The Girl Before

He lines up another sketch, squinting at my legs over the point of the pencil. “You seemed to enjoy them at the time,” he says at last.

“In the heat of the moment, perhaps. But afterward…I just wouldn’t want that kind of thing to become a regular feature, that’s all.”

He starts to draw, the pencil sweeping effortlessly across the page. “Why deny yourself something that gives you pleasure?”

“One can dislike something, even if doing it is a momentary indulgence. If it feels wrong. You of all people should understand that.”

The pencil’s soft back-and-forth doesn’t hesitate, like the stylus of a seismograph on a calm, earthquake-free day. “You’re going to have to be more specific, Jane.”

“Rough stuff.”

“Go on.”

“Basically, anything that causes bruising. Force, restraint, skin marks, or hair pulling, ditto. And while we’re on the subject, you might as well know that I don’t like the taste of come and anal is a complete no-no.”

The pencil stops. “Are you making rules for me?”

“I suppose I am, yes. Boundaries, anyway. It goes two ways, of course,” I add. “Anything you want to say to me, feel free.”

“Only that you’re a very remarkable woman.” He returns to his sketch. “Even if one of your ears is a little bigger than the other.”

“Did she go along with it?”

“Who?”

“Emma.” I know this is dangerous territory but I can’t help myself.

“Go along with it,” he repeats. “An interesting way of putting it. But I never discuss my previous partners. You know that.”

“I’ll take that as a yes.”

“You can take it any way you like. So long as you stop tapping your foot like that.”

—

In my art history degree course, we did a module on palimpsests—medieval sheets of parchment so costly that, once the text was no longer needed, the sheets were simply scraped clean and reused, leaving the old writing faintly visible through the new. Later, Renaissance artists used the word pentimenti, repentances, to describe mistakes or alterations that were covered with new paint, only to be revealed years or even centuries later as the paint thinned with time, leaving both the original and the revision on view.

Sometimes I have a sense that this house—our relationship in it, with it, with each other—is like a palimpsest or a pentimento, that however much we try to overpaint Emma Matthews, she keeps tiptoeing back: a faint image, an enigmatic smile, stealing its way into the corner of the frame.

THEN: EMMA

Oh my God.

Smashed glass litters the stone floor. My clothes are ripped. The sheets have come loose from the bed and been kicked into a corner. There’s blood smeared across my thigh, I don’t know where from. In the corner of the room is a broken bottle and some trodden food.

Bits of me hurt that I don’t even want to think about.

We stare at each other like the two survivors of an earthquake or an explosion. Like we’ve been unconscious and we’re just coming around.

His eyes search my face. He looks appalled. He says, Emma, I…His voice trails off. I lost control, he says quietly.

It’s all right, I say. It’s all right. I say it over and over, the way you’d soothe a runaway horse.

We clutch at each other, exhausted, as if the bed is a raft and we’ve found each other in a shipwreck.

It wasn’t only you, I add.

It was such a small thing that prompted this. Since Edward moved in I’ve been trying to keep things tidy, but sometimes that’s meant chucking things in cupboards just a few minutes before he gets back. He opened a drawer and found it full of, I don’t know, dirty plates or something. I told him it didn’t matter, tried to make him come to bed instead of dealing with them.

And then…Bam.

He got angry.

And I got the best sex I’ve ever had.

I crawl into the warm bit between his arm and his chest and repeat the words I screamed at him not so long before.

Yes Daddy. Yes.

8. I try to do things well even when others are not around to notice.

Agree ? ? ? ? ? Disagree

NOW: JANE

“I have to go away.”

“So soon?” It’s only been a few weeks since Edward moved in. We’ve been happy together. I know it in my heart, but I also know it from the metrics, which Edward has been doing along with me. His aggregate is fifty-eight; mine a little higher at sixty-five, but still a big improvement over where I started.