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“Both.”
“Tell me.”
She twirled a bar of soap between her hands and spread suds down her arm. “The thing with Brian … I wasn’t in a hurry to do it again. But then I was going out with this guy, Andy.”
One of a chain of well-meaning men pressed on her by others. Amber was happy enough to go out with them, but usually things would peter out after three or four dates. Andy had lasted longer. Met her parents. Taken her to Cleveland for a Browns game.
“Tell me, Amber.”
His voice so calm and certain, the way it was on the job site when he told the workmen what to do.
Authority and kindness. Exactly what she needed.
“I was going out with him around Christmas, and he came over here for dinner and gave me a present that was way too expensive. A flat-screen TV. And I knew when I opened it, ‘This is because he wants you to have sex with him.’ So he was a creep, right?”
It hadn’t just been the present. She’d already noticed that he wasn’t as interesting as he’d seemed at first, or as nice. And on one of their dates, he’d been rude and condescending to their waitress. Always a bad sign.
“I’d bought him a tie. Seriously, a tie. And he bought me a TV, which I don’t even really watch. But I let him sleep with me anyway, because I wanted to have done it with more than one person. I felt like, I’m twenty-three, and I should know what this is like. I should be doing this.”
Her hands skated over her breasts, lathered between her legs. Her body felt sensitized, aware, but there was nothing arousing about telling these stories. It was a purging, a necessary cleansing so she could have Tony the way she wanted him.
Honest.
“That time it didn’t hurt. It was just exactly what it was, you know? His body and my body, joined together in this really improbable way, and the whole thing with the condom, and trying to figure out where
to put my arms.
“There was no way I was ever going to come, not in a million years. So I just made this little sound, like oh! and he seemed to think that was it, and he slapped along to the conclusion.”
Afterward, she’d felt scooped-out and empty, and she hadn’t been able to understand why. She’d gone to mass with her mother, just to see if she could find some glimmer of the feeling it used to inspire in her, and she’d felt nothing. No sin. No forgiveness. Just … nothing.
“He called me a few times after that, but I didn’t call him back.”
She rinsed off the soap and cut the water, wrung it from her hair, and pushed the excess droplets off her arms and legs with the flats of her hands. When she emerged into the clouded bathroom, he held open her old green towel and wrapped it around her.
He leaned down and kissed her softly on the mouth.
“It’s not supposed to be like that,” he said.
“I know.”
He walked her into the bedroom and took a seat on the edge of her bed. So stern again, serious in his wet red T-shirt and jeans, his hands braced over his kneecaps as if he needed something to hang on to.
He was beautiful.
And now that she’d told him, she felt different. Not quite perfectly calm, because her heart was pounding way too fast, and she felt as if she were floating an inch or two outside her body. But more sure of herself.
She wanted Tony for different reasons than she’d wanted Brian or Andy. Not because she expected him to rescue her or change her or fix her, and not because she had anything to prove.
Because he made her hot. Because he was sexy. And maybe more than either of those, she wanted him because she liked him. The actual him.
It was a good reason.
He didn’t look like he agreed, though. He looked like she’d drawn him to the edge of an abyss, and he wasn’t sure he ought to go over it.
“What are we doing, Amber?”
She tried to lighten the mood. “I thought you planned to—to—”
