16
SEBASTIAN
Gwen squinted and leaned back in her seat.
When she didn’t say anything, I did the same. “What? What’s that face about?”
“You know what the ranch is.”
“I do.”
“Then you know why my past relationships failed.”
I knew she’d been abused in some way. That it’d been bad enough that she’d felt the only way out was to erase her identity and start over. He had to have been one sick son of a bitch.
But I didn’t know what made her who she was. It wasn’t my place to insist she tell me every detail, but wasn’t it my place to know what she had been through? To be sensitive to the specific topics or issues? So that I didn’t accidentally say or do something that’d trigger her PTSD?
“Vaguely,” I said.
Still, she said nothing.
Cocking my head to the side, my eyes flicked over her, surveying for a signal of discomfort or pain. This was supposed to be fun for both of us. I wasn’t trying to turn our first date intotrauma porn. If she wasn’t ready to talk about it, or if she never wanted to, that was okay.
I made sure to soften my voice when I said, “You don’t want to talk about it?”
Gwen scratched the side of her head. She opened her mouth and shut it a few times. Eventually, quietly, she said, “I don’t want you to pity me for it.”
“What does pity mean to you?”
Her open mouth stayed silent a moment longer. Eventually, she shrugged. “I don’t know. Whiny, I guess. Pathetic. They’re all synonyms.”
“That’s what’s wrong with the world,” I said under my breath. After grabbing a chip from the center console, I dipped it in the queso. “Pity, by definition, means compassion and sorrow on someone else’s behalf. Why the hell is having compassion and sorrow for someone viewed as whiny or pathetic?”
She arched a brow at that, and I saw the wheels turning behind her eyes.
“Not saying that you’re wrong for viewing it that way,” I told her. “I mean, if you don’t actually look up the word, it does sound like an insult. But I think we should all pity each other a little more. Life might be a little less grim if we did.”
Gwen’s eyes sparkled. Not with tears, but consideration. Like my words made her think. Eventually, she said, “Yeah. It might.”
“The rest of the world can go on making fun of us, and we can have our pity party.” I smiled. “Only if you wanna talk about it. You don’t have to.”
A breathy laugh escaped her. “Well, I don’t reallywantto talk about it. But I feel like you have the right to know?”
“I’d consider it more of an honor than a right.”
Her expression softened. An unusual start to the night, maybe, but it seemed to have broken all the ice. She was only an octave or two above a whisper when she continued.
“It’s probably the same story you’ve heard a thousand times. We were together until last year, when I left. Mostly, anyway. I don’t know. I tried to leave many times before I finally did. And it didn’t go the way it does in movies. He didn’t wear a wife beater and come home each day and scream at me about the dishes.
“I guess he did, a couple times. Scream at me about the dishes, I mean.” She scratched her head. “I don’t know. I was young. I was dumb. My mom thought he was great, mostly because I didn’t tell her everything. By the time I was eighteen, he wasn’t really interested in me anymore. Not romantically, not physically. But he didn’t want to lose the other things I gave him. A clean house. An assistant to arrange his life. A therapist to vent to.
“Every time I tried to leave, it was chaos. Most of the relationship wasn’t, though. I guess because, somewhere along the way, I realized that if I didn’t bring up how I felt or the problems we had, there wasn’t a fight, so I stopped talking. Gradually stopped caring. The only thing that was hard about leaving were the logistics. Hence, the ranch.” Pressing her lips together, Gwen looked out the windshield for a moment, watching the snowflakes. When she turned back, the melancholy tone was gone, and a smile spread across her lips. “But he never wore the wife beaters. Wasn’t half bad at it, but he never dressed the part.”
A half laugh escaped me, not because I found it funny. Because that’s what she needed. The only way she could manage spitting that out was if she knew I wouldn’t look at her like she was pathetic for having put up with it.
And I wouldn’t. I would never.
To show some semblance of solidarity, understanding, I said, “Yeah, my dad never dressed the part either.”
