I definitely won’t have the chance standing out here, so with a prayer uttered under my breath, I push through the door and sweep my eyes across the room.
My gaze finds Hendrix almost instantly, even though his back is to me as he sits at the bar.
I allow the sigh of relief before heading toward him. He still hasn’t looked behind him when I take the empty seat at his side. I feel how he notices me, how his back straightens and the air crackles like his body has just been turned on.
I also feel his hesitation, the worry that he might be overstepping by being here.
“Should I make it two?” he asks, picking up his near empty glass. He still hasn’t turned toward me.
“No, thank you. I didn’t come here tonight to drink.”
Now he swivels in my direction so we’re face-to-face. “Then why did you come here?”
“I wanted to see you. And so I came to where I thought it was most likely that would happen.” I’ve quoted him, and it hits the mark.
He smiles, slowly but surely. He looks lonely, somehow, under that confidence.
My smile matches his without even trying. We’re caught like that for several seconds, taking each other in, saying nothing. Something hits me like a ton of bricks. The me he’s seen that I wasn’t sure was really me… Could it be that what he saw was us all along? Entwined, making each other better? Finding happy, discovering a new world?
Eventually, I realize I’m the one driving here, and so, gently, I put my foot on the gas. “Could we go somewhere?” I don’t want him to assume I’m up to my old tricks, simply trying to get him in bed, so I add, “To talk?”
I’d offer my flat but I can’t keep towing Freddie into my adult affairs, and besides, this discussion would be much more appropriate in a kid-free zone.
He considers for only a moment, though it’s long enough to have my stomach in knots. “I’m subletting an apartment just a couple of blocks over. If you don’t mind small…”
“Just so long as it’s private.”
“It’s definitely that.”
A few minutes later, we’re outside and now my stomach’s knots can be blamed on what I’m soon to share. I have my talking points memorized. They’re only daunting because they’re words I’ve never said outside a therapist’s office. While they’re always trapped inside me, they feel heavier as we venture from the commercial area of the neighborhood into the residential. I remind myself that bravery isn’t a lack of fear. I remind myself that a loss leaves me the same, whereas the rewards leave me infinitely richer.
Then his hand finds mine swinging at my side, his fingers lace through mine and suddenly the burden lightens, like he’s carrying it with me, and I’m no longer alone.
Romantic notion, I’m aware. It surprises me to find I’m capable of those.
By the time we’re inside his flat and the door is shut behind us, it feels like we’ve had an entire conversation though we’ve spoken very few words at all. There’s much that is said with hands clasped in silence. I gather a lot was said just by my showing up at all.
But now it’s time to transition from that beat to the next, and I’m not as brazen as I was just a few minutes ago. I wipe my sweaty palms against the fabric of my skirt as I spin slowly, taking in his space. It’s an open concept, which suits him, and though I’m sure the furniture came with the rental, there are pieces of him evident everywhere my eyes land. A jacket thrown over the back of the armchair. A tripod set up by the window. The photo printer sitting on the kitchen table.
It’s been so long since I’ve been in a place where someone else lived, as temporary as that living arrangement might be. I’ve forgotten how to settle in.
“Can I get you something?” Hendrix asks, and I sense he’s trying to help with my unease.
“Some water maybe?”
“Bottled or in a glass?”
“Either is fine.”
He’s back too soon, handing me a cold plastic bottle before gesturing at the couch. I take a swallow of the drink and sit down, but as soon as he sits down beside me, I pop back up.
“No, stay there, please,” I say when he seems about to follow. I recap the water and set it on the side table, then reach for the tie on my wrap-dress. I have to do this now. Bravery always seems to cower in the face of comfort.
I can feel a protest pushing at his lips, but before he can voice it, I turn my back toward him and lower my dress so that my shoulder blades are exposed, pulling my hair to one side to be sure the scars aren’t covered.
The sight renders him speechless. I get it. Sometimes when I catch a glimpse of myself in the three-sided mirror in my closet, I’m rendered speechless too.
I twist my head to glance at Hendrix. “Cigarette burns,” I say, in case he can’t identify the source of the constellation of angry red marks across my upper back. “My foster father’s favorite form of punishment. Punishment being an excuse, really, since I rarely caused trouble back then. Making me wrack my brain trying to figure out what I’d done was part of his sadistic game, I think.”
“Camilla...” he says, as he so often does, and I’m desperate to hear what he’ll say next, but more eager to plow through the rest.
So I lower my dress farther, until the material is bowed down to my waist and the dark jagged stripe across my mid-back is exposed. “This one was Frank’s doing. My husband. We’d been on a walk, and I smiled too wide at a man riding by on his bicycle so as soon as he was out of sight, I was pushed into the barbed wire fence at the side of the road. Later, he claimed it was an accident, but even if he hadn’t held me down when he’d pushed...Well, let’s just say there was a pattern of such accidents.
“There’s matching streaks on the back of my thighs too, and here.” I gather my hair high in a fist. “Very slightly you can see the one on the back of my neck.”
Hendrix cranes forward so I perch myself on the ottoman in front of him so he can see better. His fingers whisper across the scars, skin that hasn’t been touched in years. Certainly it’s never been touched this gently.
“It seems stupid, probably, that a woman who was abused as a child would marry someone who treated her the same. Would stay with him.” I swallow back against the shame. Even when I think I’ve overcome it, when I can stand to look at my reflection for days at a time, the feeling returns when I’m being observed. Shame is a weed. It always comes back. “Apparently it’s not uncommon. So stupid, but not alone.”
“I didn’t say you were stupid.” His tone is reverent. His tone is awed.
His tone is not full of pity, and that gives me strength to go on. “I have more, not all of them are as easy to see, and I don’t remember where half of them came from, what injury left what mark.” The breath I take in is shuddering. Bravery is facing fear.
On the exhale, I pull my arms out of the sleeves, letting my dress fall off completely as I pivot toward him. “It’s these, though, that are the most humiliating.”
He takes my outstretched forearm and gazes down at the short lines, stacked evenly on top of each other like rungs of a ladder or like the marks on the wall in Edward’s nursery where Freddie stands once a month to measure his height.
Hendrix traces his finger across one. Now the next one. And the next. At the beginning of each stroke, I try to gather the courage to say the rest. At the end of each stroke, I fail.
“You did these,” he says for me.
I nod, the ball too big in my throat for words. A deep breath, and it breaks up some. “I was at private school by then. Edward had sent me after he was granted guardianship. Someone had left a boxcutter in the common room.”
I hadn’t made them all at once. They’d come little by little over a term, each individual cut slashed into my skin when the complexity of emotion inside me became overbearing. It was that fizzy pop again, the way adrenaline poured out of me with the swipe of the knife. Like a release valve for my feelings. Unlike unwanted emotion, a wound had a start and an end, a finite amount of hurt. It was t
herapeutic. It was art.
But I’ve tried to explain the poetry of my actions before and been frowned at disapprovingly, so I don’t try now. I know it was unhealthy. I know how it would break me to see Fred do it. I also know it was the only way I ever knew to process my pain, from the first burn on. A prescribed timeline. The promise of the end of the suffering. “Don’t ask why,” I say simply. “It’s not something I can put into words.”
“You don’t have to,” he assures me. “They tell a story all on their own.”
I twist so I’m facing him directly, and though it’s been a long time since I’ve sat in only my bra and pants in front of a man, the marks on my forearm are the only part of my skin that feel exposed. “What story do they tell?” I ask, because I’m honestly curious.
While I wait for his answer, I feel the same anxious anticipation that builds when waiting for a critic to explain what meaning they picked up from my latest photography exhibit. What is it he sees? A broken person? A crazy person? A stupid person?
I am all those things, but I’m also so much more.
It turns out, I’m also occasionally a happy person.
He sweeps his whole hand over the length of my arm and back, a soft caress that has my blood humming. He repeats the movement. “That you survived.”
It’s incredible how freeing it is to be authentically seen. I’d forgotten that graffiti is a form of art that often has a powerful message when it’s truly understood.
Chapter Eleven
Composition: The arrangement of the individual elements within a work of art so as to form a unified whole. - MoMA Glossary of Art Terms
I shiver when Hendrix kisses the first of my scars.
He’s not the first lover I’ve had who has seen them. Before Frank, I’d been guarded but less so around the men I was intimate with. I went through several boyfriends, most rebellious troublemaker sorts. Several had been quite extraordinary in bed.
But none of them—not my deceased husband, not the man who wanted to sweep me away to Brazil, not the one who broke into a pawn shop to buy me a diamond ring—not a single one of them ever pressed their lips to the raised welts scattered across my skin.
I’m stunned. And moved.
Goosebumps sprout along the path he makes. By the time he’s kissed every mark on my forearm, tears are rolling down my cheeks.
He moves to my back where he lovingly kisses the cigarette burns and the barbed wire wounds and an unremembered mark he finds along my ribs.
This last one tickles, and I giggle.
Imagine me, giggling over this.
I’m still grinning when he gets up from the sofa and kneels in front of me. We lean into each other at the same time, our mouths meeting like old friends.
“You’re beautiful,” he says against my lips. “Every single inch of you.”
I roll my eyes and kiss him again, a little less playfully. A little more greedily. If I am allowing myself to enjoy my body, I want to enjoy every sensation it’s capable of immediately.
Hendrix doesn’t seem quite as eager to speed things up as I am. “I want to kiss every place on your body you’ve been hurt. I want to kiss those places so many times that you remember them for that instead of anything before.”
And I’m starting to remember another thing about bubbles.
He leaves my mouth to kiss up my arm again.
“When I was caught out about those—foolishly, I didn’t think about the fact that the next term I’d have to wear a polo shirt for PE—I was assigned a counselor and told very strictly to stop with the self-harm.” I have a reason to bring this up now. A fun reason. “Of course I pretended to comply. Really, I just started hiding where I cut.”
Hendrix sits up, alert. He understands where I’m going with this. “Where are they?”
“My inner thighs.” Heat rushes to my cheeks, knowing what will come next.
I’m already wet from the kissing. The rasp in his “Show me” nearly makes me come.
Making somewhat of a show of it, I lean back on my elbows and spread my legs wide. How long has it been since I’ve played like this with my sexual encounters? It’s strange how easily it comes once I’ve given myself permission. I’m not even concerned about how well-lit the room is. It’s a relief. It’s freeing.
And that’s the thing I’m remembering. That bubbles can come in streams. When you blow through the hoop. When you open a fizzy pop.
That maybe, unlike pain, these bubbles of happy weren’t finite after all.
Like before, Hendrix runs his fingers tenderly across the rows of marks embedded in the soft skin at the tops of my inner thighs. There are more here. I’d discovered the delicate nature of this area made for a particularly painful cut. Since pain was what I was after, I’d done a lot of damage.
He studies each one carefully, as though trying to gather the story of each individual slice. “They’re old,” he remarks. “Do you still do this?”
It seems like I fight not to every day of my life. Like any addict, the more stressed I am, the harder the battle to not give in. But the help I got as a teenager taught me better ways to cope, and for the most part I’ve refrained since then.
I have to remain vigilant though. There’s always the chance I’ll fall off the wagon. Hendrix has to understand that if he really wants to be with me. Despite the happiness I find in myself under his gaze, there will always be sad days. Weeks, even. I am tentatively allowing a new future in, but it won’t banish the past. “What would you do if I still did?”
“I’d kiss those marks too.” As if to prove it, he bends down to place his lips on a jagged blemish at the roundest part of my thigh. “I’d love you.”
I have to take a second to breathe before I speak. “The last time happened a while before Freddie was born. During a period when Frank was especially mean. It felt somehow empowering to hurt myself as well. It was pain I could control when so much of my pain came from chaos.
“After I got pregnant, though, after Frank died…” I pause to understand what I mean before I try to voice it. “I wasn’t as interested in turning my body inside out anymore. I’m still tempted. But now I have more reason to not.”
“I want to be one of those reasons.” This time his tongue flicks across the scar. He must smell my arousal. The damp spot at the crotch of my pants is unmissable.
He kisses there next, soft and open-mouthed, his eyes on mine, seeking permission even as he invades my most private space.
I widen my legs farther in response.
I let him in.
He kisses me again, higher up. Through the silk material, he finds the swollen bud of nerves and sucks.
I let out a gasp. “Please!”
Quickly, he helps me out of my underwear and drags me to the edge of the ottoman, propping my feet up so he can take care of me properly.
And, oh, is he proper.
He’s so proper, I’m already on the verge of orgasm, and it’s only the third swipe of his tongue. I’d forgotten how fantastic being adored like this can be. I’d forgotten it was pleasurable at all. Frank’s habit of using cunnilingus as an apology after a bad fight had, I thought, poisoned me against the act entirely.
I’m delighted to discover I was wrong.
It’s only after I’ve come twice that Hendrix returns his mouth to mine. He’s more frenzied now, tugging at the clasp of my bra as he kisses me. When my breasts are free, he plumps one with his palm while teasing and sucking the other nipple. He touched me like this in Paris, but not with his lips. The last mouth I had at my breast was my baby, and, oh God, have I been missing out.
Can’t say I’m not living my life now.
It’s the best life too, being cherished by a man so completely. Even when I realize I’m stark naked, and he’s still wearing every stitch of his clothes, it doesn’t feel uncomfortable. Of course I’m still eager for him to join me in the nudity. I pull at his Henley as he continues to feast on my breast.
Taking the cue, he abr
uptly stands and rips his shirt over his head. His pants tent out at his crotch, showing off a massive erection that I am eager to see in the flesh.
But when I reach for his zipper, he shoos me away. I’m bewildered until he gathers me in his arms and carries me to the nearby bedroom. He deposits me on the bed and leaves the light on as he works off his jeans.
“How long can you stay?” he asks, his eyes never leaving my body. It’s amazing how they feel like they belong there, like they’ve always seen every part of me.
“I have the nanny until nine in the morning. I should probably be headed home by half past eight.”
He glances at his watch. “Nine hours to do everything I want to do to you? I’ll do the best that I can, but it’s not even going to come close to being enough time.”
My thighs clench with the promise. “Then, I suppose it will just have to be a beginning.”
“The beginning. I like the sound of that.”
Scary as it is to think, I like the sound of it too. So many of my recent stories have been rushed, begun and finished in the same night. There’s a thrill in imagining how much more intricate this one can be with time, how deep and meaningful and divine.
I can see glimpses of it even now. As he rolls the condom on his cock, I foresee a night when we do away with it altogether, a promise to partner in whatever the gamble may bring. When he slides inside of me, I envision a time when it doesn’t feel so new, when the excitement is overshadowed by the profundity of our love.
I see happiness that streams, even if no individual bubble lasts.
When we’re sated and exhausted and he holds me against his chest, his fingers running up and down the length of my arm, I imagine this becoming routine. Imagine that it’s our bed that we fall asleep in instead of his. Imagine that the sunshine that streams in the window in the morning belongs to both of us.
Slash: A Slay Series Novella Page 10
