The First Taste (Slip of the Tongue 2)

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.”

“You shouldn’t have to be grateful for—for—” He swallows, puts his other hand around mine and brings it to his mouth, kissing my knuckles. He looks up at me but doesn’t speak, just stares, his expression hard. After a few seconds, he presses his forehead to our hands, as if in prayer. “I’m so mad.”

Seeing his struggle makes my throat thick. “I shouldn’t have told you.”

“No. I mean yes, of course you should have. I’m not mad at you; I’m mad at the situation. At him.” He says him like the word itself has wronged him.

“I’m not a victim,” I tell him. “I got out. I’m stronger than him, believe me.”

“How did this . . . why did you marry him?”

“He didn’t act that way most of our relationship. When avec started doing well and I could stand on my own, it drove a wedge between us. That’s when the name-calling started. After he met Virginia, he wanted sex with me less, but when he did and I didn’t, he took it as an insult.”

“You never thought about leaving him?”

“I still loved him. I couldn’t see the big picture. He’d been manipulating me in my business dealings and personal choices for a while without me realizing it, so it almost happened like a shift.” I take my hand back. “When I started therapy after the split, my doctor listened to it all, and she’s been helping me understand how wrong his behavior was.”

“But you’re so strong,” he says. “So independent. It doesn’t make sense.”

“I’m still human. I fell in love.” I pause as we stare at each other. “Stupid, I know.”

He looks me in the eye. “Not stupid.”

“No? Maybe not the first time. But I know better now.”

“So do I.”

I smile timidly at him. “That’s why we’re such a good pair.”

“Yes, that’s why,” he says. “Not because of amazing sex. Or our unintentionally intimate conversations. Not the fact that I care about you.”

He’s gone and done the exact opposite of what he promised, and yet, when he says it, I know I feel the same. I care. He lets the comment hang. Either he’s wishing he hadn’t said it, or he’s letting me adjust to it. I shudder with a mix of excitement and fear.

He misreads my reaction for cold and stands to swipe a towel off the rack. “Come on,” he says, holding a hand out for me.

I take it, letting him help me up. He wraps the towel around my shoulders and rubs them, warming me up. “I mean it,” he says. “I care about you. Since we started this, I’ve wanted you to be happy, but now—now, I want you to be safe, and that comes from a different place.”

I may be able to open up, but telling him how I feel doesn’t come quite as easily. I wipe the leftover bubbles off his chest like steam from a mirror to reveal the tattoos underneath. They’re such an important part of him, like a hidden appendage, but until now, to me they’ve just been ink on skin.

“What do they mean?” I ask.

He looks down at me, as if debating what to share and what to keep private. He takes my wrist and pulls my hand away from his chest.

My heart drops. After everything we’ve just gone through, it feels unfair to be shut out.

But he replaces my hand on his left shoulder, over the first tattoo I noticed, a cluster of rich, purple-blue flowers. They droop lazily onto his upper pec. “Bluebells,” he says. “For Bell. I got them when she was a baby. Shana’s favorite flower.”

They resemble upside down bells, sagging but vibrant, small individually and striking as a bunch. “They’re pretty,” I say, “and also a bit sad.”

He nods. “That was Shana.” He moves my hand down his pec to a skull and crossbones, only the bones are a wrench and a hammer crossed in an “X”. “I drew this in memory of my grandpa, a fix-it guy with a special love for cars. He lived clean for most of his life. He’s my role model, unlike my dad. My dad,” he slides my hand under his arm, over his ribcage, to a script of words I can’t see well enough to read, “is a drunk and a gambler. This says ‘the things I cannot change’.”

“That’s from the Serenity Prayer,” I say, glancing at his half-finished whisky. “Are you an . . . alcoholic?”

“No, but I could’ve been. My grandpa was. He cleaned himself up when my grandma got pregnant. My dad didn’t, though. When I was a teen, my dad drank and picked fights with me. I’d leave the house and meet up with friends to get wasted. But Sadie was always in the back of my mind. I knew, no matter how obliterated I wanted to get, I had to come home for my little sister. I didn’t want to leave her there alone, and she worried about me.”

“She kept you from going over the edge.” I glance at the flowers again. “Like Bell.”

He nods. “When Shana left, I just wanted to numb myself. Not going to lie, it wasn’t easy—raising a child, a girl no less, by myself while my heart was broken. Some nights, it got to be too much. I wanted to say fuck it, drop her off with a sitter, and go on a bender.”

“That’s understandable,” I say. “What matters is that you didn’t.”

“I got ‘the things I cannot change,’” he says, “because life doesn’t always go as planned, and that can be a good thing. There are things I can’t change, and it does me no good to try. I also got it to remind myself of what I avoided and how easy it is to go down that path.” He winks. “Plus, it hurt like a bitch. I made a deal with myself—if I ever get blackout drunk, I have to add a line the next day. Fortunately I don’t plan on it.”

“Aha. Pain therapy.” I smile and glance at the tattoo I’m most curious about—and most hesitant to learn about.

He squeezes my hand and lets go. “I got the rest before Bell. Stupid shit. Things I thought mattered.”

“Even this one?” I go to touch the illustration of an anatomically correct steel heart made of machine parts, like it’s the guts of a clock or car engine. Except that it’s a heart. He stops my hand. I look up at him. “What?”

He shakes his head a little. “I got that when Shana left.”

“So it’s not before Bell.”

“No.”

“What is it?”

“A hard heart. Steel. Can’t be broken.” He releases my hand, kisses my forehead, and gets out of the tub.