e.
I snorted a laugh. “So, how fucked up is my butthole, now? On a scale of one to needs surgery?”
He chuckled. “No surgery. Possibly a little blood, but we’ve definitely done worse.”
“True. At least this time you used lube.”
He leaned forward and craned his neck to kiss my cheek. “You like it when I don’t use lube.”
“Yeah,” I admitted. “It hurts more.”
Our postgame wrap up felt so good. I supposed that, at some point, I had stopped believing that we would ever have this relationship, again. That Neil would ever be strong enough. Yet, here we were. And everything seemed right.
He gave my shoulders a final squeeze and said, “Why don’t you go get into a hot shower? I’ll clean up in here before I join you. And I’ll get you something for the pain.”
I slid from the bed. “Yeah, you really whipped the hell out of me.”
“You earned it with your smart mouth,” he reminded me. “Throw me my shirt, if you would.”
I leaned down and scooped up the shirt from the foot of the bed and tossed it to him. He caught it one-handed and shook it out, pulling on one sleeve before I headed toward the bathroom.
I stopped and turned. “I’m glad we’re back.”
He looked up from fastening his buttons. “I’m just glad we’ve been able to put the whole thing behind us.”
It was an innocuous comment, or should have been. But my fragile post-scene emotions seized on it and wouldn’t let it go. What had, just minutes before, felt like closure now felt like a wound ripped open from the inside by an insidious infection caught too late.
“What if I don’t want to put it behind us?”
He lifted his head. “Hmm?”
I’m sure he thought he’d heard me incorrectly. After all, who wouldn’t want to put this entire year so far behind them and never think of it, again? But that would require forgiveness, and mine had suddenly evaporated.
“What if I don’t want to put it behind us?” I repeated, more forcefully. “You know, this whole year has been about you, so far, and how you’re handling things. But maybe I’ve been too busy dealing with your emotions that I haven’t been able to do anything about mine. And you want me to just ‘put the whole thing behind us’? I don’t get a say in it?”
“Of course you do, Sophie. I’m sorry, I never meant to imply—”
“Fuck your ‘sorry’!” I shouted. “You’ve said that so much the word doesn’t even mean anything to me, anymore. I know I’m supposed to forgive everything because you’re sick and you’re grieving. But I’m tired of it!”
He rose and came toward me, like he would embrace me. “You don’t have to forgive everything. What I did to you… I was sick, but I do have to take responsibility for my actions. I learned that in therapy—”
I pushed away from him. “I don’t care what you learned from this experience! I don’t give a shit about your personal growth, so don’t even talk to me about it!”
His brow crumpled in confusion and concern, and I hated him for both. “Sophie, we can talk about this, but you’re having a drop. Let me—”
“No!” I stomped my bare foot on the marble floor. A shock of pain vibrated up my leg. My body had already endured so much tonight, what were a few more endorphins wrung from my brain? “You want to put this all behind us? Why? Because you’re ready to not feel bad about it, anymore? Because you made the choice to come home to us? No! You don’t get to do that! It’s easy for you to put it behind us because you’re the one who fucking walked away!”
He didn’t move, frozen by shock, I assumed, at my sudden outburst. I saw Neil now as I rarely saw him, unsure of himself and out of his depth.
“Why did you want to leave us?” I shouted at him. “Why did you want to leave me?”
“I didn’t want to leave—”
“Yes, you did!” My whole body trembled with anger I’d held back. Because I loved him, because I hadn’t wanted to hurt him, I’d stuffed all of it down. Because I’d thought he deserved my forgiveness.
I jabbed at the air with my finger, when what I really wanted to do was punch him, slap him, hurt him and never stop. “You planned it all! You tried to trick me into believing you were getting better! You had that dinner with us, knowing it was going to be your last. You made love to me, you were going to let me wake up beside your dead body! Admit it!”
He looked down.