Page 20 of Bonds of Shame, Bonds of Lust

I didn't know his last name. I knew he sold commercial real estate and that his mother lived in Ohio, and my arousal had already gone by itself, and I hadn't caught it until it was most of the way down the road.

I got my hands flat against his chest.

"I think I need some air," I said.

"Sure." His hand stayed at my back, guiding me off the dance floor, and I let it, because I didn't know how to discreetly remove it.

"So." He was closer than he had been all night. "What does the rest of your night look like?"

"I should head home soon. Early morning," I answered.

"On a Sunday?"

"The hospital doesn't observe weekends."

He smiled, and it was a different smile, less open, something brewing underneath. "Come on. We've been here for hours. Your place or mine, you pick."

It took me a second. "I'm sorry?"

"We're having a good time." Patient, like he was explaining to a child. "You came in dressed like that, we danced, we've been having a good time."

"We have," I said carefully. "I thought maybe we could exchange numbers. I'd be open to dinner sometime."

"Numbers," he said, dry. "Dinner." He set his glass down. "Do you know how long I've been talking to you tonight? I bought you drinks. We danced." His voice stayed low, controlled, pitched for me alone. "You were practically humping my leg. I misread this situation, apparently."

I started to agree with his misunderstanding when he continued.

"You know what you are?" Almost conversational. "A tease. Dressed like that, dancing that way, letting a man spend his whole evening, and then." A small gesture at the phone in my hand. "Numbers. Dinner." He shrugged his jacket on. "Some men would call you frigid. I'm just calling it what it is. Good luck with your 'early morning.'"

He walked away. The music kept going. I retreated and sat at the bar.

The words hung, almost physical. Tease. Frigid. The whole evening reweighed in thirty seconds of quiet venom.

I was angry. But under the anger another feeling. The flush went down my neck into my chest and then lower, settling somewhere unwelcome. I pressed my thighs together against the stool, stared at the mirrored backsplash, and ignored it.

Then my father's voice, on schedule. Dresses like that give men ideas, Lacey. Is that what you want, to give men ideas? The old shame, the original one, moved through me in a wave. It was older than Brad. Older than my marriage. It had been hiding in me the whole time, and a stranger in a bar had released it in one sentence.

And within the shame, not separate from it, the pulse was still there. What the hell is wrong with me?

I walked out to my car, but didn't start the engine right away. I touched my cheek and my fingers came away with a faint smear of mascara, and I looked at it on my fingertip for a while before I drove home through the dark, both hands on the wheel, not crying, still in the gray space between the event and the feeling catching up to it.

Whiskers was on the couch when I came home. I didn't turn on the light. I sat down next to him and let him climb into my lap and purr against my hands, and I thought about the woman in the mirror three hours ago, so proud of having decided something.

I had done everything right. I had been good, exhaustingly, all the way down to nothing, the faithful wife and the careful daughter, and I'd swallowed the wanting, the grief, and the loneliness until they were a noise low enough to sleep through. And here I was. Thirty-five, alone, in a dark house that still faintly held the smell of a man who had been lying to me for years. No children. No husband. Nothing.

The first sob came with no warning, and then I couldn't count them. I folded forward over my own arms and cried for the seven-year-old who came home to no mother and no goodbye, for the girl taught to apologize for her own body, for the wanting that had nowhere to go, for the children who were never going to exist.

When the worst of it had gone through me, I stayed where I was, wrung out, face wet, Whiskers pressed warm against my leg, the one thing in the room that felt entirely real.

Then I sat up.

"I don't want to be good anymore," I said to the empty room.

My voice was small and wrecked. I said it again and again until I was screaming it.

The sound faded. The room settled.

I picked up my phone to text Janice. She never slept before one.