Total pages in book: 47
Estimated words: 42790 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 214(@200wpm)___ 171(@250wpm)___ 143(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 42790 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 214(@200wpm)___ 171(@250wpm)___ 143(@300wpm)
I stand over the wreck I’ve made of her in the dark, and the question comes rising up out of the oldest and the ugliest part of me, the part that grew up on the wrong side of every set of tracks there is and never once in its life expected to be the one chosen, and it asks the only thing it has ever truly wanted to know.
What does Barrymore have that I can’t give you?
Chapter Five
Iwake to the feel of my husband’s lips against mine, and in so many ways it’s no different from all the other mornings he’s woken me exactly this way, the slow warm pull of him drawing me up out of sleep before I’ve decided to surface, the mattress dipping under his weight, the dark of the room still complete around us because it’s hours yet before any reasonable person would be awake. But it’s different, and I know it’s different, even half asleep I know it, because this time I know the truth, and the truth is that everything I am to him is a means to an end.
The covers slip away, the cool air of the room moving over my skin and then his warmth replacing it, and my tears come even before his hands do, sliding sideways down into my hair where he won’t see them in the dark. My body betrays me by wanting him exactly as much as it has always wanted him, every bit of it, and that’s the particular cruelty I wasn’t braced for. I’d thought the knowing would armor me. I’d thought a heart broken this thoroughly would simply forget the language, would lie there cold and unmoved and let me keep my dignity. But he has only to touch me and all of me answers him the way it answered on the very first night, when I crossed a vast pale room to him in a borrowed silk nightgown and he curved his hand around the back of my neck and I trembled under it and thought, so this is what it is, then, to belong to someone.
If I touch you, there’s no going back, he told me that night, his voice low in the dark the way it’s low now. I’ll see you as mine.
I believed him. That’s the thing that undoes me now, lying here in the dark six months later, the memory of how completely and how easily I believed him, how I lifted my chin and told him I didn’t like to share either and watched something go soft in that hard handsome face, something I was certain, so certain, that only I would ever get to see.
His mouth moves to my skin and my tears come faster, because he still kisses me the way he kissed me then, like a man who can’t quite help himself, and it used to make me blush down to the roots of my hair, the way he never once bothered to hide how much he wanted me. You’re blushing again, he’d murmur against my cheek in the mornings, pleased with himself, pleased with me, and I’d hide my hot face against his shoulder and feel, for the whole length of a morning, like the single most wanted woman alive in the world. Now the same mouth moves over me in the same dark and the same heat rises up in me to meet it, and all of it only makes my chest ache so badly I can hardly draw breath around it, because I understand at last that the wanting was never the lie. The wanting was the one true thing. It was only everything underneath the wanting that I went and invented for myself.
He takes me the way he has always taken me. Fiercely. Deeply. As though I am a thing he means to keep forever. And I surrender to him the way I have always surrendered, helplessly and completely, a girl whose heart was stolen so early and so thoroughly that she gave up long ago on any hope of getting it back.
He held me through the worst of the nights after Dad, I think, even now, even with him moving over me in the dark. He never once told me to stop. He only stayed. I’d built so much on that staying. I’d taken it as proof of the very thing I wanted most in the world to be true, that a man does not hold a woman through the ugliest, graceless hours of her grief, night after night, unless some part of him has decided she is his to keep safe. I was wrong about what it proved. I am learning, this week, that I was wrong about very nearly everything. But my body has never learned how to be wrong about him, and it gives itself over to him the same as it ever did, and I let it, I let it, because these stolen ruined minutes in the dark are the only place left in my life where I’m still allowed to pretend.