Page 114 of Melt for You (Slow Burn 2)
He grins around a mouthful of chicken. “Why, ’cause I’m so enlightened? Maybe I’m the latest reincarnation of the Buddha, you ever think of that?”
“Oh yes. You’re very enlightened. I can tell from the girly pink robe.”
Cam looks up at me, hazel eyes sparkling. “Exactly,” he pronounces. “Great title for another sonnet about me, don’tcha think? ‘The Man in the Girly Pink Robe.’ I can see it now. Full o’ tender endearments about my extreme lovability. You can work on it tomorrow and show it to me at dinner.”
We smile at each other, Mr. Bingley jumps up onto Cam’s lap and curls into a ball, and I push away the little voice in my head whispering how the man in the girly pink robe will soon be gone from my life forever.
TWENTY-NINE
The man in the girly pink robe and I
Sit on a bench in the park discussing the weather.
He speaks of stardust and miracles while I sigh,
Wondering how it’s so effortless to be together
With someone so different from me, yet the same,
Over laughter and food our friendship is dawning.
Yet strip away the smiling outer shells—what remains?
Two hearts in darkness, filled with unbearable longing.
Pink robes can mask pain as well as spare flesh
Can be used as somewhere to hide.
Each time we meet I’m moved afresh
By his eloquence, his beauty, his pride.
The man in the girly pink robe is like home
The safest and strongest and best that I’ve known.
“I must be getting my period,” I mutter, angrily wiping the tears from my eyes. “This is ridiculous.”
I stand, place my sonnet book back into the top drawer of my desk in my bedroom, and look out the window. It’s snowing. Flakes float sideways past the pane, gathering in white drifts like dustings of sugar on the corners of the sill.
It’s Saturday the twenty-third. The office holiday party starts in three hours.
I’m officially freaking out.
I didn’t sleep at all last night. Or the night before. Or the night before that. Dinner with Cam a few days ago left me raw in ways I didn’t expect and didn’t feel right away. It wasn’t until after he left that night that I got to thinking about what he’d said about having gratitude for my body instead of treating it like a one-night stand.
For some reason that really resonated.
The first time I went on a diet, I was twelve. I hadn’t even gotten my period yet. My mother, on the other hand, had recently turned forty and was inconsolable. Her grief at passing that milestone age was like a black shroud that hung over the house. Everyone spoke in muted tones and tiptoed around for almost a month as if someone had died.
One night at dinner when I reached for a roll from the bread basket in the middle of the table, my mother slapped my hand. “You’ve had enough,” she said tonelessly, looking at my waistline. My sister—beautiful even at nine—snickered.
That was all it took. I remember the moment clearly. It was the last time I put anything into my mouth without feeling guilt.
From then on, every billboard, every commercial, the pages of every glossy magazine declared to me in no uncertain terms that I didn’t look how I should. There were no images of voluptuous women back then, hardly any of women of color. Everyone was blonde, thin, perfect. Homogeneous. If you were a European supermodel, then you were allowed to be brunette, but you couldn’t look too “ethnic,” or forget it.
Making matters worse, I lived at the beach in Southern California. Blonde, thin, perfect women are manufactured in that area of the world like widgets. If you didn’t have straight teeth, you got braces. If you weren’t slender, you starved yourself. If you weren’t blonde, you bleached your hair. If you weren’t tan, you laid in a machine shaped like a coffin that blasted cancer-causing UV rays at your skin until it complied and turned an acceptable shade of golden brown.
