Sabrina
MY SOBS SUBSIDED. I was a wet, puffy mess. I shivered. Ryan's chest glistened, completely soaked in my tears. I looked up at him and burst into laughter. "I didn't mean to drown you. I'll get a towel."
"I have a better idea."
He clasped my hand, and pulled me down the hall into my little vintage-tiled bathroom. With a flick, he turned on the bath, like he had done it a million times before at my house, which he clearly hadn’t. While the water filled up, he looked down at me and smiled. "Let's warm you up, and get you relaxed."
That's a very good idea. After being so emotionally wrecked, there was no way that I was up for energetic sex—at least not right now. But I still wanted to touch him, to hold him, and have him hold me.
Maybe this was intimacy, I thought.
He held my hands, as I slipped into the bath, and then he took off his boxer shorts and stepped into the water behind me. I nestled into him, my back pressed against his awesome chest, his strong calves around mine, and his arms around my waist.
Wow.
This was a comfortable place to be. My very own personal Sun God, in my bathtub. Radiating warmth.
As I leaned against him, he put his chin on my shoulder and teased my ear with his lips. I let out a deep sigh and felt myself start to relax.
"Ryan," I said in a low voice.
"Yeah," he muttered, biting my neck, little nibbles. Little amazing nibbles.
They say that bravery is feeling the fear and doing it anyway. So I decided to be brave. "I want to tell you what happened to me."
He continued to nibble my neck. "I'm listening."
"But I don't want you to run away screaming."
He released my torso, and turned me around by my shoulders, so that he could look me in the eyes, a serious expression on his face. "There is nothing that you could tell me that would make me not want you. I've had a crush on you for a decade. Whatever you tell me is not going to change that," he said with utter sincerity.
Whoa. Okay, then.
I had only told my story to Marie, Hugo, and my therapist. But everything that Ryan did made me feel like it was safe to trust him. This was vulnerability. I recognized it, and I was going to try it and see how it fit me. I knew that I could get hurt. It was a risk. But I had already been hurt before, and closing up really hadn't helped me. It was time to try something different. So I took a deep breath and started talking.
"As you know, I was the prom queen and I dated the football quarterback in high school."
"Jonathan Sanchez?" asked Ryan.
Fuck. He knew who the asshole was. Of course he would. Soldiering on.
"Yeah. He wasn't my first boyfriend. I dated others in high school, but I dated him my senior year and then followed him to Boston for college. The short story is that once we got there, we fought, we broke up, we dated others, but then we got back together. After a while, we were inseparable. It felt inevitable that we would be together forever."
Ryan traced his hands up and down my arms, with light, soft strokes, while I talked.
"Looking back on it now, with what I know now, it was a pairing of convenience. It wasn't love, although back then I thought it was. It wasn't. It was just like we were supposed to be together, and had been together for so long, and knew each other for so long, that we were just, together. Without questioning it.
"It's not dramatic. I don't think he cheated on me. I don't think he had it in him. But now, looking back on it, he was so cold. I know now that he wasn’t a good lover. He wasn't engaged with me. He didn't question my Rules. We did it missionary position. He gave me orgasms with his fingers, which I thought was good sex. But I don't know if it was me keeping a part of myself from him, or him keeping a part from me, but neither one of us was truly open with the other. I knew that sex could be good. I knew what an orgasm felt like. But I didn't trust him. Not really."
"He never pushed you on your rules?"
"Never."
He uttered something under his breath that sounded like, "He didn't deserve you."
"So after we got back together in college, I continued at Harvard for law school, and he went to Boston University for medical school. We studied long hours, and barely saw each other. My parents approved of him. He's from a good Catholic home. My mom loved that. His parents are doctors. My dad's a doctor. They all knew each other for ages. It was all arranged. I was in love, or so I thought. So when he called me to ask me to marry him, I agreed."
The hands on my arms stilled. "He asked you to marry him over the phone?"
"Yeah. Romantic," I said sarcastically.
"No," he said emphatically, "it's not. More like a business merger."
"We had the perfect wedding. Three hundred people there. My parents announced it in the paper. They spent so much money on it, it was like a fairy tale. We had a gorgeous honeymoon in Bora Bora. It's totally cliché. Then we got back to California, bought a house, and went on with our lives. He opened up a medical practice in Los Angeles, and I worked for a mega firm in Century City. I worked all the time and I hated it. I knew that I had to put my time in, and make my way up the chain of command of the law firm. But I also knew that I wanted more. I wanted a child. I wanted a family.
"He told me that he wanted a child too, but that he wanted to wait until we were more settled. I agreed, because I was fine with that. It seemed like we were on the same page. A few years later, he agreed to start trying, and within a few months, I was pregnant.
"I was so excited. So happy. I was going to scale back my hours, and try to be both a lawyer and a mom. I didn't know how I was going to do it, but I was going to take every minute of maternity leave offered, and I was going to be a good mom.
"Well, we got bad news after one of my doctor's appointments. My baby had Down’s syndrome. Not only that but she had other problems. Heart problems. She was unlikely to survive the pregnancy, and she was unlikely to live very long if she did survive the pregnancy. I was hoping against hope that she would live, and I was reading everything I could about Down’s syndrome, happy to have a child."
He stilled. I ignored him and kept going, determined to get the story all out.
"I wanted to keep her." I whispered. "He wanted to terminate the pregnancy."
His arms tightened around me.
"It was my baby. Our baby. A wanted baby. No way was I terminating the pregnancy. He didn't want the baby. He didn't want our baby."
I fought back the tears that were welling up again.
"He was a doctor. I couldn't believe he wanted to terminate his own daughter. We fought all the time. The stress was no good for my pregnancy. He couldn't stand to be around me. We couldn't stand the sight of each other."
"If you want to stop, you can," said Ryan gently.
"No," I said determinately, "I'm going to finish this. So, I have an asshole husband who doesn't love me, and doesn't agree with me. I have a fantasy dream life, destroyed. And I have a baby growing inside me who is going to have special needs, and isn’t likely to live very long. I filed for divorce in my sixth month of pregnancy, when it became clear … when it became clear that I deserved better. I left and moved up here to Santa Barbara. I continued my pregnancy by myself, with my best friend, Marie, coming with me to my appointments. He wanted nothing to do with me, and nothing to do with our child.
"In the seventh, almost eighth month of pregnancy, I took a turn for the worse. I was admitted to the hospital on bed rest, with constant monitoring. I had to have an emergency C-section or both of us would die."
Tears streamed down my face and I started to sob, again.
"I still have nightmares about the emergency C-section. The gurney. The lights. Being rushed into the operating room. So they cut her out, and I didn't get to hold her. She was so tiny. She only weighed … ." I broke off. "She was so small. They whisked her away immediately. But then she was in the NICU and I could only touch her through the incubator. But she was suffering. The heart condition was too much for her. She lived six days.
"The coffin was the smallest I have ever seen."
I couldn't go any further. He wrapped me in a bear hug as I sobbed. "What was her name?" he asked quietly.
"Sabrina Michelle Sanchez." After a bit, I stopped crying. "There's more." I felt him nod. "I didn't recover from this. My postpartum depression got worse and worse until I was suicidal. I didn't really come close to doing it, but I had overwhelming thoughts of suicide. And those scared me so much. Marie, she saved me. She got me help." I turned around and looked at him. "So I'm a mess. My history is a mess."
We stayed in the bath in silence for what felt like a long time.
"Yeah. I can't fix that," he whispered. "Guys, we like to fix things. We like to make things better. We like to take action. This, this is part of you. It can't be fixed. But you need to know that I think that you’re the bravest and strongest woman I have ever met. And the most beautiful, inside and out."
"You still want to be with me?"
I said it as a joke, but I was really scared of what his answer would be.
"Of course," he replied. "You want me to make love to you?"
I stilled at his words. Not "fucking." "Making love." Now he was following my Rules. Or was he?
I thought about it. Yeah. I did. I nodded.
He helped me to stand up, then pulled me out of the cooling bath water. He wrapped a towel low around his hips, looking like an ad for shaving cream, and dried me off with a towel. Then he wrapped me up in one, with my arms pinned to my sides, like a swaddled baby.
Then he crashed his lips into mine and kissed me, a passionate, wet, soulful, hungry kiss.
He led me to my bedroom, where, holding my hands, and looking at me in the eyes, with the lights on, he made love to me, until we both surrendered.
I felt clean and spare, like I had been filleted down to my bones, and was starting to rebuild my muscle with good things.