“What face?”
“That scary serious face, like you’re about to tell me you have an STD.”
He opens the shower door, grabs a towel from the bar on the wall, drapes it around me, and starts drying my body. “Nope. Clean as a whistle.”
Enjoying the attention, I pause for a moment of sobriety. “Me, too, in case you were wondering. I suppose we should’ve talked about that before all the, um…”
“Fucking?”
“That would be the word, yes.”
He bends down to dry off my legs as I rest my hands on his shoulders. “That and your chances of getting pregnant with unprotected sex, too.” He straightens and gazes at me. “Also consent and safe words. I don’t normally get so carried away.”
“I’m on the pill…wait. Back up a sec. Safe words?”
“In case I get too rough with you.”
I almost laugh out loud. “There’s no such thing. I love how rough you are.”
He falls still. Gazing at me with unblinking intensity, he says slowly, “I could hurt you, Kayla. Accidentally, I mean. I don’t want that to happen.”
I like that he’s so concerned with my well-being. I also like that he’s taking the time to communicate that. What I don’t like is the sudden and unwelcome thought that maybe he’s hurt someone in the past.
Accidentally or not, it seems as if there might be a story there.
I ask tentatively, “Have you hurt someone before?”
“Yes,” he says instantly. Then he closes his eyes and swallows. “Not from sex, though. And it wasn’t an accident.”
I’m beginning to feel alarmed, but I keep my voice steady. “Then how?”
He opens his eyes. A muscle in his jaw jumps. He inhales a slow breath. “My father used to beat my mother. Badly. He was a raging alcoholic and very violent. He put her in the hospital more than once. It went on for years. I couldn’t do anything about it when I was small, but when I grew up…”
I realize I’m holding my breath. My heartbeat ticks up a few notches. I whisper, “What?”
He looks away. That muscle in his jaw jumps again. When he speaks, his voice comes very low. “I’m afraid if I tell you, I’ll never see you again.”
That rocks me back on my heels for several reasons.
One, because whatever he did, it was obviously bad. And by bad I mean violent. And two, he’s willing to tell me, but he’s afraid of the consequences. He’s scared that I’ll freak out and run out the door.
Which means that three, he’s as into this unexpected situation between us as I am.
I don’t know if there’s a word for this emotion I’m feeling. Maybe because it’s a jumble of so many different things at once. But I do know for certain that whatever it is he did to his father, he did it to protect his mother.
Then I remember what he said to me in the bar.
“I didn’t like my father.”
Didn’t, past tense. Which suggests his father is no longer in the land of the living.
And right then, I discover something about myself I never knew before.
“Hey.”
He glances back at me, his gaze wary and his jaw clenched.
Staring straight into his eyes, I say, “The past is dead. So whatever happened, whatever you’ve done, just know that I’ll never ask you to explain yourself to me. I’ll also never judge you for something you did to keep someone else from getting hurt. No matter how bad that something was. Life is messy, and we all have our reasons for doing what we do. I don’t care about anything you did before we met.”
His lips part. He stares at me in disbelief and something else I can’t identify.
It could be hope.
“But from now on, I do care what you do. If we keep seeing each other, I expect total honesty. Got it?”
Looking stunned, he nods.
“Good. Now dry yourself off, Fight Club, because I’m starving.” I wind my arms around his shoulders, lift up onto my toes, and give him a soft kiss. Against his mouth, I whisper, “Your little bunny worked up an appetite from getting fucked so well by her big bad lion.”
He grabs me and hugs me so hard, I lose my breath. I feel his body tremble against mine, little shivers in his muscles that are in sync with his ragged breathing.
For some strange reason, at that moment the verse Dante sent in his last letter crosses my mind.
But already my desire and my will
were being turned like a wheel, all at one speed, by the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.