Page 30 of Goode to Be Bad
Silent.
“So.” I bumped her with my shoulder. “You and your mom talked?”
She nodded, letting out a short breath. “Yeah. I told her what happened with me and Marcus—the affair, the abortion, getting kicked out of school, losing my scholarship.”
“And? How’d she take it?”
She sniffed, a sound sort of like a laugh but not quite. “I don’t know why I was so scared to talk to her. She told me she was disappointed with my decision to have an affair with a married man, which I expected, and it’s something I’m going to feel guilty about for probably the rest of my life. I mean, granted, there were rumors his wife was cheating on him with someone, but that’s no excuse on my end. I always swore I’d never be the other woman, and I became the other woman. He resigned, you know. They moved to North Carolina. He’s at Duke, now. He had tenure at Sarah Lawrence, and I cost him that.” She sighed. “The abortion was harder for her. Mainly because she’s angry and sad that I didn’t tell her, didn’t call her. She understood why I did it, but she…I dunno. It’s hard for her, as a mother of five, to consider—” She couldn’t finish. “I just couldn’t even think of any other options. There weren’t any, in my mind.”
“It was your choice, Lex. Yours and yours alone.”
“I know.” She tried to smile at me, but didn’t quite succeed—I’d never seen her this vulnerable, this quiet, this soft, this open. I felt like I was walking on eggshells, carefully considering every syllable, every movement, for fear of her shutting down again. “I appreciate you saying that, though. Mom…I think she would have convinced me to carry the…the baby…” this was in a whisper, barely audible, “to term, and adopt it out.” A wretched sob. “It. Fuckingit?”
I had no clue what to do or say. I just leaned closer so my shoulder was against hers, hip to hip, thigh to thigh. Just there. Quiet and letting her speak.
“I couldn’t have.” She was breathing carefully, slowly, measured. “I couldn’t have done that. I know I’m, like, this emotionless ice queen, but…deep down, I’m not. Not really.”
“You’re not an ice queen, Lex. You just keep certain things inside.”
“Certain things. Nice dodge, Myles.” She sighed bitterly. “I’m an ice-cold bitch, with an extremely limited range of expressible emotions. I’ll party it up and have fun with the best of them, tell jokes and be silly, but that’s about it.” A glance at me. “Don’t have to tell you about my emotional unavailability, do I?”
Truth? Or caution?
“No, honestly, you don’t. I’m…well aware.”
“I wish I knew how to be different, Myles. I really do.”
“I mean, you could try? A little bit a time, you know? Like, it’s baby steps to the elevator, Bob. No one expects you to turn into this emotional mush parade overnight, or at all. But just…open up a little.” I nudged her temple with my forehead. “Like you are now.”
“Thank you for…for recognizing it.” A pause. “I’m afraid this is probably a freak one-off event, Myles. Mom can get me open, to some degree, but I’m gonna close up any second now, so you better grab your pearl while you’ve got the chance.”
“I guess if there’s any pearl I’m interested in grabbing, it’d be an explanation for what happened in that janitor closet, at the end there. Something happened with you, Lex. I know it did. I felt it.”
She swallowed hard. Twined her fingers together in tight shifting knots, picked at her cuticles, making fists. “I…shit. Of course it’d be that.”
“There was something, wasn’t there?”
She nodded. “Yeah.”
“Tell me? Please.”
She rubbed her face with both hands. “It’s complicated. And I don’t think you’re going to like hearing some of the explanation. But I gave you the opening and you took it, so I’ll answer.” A long pause. “I don’t know how to start.”
“Just the truth, whatever it is, and don’t worry about how you think I’ll react, or what I’ll think.”
“Brutal truth?”
I nodded, held her gaze. “Always, Lex. Always.”
“Fine. So you’ve probably figured out by now that I don’t ever let anyone raw dog me. That’s been a rule of mine for forever. Hard and fast rule, never broken it, ever.”
I frowned. “Never?”
“I still to this day have no clue how I ended up pregnant. A one in a billion chance, I guess. I’ve got an IUD, and I’m still well within the effectivity range, since I’m on the nonhormonal kind which last for like twelve years or something crazy. And I used a condom, and I mean literally every time.” She glanced at me. “That moment you were bare inside me, that was, and this is the literal honest truth, the only time I have ever voluntarily allowed a man inside me without a condom.”
“I wouldn’t say you allowed it.”
She tore her gaze away. “Well, it still happened. And that’s the salient point, here. You were bare inside me. That’s what started it.” A silence. “Because I…I liked it. A lot.” She was whispering. “I wanted to keep going like that. I’ve never, ever wanted that with anyone, ever. Not Marcus, not anyone.”