#chapter Thirty-Seven
I used to be incapable of imagining any way Ian could ever disappoint me; that’s how hard I’d fallen. Everything he did was perfect and alluring and delightful. My head knew that the realities of things like sharing space and debts and chores would surely wear that all away. That’s what happens in relationships. You get used to each other, and the habits and mannerisms that once you found so charming become the grain of sand in an oyster. If you love each other enough, you make a pearl around the things that make you crazy. If you don’t…well. Lots of people don’t. My head knew that, but my stupid heart refused to pay attention.
Still, I did find it hard to believe Ian could ever make me go white-hot with rage. There were none of those niggling, back-of-the-mind excuses about behavior I’d made for other lovers. And with so little time, all of it stolen, there was no place for silly arguments.
And that’s the issue. Time. I don’t have enough of it, and Ian doesn’t seem to understand that whatever time there was, it needs to be cherished. Not wasted.
“Lunch,” I say to his tiny, precious face in my phone’s screen. I should’ve known better than to let him video call me. It always makes it harder to resist him, but who am I kidding. I can never resist Ian. “An hour?”
Ian’s nose wrinkles, and he shakes his head. “I’d have to leave the office, fight traffic…plus I already brought my lunch.”
“So you’re saying you’d choose a dry turkey sandwich at your desk over lunch with me?” I keep my voice light, almost teasing. I don’t want him to know how desperate I am to see him. It’s been over two weeks, and the last chance we had was only for an hour or so. If that’s all I can get, I’ll take it, but it’s not enough. It’s never enough.
“What time would you want to meet? And where?”
“How about Ambrosia. It’s that new place about twenty minutes from your office. At eleven? So it’s not crowded, we’ll avoid traffic…” I trail off, already seeing the ‘no’ in his face. I won’t beg. I won’t chase.
“Nah. That’s quite a hike. Just can’t make it work. Another time, maybe. Sorry.” He doesn’t sound sorry at all.
We make another few minutes of small talk, but my answers are curt and I can’t really look at him any more. I cut the call short and sit with my phone in my hands, staring at the screen, which seems blanker without his face decorating it. I eat my own lunch at my desk, and though my phone pings with a message from him, I don’t even look at it until it’s time to go home.
It’s not the only time Ian passes up a chance for us to get together. For days he’ll message me constantly throughout the day, sending photos, jokes, flirty emoticons. Sometimes, he makes wistful comments like “really wish I could see you.”
But when I give him the chance to really see me, not in a photo or a video call but my real face, my real hands, my real mouth…he can’t manage to make it happen. It makes me desperate, hating myself for being the stereotypical, clinging girlfriend who can’t let her man out of her sight long enough to have a life to go out with friends or even time alone.
Except that I’m not Ian’s girlfriend, and we don’t have much time as it is. There are vast, long stretches when seeing him is impossible, so when I am able to make the space in my complicated and increasingly stressful life, is it so wrong for me to expect him to find a way to see me?
Apparently Ian thinks so, and that’s when I discover I can be disappointed in him, after all.
It is our first fight, and it’s a doozy. Predictably, it happens when we actually are together, which makes me feel all the more irrational for complaining — and I fucking hate feeling irrational and out of control with the fire of a hundred thousand supernova suns. I’ve managed to convince Ian to meet me for an hour or two in one of those cheesy roadside motels that feature little cabins instead of a long row of rooms. Our cabin is number six, and I paid forty-nine dollars cash for the night, even though we won’t be staying much past eight o’clock.
The double bed doesn’t look particularly comfortable, but the comforter is a whimsical quilt and the artwork is framed photographs that look as though an actual person took them, not pictures in frames bought in bulk. I study one — a covered bridge. It’s a common theme around here, but this black and white shot has managed to capture something almost creepy about the traditional composition of bridge and stream and road.
“Cry Baby Bridge,” I say with a snap of my fingers. “That’s what it reminds me of!”
Ian has turned on the television. Without a remote, he has to flip through the channels by hand. The first flicker of annoyance sidesteps its way through me. We’re here to fuck, not watch The Price is Right.
“Ever heard of it?”
He looks at me. “Huh?”
“Cry Baby Bridge. It’s supposed to be about an hour from here. It’s one of those urban legend things.” I watch his face for any signs of recognition, but of course that sort of stuff is my purview, not Ian’s. He’ll dismiss it as silliness, I’m sure. “Some young unwed mother in 1880 or something like that was supposed to have jumped to her death there. You’re supposed to be able to hear the baby crying.”
Ian shrugs without much interest. “Creepy.”
“We should go.” I say it impulsively. I cross to him, pull him by the collar toward me for a kiss. “You wanna?”
“Now?”
“No.” I think for a moment, calculating ahead, putting pieces together that hadn’t, until just now, fit. “Sunday.”
Chad will be out of town with his fishing buddies from sometime before dawn until probably late at night. Ian and I could have the whole day together. A nice drive. A creepy bridge. Lunch. And, if the timing’s right, I’m sure we could find another of these roadside cabins and get naked, but really…
“I want to spend the day with you. I just want some time.” I find his mouth for a kiss. I pull him closer, breathing him in. Already my breath is quickening, my pulse leaping. Heat in my throat and chest and between my legs.
“You’re spending time with me right now.” His hands roam along my back, my ass, anchor on my hips. His mouth finds my throat and I want to tip my head back to take advantage of this embrace, but something in his tone stops me.
“Well…yeah. But does that mean we can’t spend the day together on Sunday, too? It would be fun.”
Ian looks shifty. Not guilty — if I didn’t know better, I might think he has someone else to spend his Sunday with, and I know that’s not true. At least, I used to know it. Now I’m not so sure.
I step out of his embrace. “Ian.”
“Let’s just enjoy the time we have right now.” He tries to pull me closer, but I’m not having it.
Ian often makes my hands shake, but from desire. Now another heated emotion is twitching my fingers so I have to curl them into fists and tuck them into my armpits, my crossed arms a shield. “You don’t want to spend the day with me?”
Ian sighs and scrubs at his mouth with the back of his hand for a moment. “Look, we’re here together, now. It’s Wednesday. You’re talking about Sunday already. Spend the day together? And before you know it, we’ll be sneaking off for nooners three times a week…”
“And?” I shoot back at him. Shit, my voice is shaking as much as my hands. “What’s your point? You don’t want to see me three times a week? Or is it just that you don’t want to see me unless you’re fucking me? We can fuck on Sunday, if you really want to, I’m sure we can find someplace to go.”
I’ve never seen Ian angry. Maybe, like me, he never thought I could make him. He’s pissed off now, though. His entire expression goes hard-edged and fierce.
“Stop it, Maura.”
I should stop it. I should not pick a fight now, wasting the precious minutes we have. The only ones, apparently, I’m going to get until who knows when. But I am tired of being put off. Tired of excuses.
“Spend the day with me on Sunday. The whole day.”
“I can’t make it work,” Ian says, voice flat and final. “Sorry.”
“Why not?”
“Because first you want to meet me for lunch, then you want to meet me here, then you want to spend the day with me. It’s too much. We need to put the brakes on this.”
Medusa has nothing on the look I give him. “Are you fucking kidding me?”
Ian hasn’t turned to stone. He reaches for me, but I duck away from his grasp. “C’mon. Maura. Don’t be like that.”
“Like what?” Eyes narrowed, voice harsh, I’m daring him. To call me a bitch, maybe a crazy bitch. Maybe he’ll throw ‘needy’ in there, too.
“Just don’t.”
“I’m asking you for too much? Is that what you’re trying to tell me?” Fighting tears, I search for my purse. Thank God we aren’t naked. Thank God I can get out of here before I burst into hysterical, wrenching sobs.
“It’s going too fast!” Ian shouts.
I stop. Turn. We’ve known each other for almost two years. We talk several times a week, several times a day— when Ian wants to. Less often but still frequently when he does not. It’s only been a few months since we started fucking, but we do that when he wants, too.
This is an imperfect thing, what we have, but it’s all there is for us right now. And after all that, he’s telling me it’s too much. We’re going too fast.
“Snails could outrace us at this point, Ian.” I shrug my purse over my shoulder and head for the door.
Ian manages to snag my sleeve enough to turn me. “Don’t go.”
“Why? You want to get your dick sucked before I do? Is that it? That’s not too fucking fast for you is it? I promise you,” I say with a smile that has nothing to do with joy, “I can make it slow.”
I can see the struggle in his eyes and the shape of his mouth as he works to form words he’s smart enough not to say. Even so, what he does say is bad enough. “It’s just crossing a line.”
“What is?”
“Spending the day with you. It would be too much.” Ian shakes his head and backs up a step. “That’s all.”
“But fucking me, that’s okay? Texting me pictures of your hard cock, that’s not crossing a line?” My voice is getting louder, raking at my throat. I’m sure I am wild-eyed, and I don’t care. “Telling me you love me, Ian, that’s not crossing a fucking line?”
I’m screaming by the time I get to the end of my sentence. I don’t care who hears me. I don’t even care if he thinks I am a raging harridan. I throw my purse on the ground hard enough to spill everything out of it. I hear the crack of something breaking. I don’t care about that, either.
“Maybe you didn’t mean it,” I shout, “but I sure as fuck believed you. You know how I feel about you, and I ask you for next to fucking nothing, Ian, because I’m so goddamned tired of being told no, and every time you turn me down, I tell myself it is the last fucking time. Because this is not working. Because I have shit I need to deal with in my life, and it’s tearing me apart and breaking me down, but I am fucking doing it, Ian, I am ripping my life apart at the seams, and I am not doing it for you. I’m doing it because I can not fucking live another moment the way I have been, and because…” I falter, voice raw, breath harsh in my throat, tears blinding me. “Goddammit, Ian. I love you. And maybe you don’t love me back, but you just keep letting me. So tell me again why spending some time with me is crossing a line. Please. Tell me how that works, because I just don’t understand.”
“What the hell do you want from me? What do you think this is, exactly? A relationship?”
I hate him in that moment, for making me into everything I despise. Weak and clinging and needy. Desperate. But I will be damned if I let him see me that way.
“I hate to break the news to you, sweetheart,” I tell him in a cold, faraway voice, “but like it or not, yes. That’s exactly what this is.”
Ian says nothing.
I bend to gather the contents of my purse, shoving everything in haphazardly, not caring that I spill coins and tampons and lipsticks all over. I find my keys, but when I try to stand, I can’t. I can not stand. All I can do is crumple to my hands and knees on that shitty motel room carpet and begin to cry.
I want to fight his hands on me, but I can’t do that either. Ian helps me up. Leads me to the bed. I turn my face away from his kiss. Fight him when he tries to hold me. I make my body stiff and unyielding. I make myself refuse him.
Ian pins my wrists with one hand. Locks his fingers in my hair. He’s stronger than I am, holding me when I struggle, but I want to make him hurt me. I want the bruises. They’ll be proof of my pain he won’t be able to ignore. I fight him, but Ian won’t let go.
“I’m sorry,” he says, over and over. “I’m so sorry.”
He kisses me, and I let him.
“Don’t cry, Maura. Please don’t cry.”
He touches me, and I let him.
“I never wanted to hurt you.”
He undresses me, and I let him.
Ian pushes me back onto the bed. Works at my clothes. His fingers and tongue find my bare skin. His mouth slides along my inner thigh. He finds my clit. Fingers inside me, tongue working, Ian murmurs a long list of everything he plans on doing to me.
He makes love to me with his mouth, and I let him.
When it’s over, and I am spent, panting on the bed with him kissing my mouth, Ian says to me, “you are my flower, Maura. My flower in the desert. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Please forgive me.”
Ian apologizes to me, but I can’t forgive him.