Chapter 12
twelve
Evie
The cotton shifts against my inner thigh, and I know before I open my eyes.
Not dread, not alarm. The way you know the answer to a question you've been pretending not to ask.
My body figured it out before my brain did, maybe days ago, and the knowing has been sitting low in my belly, heavy and humming, and I don't want to look at it yet so I keep my eyes closed and breathe.
I stretch. The sting catches, low, left side, where the skin is thinnest. My breath hitches before I can stop it.
I lie still, the morning light pressing through the curtain I never close all the way because I like waking to the shift from dark to gray to gold, like the day is easing me into itself.
The light is pale now, early, falling across the bed in a stripe that stops just below my waist. My legs are bare, my underwear is on, and the small gasp that escapes me sounds too loud in the quiet room.
You already know what you're going to find.
I push the sheet down and sit up, swinging my legs over the edge of the mattress.
The tenderness between my thighs announces itself with the movement.
Not pain, something in the space between soreness and a word I don't have because I've had sex exactly once and my vocabulary for after is still basically nonexistent.
My body feels touched. Thoroughly. Recently. And my pulse is picking up like it considers that a selling point.
The bathroom tile is cool under my bare feet. I don't turn on the overhead light, the window above the shower lets in enough to see by, and I want to look at this carefully. Analytically. Like I'd look at a donor disclosure that doesn't add up.
I hook my thumb into my waistband and pull the fabric down on the left side.
Oh.
It's faint. I almost miss it. A shadow of color on skin pale enough to show everything, high on my inner thigh where the blood runs close to the surface.
Not a bruise. Not quite. Like someone's mouth, held in one place long enough to mark.
I touch it, just my fingertip, and heat rolls through me so fast my hand shoots to the counter for balance.
I flush in the mirror, from chest to cheekbones, pink under white cotton, and between my legs I clench around nothing, and I'm gripping the marble now, all fingers flat, because apparently the answer to what does my body think about this is very, very clear.
What the fudge.
My eyes are still on my thigh. The hickey sits an inch from the thin white lines I've carried since I was twelve, faded enough that you'd have to be looking, but I'm looking, and the new mark and the old ones occupy the same skin like two different languages written on the same page.
I stare at the mark. At my own reflection above it.
I'm waiting for the horror to arrive, the reasonable grown-woman response to discovering that someone put his mouth on me while I slept.
He held it there long enough to bruise me, in a place no one would see unless they were between my legs.
The horror should be here by now. I'm giving it every opportunity.
It doesn't come.
What comes is more heat, low and stubborn, and the absolutely unhinged recognition that I'm wet. Standing in a bathroom at six in the morning, white-knuckling a marble counter, examining a hickey I didn't consent to receiving, and my body's answer is yes, more of that please.
He touches you while you sleep. He puts his mouth on you. You must come.
My stomach flips. I press my free hand against my sternum and hold it there until my breathing evens out.
I turn on the shower.
The water takes thirty seconds to heat in this house, and I count them because counting is something to do with my brain while steam hits my skin and my body refuses to stop humming.
I step under the spray and the hot water finds the mark on my thigh and the soreness doesn't wash off.
Stubborn evidence the water can't reach.
I work shampoo through my hair, and the lather smells like bergamot. I bought it on sale at the Walgreens on Fillmore for no particular reason, and I'm thinking about this while also thinking about the bruise on my hip two days ago.
Thumb-shaped. Right side, just above the bone.
I told myself I bumped the bathroom counter. I told myself that while looking at a mark that was clearly a thumbprint, and the lie was so thin that even my mother would have caught it, and my mother has built an entire career out of not catching things.
My fingers are slick with conditioner when I start thinking about the mornings. How many now. The way I kept waking already wet, already humming, my body in a slow aftermath I didn't have a name for.
I'd lie there in the gray light, soaked, blood beating slow and heavy between my legs, and when I pressed my thighs together a small pulse would move through me like a wave already broken.
I'd tell myself it was hormones or stress or the particular cruelty of sleeping twenty feet from a man who called me a mistake.
I'd tell myself, yesterday at the table over coffee, when the color climbed my throat, that it was the kitchen heat or the lack of sleep or the same proximity I've been blaming for everything else. I told myself that all afternoon. I am very tired of telling myself things.
Weeks of it. Building.
I rinse and step out. The mirror is fogged and I wipe it clear with one long stroke.
Flushed cheeks, dark wet hair, and I am standing in a bathroom in San Francisco examining a hickey like it's a donor disclosure with a missing page.
I apply moisturizer with the same hands I'll use to pour coffee in fifteen minutes and sit across a kitchen table from him and say nothing.
Somewhere between the Cerave and the SPF, I should probably be having a crisis. A real one, with a police report and a conversation with Darcy and a confrontation that ends with me on a plane back to Louisiana. The playbook says that's the appropriate response.
Should. That word again. Empty as a campaign promise.
Because the moment I stopped pretending I didn't know wasn't this morning.
It wasn't the hip bruise two days ago. It was around day three or four of waking up like that, lying in the dark with my hand between my legs, feeling how swollen I was, how wet, and my whole body flushed hot and tight and I thought, with the part of my brain that reads contracts and spots lies, this isn't a dream and I don't want it to stop.
My hand was shaking when I thought it. Not my hands now in the mirror, competent, applying primer like a woman who has her life organized into labeled folders. My hands then. In the dark. On sheets that smelled like his detergent.
I dry my hair. Navy linen pants, a white blouse that buttons to the collar, sandals because my ankle still twinges in heels. The mirror shows me someone composed and appropriate. The bruise is invisible under fabric, the ache between my legs invisible under posture.
The senator's daughter. If they only knew.
My feet are quiet on the stairs. The kitchen smells like coffee because Remy's always up before me, and I can hear the low murmur of news from his phone on the counter.
I round the corner and he's standing by the window with a mug in his hand and morning light spilling across his profile and shoulder.
Here's what I notice about Remy at seven in the morning, because I've never been able to walk into a room without reading it. He's positioned himself at the window but angled toward the door. He saw me before I saw him.
"Morning."
"Morning."
His shoulders are set in a way that reads relaxed but isn't. A controlled stillness. His hair is pushed back, slightly damp. His t-shirt is soft gray that fits across his chest, and I'm noticing that, along with everything else about him I can't stop filing away.
He looks at me, careful and composed and giving nothing.
"You sleep all right?"
"Fine. You?"
"Mm."
I look back, and my body floods with everything it knows about him—the Louisiana memory I have, the weeks of him my body has been collecting in the dark. My face does absolutely nothing.
I pour my coffee. The ceramic is hot against my palm. I take the first sip standing three feet from the man who marked my thigh while I slept, and the coffee is good, and the morning is ordinary, and I take another sip.
The coffee is excellent, actually. Remy grinds beans fresh and uses a pour-over method with the careful attention he brings to everything, and I know this because I've watched him do it at least six times in the past two weeks. Watched those hands measure and pour and adjust.
Those hands are on his mug now, thumb resting against the rim. I pull out the chair across from him and sit. The tenderness presses against the hard wood and heat creeps up my neck and I take another sip.
"Darcy's alarm went off twenty minutes ago." His gaze flicks toward the ceiling. "Twice."
"She hit snooze both times?"
"She threw her phone the second time." He lifts his mug. "I heard the bounce."
A snort escapes before I can stop it, surprised out of me, and his eyes change for half a second, then it's gone.
And the man making me laugh at a breakfast table is the same man who left evidence on my body while I slept.
I take a sip and let both of those things be true at the same time because apparently that's who I am now.
Darcy crashes into the kitchen like a hurricane. Her hair is piled in a knot that's already collapsing, and she's wearing an oversized LSU shirt and shorts that might be his, and her phone is in her hand despite allegedly having been thrown.