Chapter Ten
Alex didn’t sleep. He sat beside the bed, wearing only his tuxedo pants, watching Verity sleep fitfully.
When she shifted and the covers lowered, exposing her breasts, he covered her back up, and when the sun rose he called downstairs to have breakfast brought to them.
He opened up the curtains, and allowed a shaft of light to bathe Verity where she still slept. It had the desired effect. She began to stir, then sat up, rubbing at the sleep in her eyes.
“Breakfast,” he said.
He set the tray on the foot of the bed, and she pulled the blankets up to her chin, snuggling deeper into the mattress and closing her eyes purposefully.
“You should eat,” he said. “And have coffee.”
She opened her eyes and fixed him with the same sort of grumpy look she had given him the day she’d fed him salad. Except this one felt a lot more genuinely outraged.
“I don’t need you to tell me what to do,” she said.
“Is this how you’re going to play this?”
“I’m not playing anything,” she said, rolling onto her back and flinging her arm over her eyes. “I don’t feel well.”
“Are you ill, or are you upset?”
“Does it matter?”
“Yes, it does matter. Because if you feel ill I will have someone fetch you medicine. If you’re upset, then I fear you’re stuck with me and I’m not well versed in how to handle emotions.”
“I thought you understood the workings of humanity and human relationships, you’re just above them.”
“I’m not above them. I’m outside them. Two different things. I owe you an apology, Verity.”
She looked at him then. “For what?”
“That’s not...”
“I need to know what you’re actually sorry for. I need to know if you have any actual idea what you did. I don’t want you to apologize just because you think it’s going to make me more...pliant.”
“No. That’s not why I’m apologizing. I used you badly. I didn’t realize how badly until... I didn’t know you were a virgin.”
“Oh my God,” Verity said, sitting up and letting her blankets fall down around her waist. “That’s what you’re apologizing for? Because you’ve attached some kind of meaning to...to that? That is the most basic, asinine, male thing you have ever done.”
“No,” he said, realizing that he was messing this up, and realizing he cared, which was honestly the extraordinary part.
He often made people angry, uncomfortable and annoyed.
He did not often feel so desperate to fix it.
“It’s only that it speaks to... I don’t know you.
Obviously. I spent two years having lunch with you, and I don’t know you, and that is a flaw in my system, but you didn’t ask to be a victim of that.
All of the things you said to me last night are true.
I manipulated you into this. I didn’t even realize that I did. ”
“Great. A marriage license and one virginity later and now you have regrets.”
“I want to fix this.”
“I don’t think Scotch tape works on hymens.”
“What happened to my biddable assistant?”
“She is now your tired wife who expended all her appeasement energy yesterday on her parents.”
“Are you going to be difficult or are you going to have a conversation with me?”
“I’ve already had the conversation. I was desperately vulnerable and honest with you last night. And you think that you can...express a moment of regret and offer me—well, you really can offer me coffee—and that will make it go away?”
“No. I don’t know. I don’t know what I can do to fix this. I don’t know what I can do...”
“Give me some coffee,” she said.
“Okay,” he said, reaching for the carafe and pouring a generous mug of hot liquid, handing it to her.
She snatched it away and hoarded it against her chest like a small dragon keeping watch on a precious jewel.
She had told him about herself last night, as she had yelled at him. It was up to him to do more with that, not to ask her to give more, he supposed. Or maybe it was up to him to give something.
“I was five years old when I realized my life wasn’t normal.
” He looked at his hands, then out the window.
“When I realized that most children lived in one house, with the same caregivers. Even if it was a grandmother, a single mom, they had stability. Someone who loved them. That kids who were passed around like objects were the strange ones.” He felt something catching his chest. “I know many kids in my position spend a lot of time asking themselves why their parents didn’t want them.
I know little enough about my parents that I’m not sure if they wanted me or not.
They could’ve lost custody because of addiction.
Perhaps they did want me. They are a void in my mind.
There’s nothing there, not enough to grasp onto.
Not enough to question. Mainly, I wonder why no one else wanted me.
I went into the system when I was an infant.
I had the highest chances of being adopted because of that.
So many children are taken away from their parents when they’re older.
People don’t want older children. They don’t want the trauma that comes with them.
They want babies. But nobody wanted me.”
He felt very much like he had taken a knife and peeled a layer off of his skin.
Exposed something, not just to her, but to himself.
“Part of what I did with your parents came from a place of arrogance, I admit. But when you told me that you had lived in one house your entire life, one house growing up, I also admit that I imagined it must’ve been happy.
You are soft, and it seems as if connecting with people is easy for you.
I never asked you about your experiences growing up, because I thought that I knew.
I thought someone like you must have a good family. ”
He looked back at her then, and saw that his words had done something to soften her.
“I never thought of that. How...normal it must’ve seemed to you to move from one place to the next. And what that must’ve felt like when you realized it wasn’t. It must’ve been confusing.”
He nodded. “Yes.”
“I can also understand that for you it must feel...ungrateful. Ungrateful of me to have a family, to have a house like that and to have a complicated relationship with those things.”
“No,” he said. “You forget I lived with a lot of families. Even though they weren’t mine, even though I wasn’t really a part of them, I have a very clear sense for how every family is different.
Some of those families I stayed with were warm and wonderful, and leaving them hurt.
Some of them had beautiful dinners every night, and they sat and spoke to each other about their days, and even asked me about mine.
Some families are all silent resentment, or everyone in the house bending over backward to placate the member of the family who has a temper.
It sounds as if you lived in a house where you were the one who contorted yourself around everyone else. ”
She sighed. “Yes. I didn’t realize how much I did it until I was thirteen.
I had a friend over and she said that I acted so different around my family.
Strange. Like a robot. She’s not wrong. In order to deal with them I learned to sand all the difficult edges off my own feelings and make everything about theirs. ”
“Were your parents violent with you?”
“No. It’s all shouting or... You heard what my mom said.
About me being average. That’s just normal conversation for her.
But if you get her angry...every poisonous thought she’s ever had about you will come out of her mouth.
And as much as I try to tell myself that it’s just her, that it has nothing to do with me, it stings.
She’s a bitter, unhappy woman. My father is a small, angry man who constantly needs everyone to tell him how important he is.
My siblings learned how to trade on that economy.
And I just wanted nothing to do with it.
I just wanted everything to be as smooth as possible.
I just wanted to get through my childhood, and get out on my own. ”
“You did.”
“I did. I went to college, I went to Greece.”
“You went to college, but you never dated anyone.”
She shook her head. “No. I am nothing if not very protective of myself. That’s why I got so angry with you last night. I ran away from this. From all of these hard feelings.”
“I didn’t know.”
“I know. Because I’m protective of myself.
” She laughed. “Somehow, I protected myself right into this situation.” She took a deep breath.
“But I did get angry at you. I can’t decide if I’m proud of myself for that or not.
I can’t decide if that makes me like my parents, or if.
.. I finally let myself have all the anger that I wasn’t allowed to have in that house full of people who made everything about them. ”
“There’s nothing wrong with being angry,” he said. “If there is then my entire life is a problem.” He laughed. “Maybe it is. But I would think that as long as you don’t use your anger to hurt other people there’s nothing inherently wrong with it. Anyway, I deserve it.”
“I can’t argue with that.”
Silence lapsed between them.
She reached over and picked up a croissant from the tray, and he felt that was a victory of a kind.
“Are you entirely angry with me?”
She wrinkled her nose. “What do you mean by that?”
“I mean, you woke up extremely angry. Is that the only...?” Their eyes caught and held, and he felt desire tightening in his gut. This was such a novel experience, to have slept with a woman he knew so well.
She might argue that he didn’t know her, or hadn’t before last night, but in the context of his life, he knew her better than he knew most anyone.
So there wasn’t just desire, but a strange, fierce feeling of tenderness which was entirely foreign to him.
“Are you wanting to know if I enjoyed what we did last night?”
“I need to know.”
“You couldn’t tell?”