Olga wanted Matteo to say that he would give her another chance regardless of what she said. But he didn’t say that. He just said, “Okay.” Which was terrifying, because it implied that what she was going to say mattered. That he could hear it all and tell her to fuck off. But it also meant that he could hear her out, and if he still loved her, she could trust it. Olga wanted to trust it.
* * *
SO, SHE TOLD him everything, including stuff she thought she’d forgotten and tried to forget. She told him about Spice It Up. She told him how she had been fleecing her clients for years. She told him about her past relationship with Reggie. She told him about her abortion. She told him about her mother’s letters, about the Pa?uelos Negros and the compound, about her brother’s trip to Puerto Rico and their mother rejecting him, her disinterest in Lourdes. She told him about the Selby brothers and how they had been blackmailing Prieto, about the visit from Aunt Karen, about talking to her mother on the phone.
She told him how they had put all their letters in order, how hearing them out loud, in front of other people, in front of each other, had made them feel: like dolls in a rich kid’s toy chest—occasionally played with, largely neglected, sometimes abused. How impossible their mother had made it to tell her who they really were and how she had made it impossible because she found their inner selves insignificant. How much that hurt. How much, she and her brother realized, they had internalized this, becoming these people who needed to be seen in order to exist. How, particularly since Abuelita had died, Olga had been full of rage and haunted by this sense of lack so strong, it blinded her to all the love she still had around her; how it had made it very hard to love herself.
Finally, long after all the Christmas records on the stack had played and they had been listening to the turn of the table for longer than either of them noticed, Olga told him about Dick. All of it. And then she told him about the incident in college. And the very bad online date. And the drunk groomsman who trapped her in a stairwell at work that one time.
And she felt the balloon in her chest—the one that had been taking up so much space, pressing everything out of its proper place, pinching lungs so they could not get enough breath, pushing on her heart so that it altered its natural beating rhythm—deflate. Not completely, but nearly. Each story, each sentence she put out into the world allowed her insides to resume their proper place, reclaiming the space as its own. And when she was done, for a moment, she lay there, appreciating the freedom to fully breathe and relearning the beat of her own heart.
* * *
MATTEO TOOK HER hand and after a long minute finally spoke.
“I don’t know really what the right thing to say is.”
“I don’t know that there is one right thing to say,” she replied.
“Then, I guess I’m afraid to say the one wrong thing. Except, I guess, to say that it’s okay. Not what happened to you, but—fuck, see? So easy to say wrong things.… I guess, thank you. For telling me. For … trusting me.”
Olga let his words wash over her and they felt good. Warm. Yet still not enough. Not obvious enough for her to know she was safe. Not enough to know she was still loved. She was frightened to ask for what she needed now, but felt no other choice.
“And me? Do you still like me? After all of this?”
He rolled towards her now. “What? Girl, are you crazy?” He went to put his arm around her and stopped himself. “Actually. Wait. Is this okay?”
“Co?o.” She laughed. “Don’t be that guy. Don’t make me that girl.”
“What girl?” he asked, confused.
“The girl who is going to break.” She pulled his arm over her. “I’m still me; you just know a lot more now. And you are cool with it,” she said, more to herself than him.
“Well,” he said, “most of it.” Before her heart could fully sink, he quickly began again. “Olga, I want to do this with you. For real. But I told you what I needed, and that was for you to not disappear. I trusted you and you broke that trust, and I know it wasn’t intentional. It’s your very fucked-up coping mechanism. But I think for this to work, we can’t accept that as a way to deal with things. You need a new coping mechanism. And to go to therapy.”
“Matteo, no. I don’t believe in—”
“—hold up, let me talk for a second. We”—he made a point of saying—“need therapy not because you are broken, or because I’m broken, but because it’s a lot to manage. I need to learn to live without … all of this stuff, and you need to learn how to not shut me out when you’re going through shit. Because that hurts, girl. Both of us. Bad.”