Page 112 of Give My Everything
“Convierte tus heridas en lugares donde la luz puede entrar en tu alma.”
“Damn, you sound sexy when you speak Spanish.”
She giggles, the sound muffled slightly.
“What does it mean?”
“Turn your wounds into places where light can enter your soul.” Remmy pauses, her eyes opening again to look into mine. “I got it during my senior year, after going through the therapy that started to really help me sort through my issues.”
I don’t know what to say in response, my mind unable to drift to anything positive or encouraging to say, though I don’t necessarily think that’s what she needs from me.
My hand reaches out and I trace it up and down her spine, provoking a shiver I watch ripple through her body.
And then I rise onto my hip and lean forward, bending over her body, placing my lips at the base of the tattoo, which runs from her tailbone all the way up to her neck.
Kiss after kiss I place on the tattoo, on her wounds. Wishing there was something I could do to take them from her, to heal them over, but knowing I can’t.
When I finally make it to the top, I realize Remmy is breathing heavily, her breaths coming out hard and awkward.
“What’s wrong?” I ask, suddenly worried I’ve crossed a line or a boundary I didn’t know was there.
Remmy shakes her head and then turns. Toward me, not away—a good sign.
“I just don’t know how you manage to take the things that make me feel the most worthless and instead make me feel beautiful and powerful and strong.”
I grin at her. “It’s easy to do when there’s a lot of amazing raw material to work with.”
She smiles and then rises up slightly, scooting onto her side and giving me a little peek of the goods before she adjusts the sheet and grabs a pillow to snuggle up to.
“Let’s talk about something else,” she says, no longer looking like she’s about to doze off and tucking her face into the pillow she’s holding so I can only see her eyes. “I never got to ask my second question.”
I groan, my upper body falling back to the mattress. “You sure you don’t want to talk about something else?”
Her eyes twinkle and I know she’s smiling, which is confirmed when she lifts her chin and tucks the pillow in under her neck.
“Alright, fine. What’s your second question?”
“You were vague earlier about you and Krissa, about what she said to you in the hallway.”
I shift so I’m also on my side and rest my elbow against the bed, propping my head up with my hand.
“What really happened between you and her?”
Sighing, I stare at the span of sheet between us, wishing she’d gone the easy route and asked me about Ivy or my mom or something else—anything but my dad and my ex.
But after she revealed so much earlier, there’s no way I can pussyfoot around this. I have to be open about what happened.
“Krissa and I started dating when I came home from graduate school,” I start, thinking back to the day I first saw her. “I was twenty-three and she was celebrating her eighteenth birthday, which didn’t feel like a crazy age difference at the time. I was in the process of buying the failing restaurant that would eventually become Bennie’s, and she was working at a temp agency and had been struggling to get placed. We hit it off and I helped her get a job as a receptionist at my dad’s office while his usual assistant, Pauline, was on maternity leave. We dated for about a year and she was practically living with me at the time.”
“Here?”
I nod. “I always wanted a family, even though I rarely dated or made the time for something that important, so I bought the house hoping it would become a place for me to grow into. Then one day, I went to his office for a meeting and found him fucking her on his desk.”
Remmy winces. There was a time when telling this story would have made me want to wince, too, the memory a pretty shitty one to recall. But today, it feels like a long-ago life, a different version of me, and the emotional connection I had to that moment has been severed.
I had thought I loved Krissa, but in reality, we were very different people. My hurt at her betrayal was more about my ego than it was about her.
“She acted like it was true love with him, like what she was doing with me was just fucking around. Told me she wouldof coursechoose my very successful father over me. So I went home and dumped all her stuff on the lawn.”
