“If I had a wife and kids to consider,” I tell her, “It’d be a different calculation.”
She flinches.
And I realize how what I just said must sound to her. Like she doesn’t count. When I’m trying to say the exact opposite.
“I—I’m sorry,” I stutter. “I didn’t mean?—”
She takes a gulp of wine. “It’s fine. I get what you mean.” Another smile, this one thin. “No hard feelings.”
Damn it. I hurt her feelings. I’m already fucking up this whole marriage thing.
There’s a beat of silence between us. I look up at the stars, struggling to find something to say, struggling to explain myself better. I wish I was good with words, like my brothers are.
“Does massage help?” she asks. “With the shoulder?”
“I wouldn’t know,” I say. “The only person who’s ever worked on it is our arrogant prick of a team physio and that’s about as pleasant as it sounds.”
“Turn around.”
Her hands on me? Massaging? This is going to be torture. Bliss, but torture. “Lila…”
“Please? I’ll be gentle,” she says.
How can I deny my wife anything? Especially when she asks so sweetly.
I turn around.
Her hands are warm when they find my shoulders. She starts slow, fingers rubbing the muscle carefully. When she finds the right spot her thumbs press in carefully and I feel the tension there for the first time, the knot I’ve been carrying so long I stopped noticing it.
I ignore the throbbing of my dick.
“Does that hurt?” she asks.
“Good hurt,” I say.
She works quietly. The water steams into the cold night air. The stars glimmer above us, the seam of the Milky Way visible in the velvet black. Her hands are careful and unhurried and I close my eyes and think about the last time someone took care of me and can’t come up with an answer.
“Tell me something,” she says.
“Like what?”
“About your childhood. You haven’t talked about it much.”
“It was good. Idyllic, I guess you could say.”
There’s a pause. “Can I ask… can I ask about your mom?”
I’ve never talked about Mom with anyone outside of my dad or siblings.
But Lila is my family now too, even if it’s in name only. But names mean something. And hers is Mrs. Rhodes now.
“She died about ten years ago,” I say. “Lung cancer. Never smoked a day in her life, and yet.” The howling injustice of it, the cruel irony, had enraged me for quite some time.
That faded eventually. For years now, there’s been only numbness.
Lila’s hands stroke slowly, comfortingly across my shoulder. “I’m so sorry, Slade.”
I close my eyes against the flood of bitterness and pain. Try to find something good to say. “She would have loved you. She loved to go antiquing. Loved old books and treasures and things with history. You guys would have had so much to talk about.”
