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She turned her face into the spray and washed away last night’s makeup and Tony’s mouth, absinthe and wine, deep kisses and damaging hope. She soaped her skin and rinsed lingering traces of Tony’s come off her stomach and from between her legs. Her fingers explored the denuded landscape of her body. Puffy and tender. Childlike.
Amber didn’t feel sexy anymore. She felt foolish.
There was no way to start over. That was the problem. There was only forward. An eternity of forward, moving into a future where they were always the same people making themselves happy and unhappy in the same ways.
She soaped her legs and ran the razor over them, scraping herself bare.
When she’d met him, the sex had dazzled her. His smile had dazzled her. Everything about him—the way he looked, the things he said, the physical intimacy he’d introduced her to, so unlike anything she’d known before. She’d been ready to tell him she loved him within a week. Ready to move into his apartment and launch herself into the rest of her life with her hand firmly clasped in his.
Tony had been more cautious. He’d suggested she keep her apartment. That they take it slow, because what was the rush, really?
Yes, I want you here, he’d assured her when she started to worry that they weren’t even reading the same book, much less on the same page. I want you with me all the time. He’d reached for her. God, Amber, all the time.
So she’d relaxed into it, spending nights in his bed. Long, lazy weekend mornings. Buying groceries for Tony, new clothes she thought he’d like, a little makeup, sexy underwear.
When she thought about those days now, it was always summer, and they were always laughing, even though she knew it hadn’t been like that. Yes, they’d watched TV together, taken turns pretending to know how to cook, made love every night, every day. But they’d argued, too. She had bad periods that made her moody and insecure, and he tried to fix it with sex, which was the last thing she wanted. He got migraines and hated being fussed over.
I love you, she’d told him, so many times. I love you, I love you.
And he said it back, though not as often as she did. I love you, too, bunny.
It wasn’t until she got pregnant that she’d started to wonder why she loved him.
It wasn’t until he’d proposed that she’d started to wonder why he loved her back, and if it was enough. If she was ready. If they could do this.
When she’d found out she was going to have a baby, she’d become conscious, suddenly, of how little she knew. What if they turned out to be awful parents? What if this thing that felt like love wasn’t? What if he and Patrick were permanently at odds, and he was always prone to feel guilty about his niece’s death, his father’s death—a possibility that scared her, because she’d been able to pull him away from that darkness so far, but what if someday she couldn’t? What if he got in one of his black moods and she didn’t know how to help?
It was just after 9/11. Her mom never turned the TV news off. Tony read every newspaper and magazine article about al-Qaeda that he could get his hands on, and Amber was afraid. All the time.
She could still remember the taste of her fear, like prenatal vitamins and orange juice. The restless need she’d had to pace the rooms of Tony’s house and take long walks—so long that even Tony started to worry. She wasn’t putting on enough weight with the baby. She couldn’t stand still, because whenever she stilled, she became afraid, and the fear kept getting bigger.
Tony didn’t know, either. What to say or how to fix it. He said he loved her, he loved their baby, but the words sounded so thin. Inadequate against the enormity of the situation. She kept waiting for him to tell her the perfect right thing that would banish all her fear, and when he didn’t, she moved out. Two months before Clark’s due date, she’d packed up her stuff and taken herself back into the apartment she still had in Camelot, turned off her phone, locked the door, and refused to answer when her mother knocked.
She’d huddled in her bed beneath a blanket, curled around her baby. This baby who was the shape of a future that she already felt pressing into her, molding her identity into wife, mother, when she wasn’t ready for any of it.
Tony took the door apart.
Later, he said he was freaking out, but he hadn’t seemed to be when she’d padded from the bedroom to find him standing in her living room with all the daylight she’d been shutting out of the apartment lighting him up.
He’d propped the door in its place, put his arm around her, and led her back to bed. His work boots had made a mess of her comforter, because he’d come from the job site when her mother called him. He’d come right away, and when Amber didn’t answer, he’d taken apart the door.
He held her until she finally started to cry, and then she told him what she was afraid of.
Such a long list of things.
Tony had promised her he would do anything he could to help. Anything for her. Anything. And she’d put her nose to his neck, her lips against his chin, on his mouth, and known he meant it.
She’d thought, This is love, then.
Not the drama of the door and the hinges. Not all the sex they’d had, the excitement of finding intimacy with a man for the first time at the ripe old age of twenty-four.
Just Tony’s arms around her, and his promise. His choice.
I’ll help you. I’ll be here. Whatever I can do, I’ll do it.
She’d made a choice, then, too. To be with Tony, whatever that cost her. To accept the future they’d created, the life they’d made, and not look back.
He’d helped, just as he’d promised to. In the hospital, when labor turned out to be so much more formless and confusing than the books had led her to believe, Tony had rubbed her back. He’d put a pillow beneath her forehead where she had to press it into the bed, and he’d found another one to go behind her knees. She moved, and he made sure the pillow was there when she needed it again.
