16. Jett #2
I'd learned in my mid-twenties, from a therapist in San Diego I'd paid two summers in cash so my agent's office wouldn't see the receipts, that the worst thing you can do for a woman who's told you she doesn't deserve to be cared for is tell her she does.
The telling is a thing the woman has to do for herself.
The job of the man with his arms around her is to be a wall her saying so can land against without bouncing back.
So I let it land.
I let her cry.
I let her shake.
I let her say the words she'd been telling herself her whole life into the side of my chest at one in the morning, in a bed in a glass house in the desert, and I did not answer them, because the answering wasn't mine to do.
She quieted, eventually.
She lay against me with her body slack and her breath evening out and her hand flat against my sternum, the way a hand goes flat against something a person is grateful is still there.
When she'd been quiet a long minute, I felt her start to settle. The tenderness arriving the way it does after, the body softening, the chemistry doing the thing chemistry does.
I felt her notice the wet of me leaking out from between her legs.
"Great," she muttered.
I almost laughed.
I didn't laugh, but I almost did, and she felt the almost-laugh in my chest, and she was unfortunately the kind of woman who'd know exactly what that almost-laugh meant.
Without a word, I rolled her on top of me. She squealed and clung to me, trying not to slide. My hands dropped to her ass. I locked her against me with one arm under her and stood up from the bed.
"Jett?" she asked softly.
I didn't answer.
I didn't say a word, which I knew was unlike me. I'd spent my whole life saying every word I had access to, and now, in this room, on this night, I'd run out of them. I walked her down the hall to the bathroom. She held on to me like a tired kid. I set her down on the bathroom counter.
She drew in a breath.
"Jett, I."
"Quiet."
She curled her lips over her teeth. Her legs dangled off the edge of the counter.
The bathroom lights were on dim from the hall.
Her hair was a wreck. Her makeup was a wreck.
There were finger-shaped marks I'd left on the soft skin of her hips.
She looked like a woman who'd been put through something and lived through it, and she looked beautiful to me in a way I couldn't have explained to a stranger if my life depended on it.
I reached into the shower and turned the water on.
I scooped her into my arms again the way I'd scooped her off the bed, and walked us into the shower. The kind of shower I'd bought with too much money the year I bought the house, two heads and a stone bench. I set her under one of the heads. I let the hot water do its thing on her hair.
She tried to talk again.
"Jett, I."
"I said quiet, Hartley."
She swallowed and nodded.
I let her stand there a long minute. Let the water rinse her.
I picked up the shampoo, the kind I bought from a barber I'd been going to for six years, lathered it in my hands, and worked it through her hair the way I'd watched my sister work shampoo through her hair when we were kids and our mother had broken down again and couldn't get out of bed, and Mary Beth had taken to washing my hair instead of leaving it to the woman who could no longer remember to do it.
The motion was old. It came back from somewhere in my body that didn't require thinking.
Dani peeked at me sometimes. I caught her doing it. I didn't say anything. I let her watch.
I backed her under the water and tilted her head back and rinsed the shampoo out the way you'd rinse it out of a skittish animal's coat. Gently. One hand cupped against her hairline to keep the soap out of her eyes.
She started crying again, quietly, with her face turned up to the spray.
I didn't say anything about it.
I lathered the bar of soap and washed her.
Her shoulders. Her arms. Her breasts. I lifted them carefully and washed underneath, where the sweat from the bed had gathered.
I knelt in the shower and washed her legs, the fronts and the backs.
I washed her scars. I washed each one with the same attention I'd washed everything else.
No faster. No slower. No different from the rest of her.
I felt her cry harder when I did, and I didn't look up at her, because I knew her tears in that moment weren't for me to look at.
I washed the mess of me out of her, gently, with a washcloth and the same soap, the way a person washes something delicate that's been damaged.
I stood back up. Rinsed her again.
I did not flinch through any of it.
I spent a quarter of the time washing myself.
"Didn't realize the chirper of the team could be so quiet," she said with a soft snicker as the water beat down on us.
That earned a chuckle out of me. The first one all night. It came out small.
She didn't ask if she could wash me down.
I figured she'd worked out by now that if I wanted her to, I'd have told her to.
She seemed to like that about me. The lack of guesswork.
The not-asking-her-to-perform-care-for-me.
It was, I was learning, possibly the thing I'd been carrying my whole life that this woman needed me to keep carrying.
I turned the water off. Stepped out and grabbed two towels. Wrapped one around her and one around myself.
"Apology accepted, by the way," I said as I handed her the towel.
She caught it. Wrapped it around herself before she stepped out onto the mat. "Good to know the sex was that good."
I almost laughed for real that time. "I didn't say the sex was accepted. I said the apology was."
She dried herself off. "Ah, so the sex was terrible. Got it."
"Hartley."
"Yeah."
"The sex was not terrible."
"Hmm."
"Go to bed."
"Yours or mine."
"You don't have a mine. Get in the bed."
She walked back to the bedroom in the towel and the wet hair.
I followed with both hands jammed into the towel at my hips so I wouldn't put them on her again.
We climbed into the bed. I pulled the duvet up over us.
The lamp was still on. She looked at it.
I looked at it. Neither of us turned it off.
She rolled onto her side facing me.
I rolled onto mine facing her.
The room was still warm and yellow.
"Jett."
"Yeah."
"Thank you."
"For what."
"For all of it. For the dinner. For the car. For the not-asking. For the apology accepted. For the shower. For the. all of it."
"You're welcome."
"I mean it."
"I know."
She was quiet a while.
Then she said, very small, "He used a belt. When I was eleven. The scars are from when I was eleven. I came home from a sleepover with my hair cut shorter than he liked. He thought I'd let a boy cut it. I hadn't."
I did not move.
I did not say anything.
I'd braced myself, in the shower, with my hands on her scars, for the moment she'd tell me.
Braced for it with the same controlled attention I'd braced for everything in this house tonight.
I'd told myself I wouldn't react too fast, the way I hadn't at the kitchen island on Friday with the photograph between us.
I did not react too fast.
I waited.
She watched me wait.
"Okay," I said.
"Eleven."
"Mary Beth was eleven when our mother stopped speaking to us for the first time. I have a thing about eleven-year-olds."
"I gathered."
"He's never going to put a hand on you again, Hartley. I want to say that out loud once, and I want you to hear it, and then I want you to go to sleep."
She closed her eyes.
"Okay," she said.
"Sleep."
"Sleep."
I turned the lamp off.