. I was wrong all along. I needed help, not freedom. I needed someone to accept it, to love me anyway.
Now I have everything I’ve ever thought I wanted, everything I fought for. He gave me a way out. I’m standing on the edge of freedom, but it no longer looks like the end goal. It looks terrifying and isolating. That isn’t what I want anymore.
But I only realized it too late.
“Yeah, I fucked up,” I say to Bianca. “We both did. Mostly him.”
I don’t add the rest of it, that I should never have told King, that I should have just sucked it up and lain there and let him fuck me every night for the rest of my life. If I’d never told, never let him take part of that weight off me, I’d never have realized it was crushing me. I’d have gone on forever without thinking about any of it too closely.
But then what?
“What’d you do?” Bianca asks. She looks different, though, not as eager and more… Guarded. And this is why I can’t trust her with anything. I never know when she’s a friend and when she’s going to use something against me.
“We’re just so different,” I say, knowing how lame that sounds when she can see the devastation all around us. This is not from any irreconcilable difference.
“You might have more in common than you know,” Bianca says, picking her way over to the couch.
That makes me snort. “Like what?”
“For starters, you both have a dead sibling,” she says.
Some people might call a comment like that insensitive, but when you’ve grown up the way we have, it’s just the way things are. There’s no point tiptoeing around the truth. We’ve all lost people we care about, and plenty of us have lost family. Which means it’s hardly something to bond with my new husband over.
Still, jealousy rears its ugly head when I think about him telling her something painful from his past. When did they talk about this? And why didn’t he talk to me about it?
“Did he tell you that?” I ask.
Bianca shrugs. “You’d be surprised what you can learn by reading the news.”
I don’t want to be interested, but I’m way past that. I want to know everything about my infuriatingly proud, stubborn husband. I just wish he’d told me. I accused him of not doing his homework, but to be fair, I don’t know anything about him. Not that I can blame him for not telling me something personal. I haven’t exactly made it super easy for him to talk to me. I’ve been too busy being a brat and provoking him for him to trust me with anything. I would have thrown it back in his face.
“How’d she die?” I ask.
“I guess she drowned in a flood,” Bianca says, popping open her compact and examining her lipstick. “They never found her body.”
“When was that?”
“Like, this year,” she says. “I don’t remember when. I can’t believe he hasn’t told you.”
She snaps her mirror closed, looking smug, as if he’s the one who told her and she wasn’t internet stalkingmyhusband. I want to smack the sloppy lip gloss right off her face, but I’m too preoccupied with thoughts of King. I remember how I felt after my brother died. How numb I was, like I was in shock for months. Which means King is still probably in the grieving period, and instead of being there for him, I’ve been a total brat. And not just a brat, but so hateful that he actually thinks I’m capable of arranging a hit on him.
I haven’t cared up until now. I haven’t wanted to talk to him or know him. I didn’t want to risk getting close. But that’s all gone now. There’s no way to go back, now that I’ve spilled my dirty secrets to him. And there’s no way to feel distant from someone after telling them something like that, something you’ve spent your life hiding, and compensating for, and ignoring. Something you’ve never told anyone. I bared my soul, my shame, my brokenness. I don’t even know why I told him. Maybe some part of me recognized a brokenness inside him, and it called out to me that we are the same, that he could be trusted with this, that he could bear it.
But I was wrong, and he’s gone. And it’s time for me to be gone, too.