Page 80 of Tempting as Sin
Silence for a moment, and then he said, “Thank you.”
He started on his dinner, calm all the way, and after a minute, she said, “And you want to know what that was all about out there.”
“A bit hard to answer that,” he said. “It’s like you coming downstairs, thinking there was something you had to do, a script you were meant to follow. I don’t need you to tell me tonight if you don’t want to. I’ve got the gist. That wasn’t the first time he’d hit you.”
“No.” Did she want to tell him? No. But she also didn’t want it lurking in the background. She didn’t want him wondering.Shedidn’t want to wonder what he believed. Time to tell him. “It got worse as it went along, but it was always more of an emotional thing anyway. Control, and…contempt, you’d call it. You saw it. Contempt can shrivel you. When it’s there every day, when you’re waiting for it…it’s worse than the physical part, and you can’t show it to anybody. You can’t say, ‘See what he did to me?’ It’s invisible. And you’re never sure that you don’t deserve it. That’s the hardest of all. The physical part was usually things that didn’t leave a mark, too. Shoving me into the wall during an argument. Pushing me down on the sidewalk, so I fell, and then walking away. Humiliation and shock, more than pain. Keeping me tense, waiting for it. Not wanting to provoke him. Walking on eggshells.”
Rafe muttered something, and she said, “It sounds bad when I tell you, which is why I told you, but it just felt like my life at the time. It was always my fault, you see, because I’d made him mad, because I’d been stupid again. Dramatic. Overemotional. It took me so long not to see myself that way. And if you want to know why I stayed…” She stopped. That was always the hard one to answer, even to herself. “Why does anybody stay? People have written books about it. Because it starts small and escalates until it feels normal, until youaresure you deserve it. Because they’re manipulative. Because they choose you to begin with, knowing they can work on you, and then theydowork on you. Guys who want to take? They find women who are programmed to give. And you’re too ashamed to tell anybody what’s really going on, especially if you look like you have everything. You know what other people will say. Exactly that. ‘If it’s that bad, why are you still there?’ You’re a gold-digger anyway. The shame, though—that’s the worst. You start to think you reallyarethat stupid, that you reallycan’tdo it on your own. He tells you so, and it just…” She stretched out a hand, palm down, pushed it into the comforter, and knew she wasn’t explaining well enough. “It sinks in.”
She had to stop and try to slow her breathing down. “Boy, this is hard. You’re the first person besides Paige I’ve told this to. Paige and a therapist. And I wish you’d say something. I’m…”
“Shaking,” he said. “I see it. But I’m listening. I’m hearing. Maybe you also stayed because of that baby you didn’t have. I think maybe so.”
She couldn’t look at him. Her throat had closed, and she wanted to run from this, but it was here, and it always would be. There was no more running. “Yeah,” she said. “He did say he wanted one at the beginning, before we were married, when I got pregnant. His family was happy. There was always some truth in anything he said. Twisted around, but it made it hard to reject what he said. It was never all a lie. I lost the baby, and I couldn’t get pregnant again, and they couldn’t figure out why, and his family was disappointed. And I felt…” She stopped again, then said it. “Defective.”
She knew why she was remembering it. Because she’d seen Antonio again, and everything had come back, the same as before. The words that cut into her skin and laid her open. The look in his eyes, like she disgusted him. The burning shame of lying there, hurting, knowing he was going to kick her, and that everybody was watching. Like she hadn’t gotten anywhere at all. Like she was still stuck in that life, in that person, in that self.
Trapped.
Remembering, too, that first, worst night, when her perfect-on-the-surface new life had started to fall apart. Sitting there, alone in the enormous, perfectly decorated, absolutely-not-quite-hers house on the beach in Malibu, and seeing the first streaks of blood. Leaning her head against the eggshell-white bathroom wall and thinking,Breathe. Think. What now?Calling the doctor’s answering service, then waiting. Watching TV, and not seeing it. Trying to think of something—anything—she could do, and knowing there was nothing.
She had no cramps. Surely there would be cramps if it were a miscarriage. Surely, then, it was all right, and the life she’d imagined was going to happen. She was being too dramatic again, that was all.
Antonio had been shooting in Costa Rica, and when she’d called, it had gone to voicemail. Another hour, then trying again, and the same result.Out of cell phone range a lot of the time,he’d told her when he’d left. It had been years before she’d thought to wonder whether that had actually been true.
The doctor had finally called back, had told her to come in the next morning. “Unless the bleeding gets worse or you develop severe cramping,” he’d said, “in which case you should have somebody bring you into the ER. If you’re miscarrying, though, we won’t be able to stop it. Up to twenty-five percent of pregnancies do fail, unfortunately. That’s the body’s way of dealing with a chromosomal abnormality.” He’d sounded so casual, so calm, and she’d thought again,Nothing you can do. Just wait.
She hadn’t slept much that night, and when she finally did, her dreams were dark and jagged. Trying to get to the ship so she could sail to England, but her suitcase kept opening up, spilling out all her clothes, and she kept trying to put them back inside, and failing. She was in a taxi, but it was taking too long, because the airport was suddenly hundreds of miles away. She didn’t have her passport, and she had to go home to get it, and she’d miss the boat. Again and again, the same endless loop, until she’d woken and everything was the same.
A little blood. No cramps. So it would be all right.
Calm down.
When the clock finally inched around to nine, she drove herself to the doctor’s office for a scan. A scan that would surely show that she was fine, and so was the baby. Spotting could be normal, too.
Overdramatic. Needy. Fragile.
Lying on the exam table, peering at the monitor, trying to see. The seconds ticking by, and nothing but gray shadows. No tiny spot pulsing white like she’d seen online, and then the doctor saying it.
She got up onto the table pregnant. She got down knowing that she wasn’t sharing her body after all. It was just her here. Just her, all alone. The numbness had progressed up from the soles of her feet, and the tears had felt hot and scratchy behind her eyes, the opposite of healing.
She’d walked across to the hospital for the D&C, her mind floating above her, gone away. Disassociation. Seeing the nurses on their break, striding out of the hospital’s revolving doors, talking and laughing, and the brunette whose scrubs were printed with teddy bears holding balloons.She must work on the pediatric ward,she’d thought.Babies and kids in the hospital. That would be so much worse than this. This happens every day. A chromosomal abnormality.
The doctor talking to her afterwards, and how she’d hated him for his matter-of-factness, then shoved the hatred down, because that was surely irrational, too. He was just being professional.
“It never developed into an embryo,” he said. “Just a blighted ovum. When it didn’t develop, your body eventually stopped producing hormones.”
The slap in the face that had been, saying that you couldn’t even grieve, because it had never really been there. No little tadpole with an oversized head and its fingers starting to form, the way you’d imagined. A blighted ovum. A dead egg that hadn’t been anybody after all.
“I lost the baby,” she told Rafe. The ache was still there, even after all these years. “It happens all the time, and it was still the worst day of my life until then, probably because there was so much I wasn’t looking at, so much more under the surface that was wrong. Or maybe just that it’s always a hard thing. Saying goodbye to your dream baby.”
“What about Paige?” he asked. “Where was she?”
“On the other side of the world, working on a cruise ship. I could have called my mom, but I didn’t want her to worry. I told her the next day, when I was calmer. I wanted to take care of her for a change, you see, and finally, I could. It was my new life. I could send her money so she could quit working so much. I wanted to buy her a house, but I never did get to do that. By the time I was divorced and wasn’t getting an allowance, when I could have spent the money, she was gone.”
“Anallowance?”He looked outraged, the same way Paige had been when she’d found out.
“Sounds bad, doesn’t it?” she said. “But itwasAntonio’s money. He was right about that. He’d earned it.”
