“It’s not like hers or Iris’s or Iris’s mom’s, or any of our family’s. It seems like such a small thing now, but growing up, it was a big deal. It made me feel like I wasn’t good enough.”

I shrug, a dismissive gesture that doesn’t come close to telling the story of how my mother rejected me in a million small ways before she rejected me in the greatest way possible. In the worst way possible.

“She had this boyfriend who . . .” I falter, my throat closing around the secrets, around the dark memories. My body is reluctant to release them, but I have to. I’m not holding onto this trauma. It’s holding onto me. It has me in a vise grip. I have to get it out to move on.

“Dammit,” I mutter, twisting my fingers in my lap.

“Baby, you don’t have to—”

“I want to,” I tell him, glancing up. “I need you to know.”

He stares down at me and passes a callused thumb over my lips. “Okay. Tell me.”

I nod and swallow, forcing myself to keep going. “She had a boyfriend.”

“What was his name?” Kenan demands before I can go any further. His hand is clenched into a tight fist on his knee.

“Ron Clemmons,” I reply in a hushed voice.

I want it behind me. I want it out in the open and left behind so I can run forward.

“He, um . . . he raped me when I was twelve.”

“He . . .” Kenan’s words get caught up in his throat like a jammed rifle. “Is he in jail? What happened to—”

“He’s in hell,” I interrupt, the words falling fast, sharp, heavy like a guillotine, quick to execute judgment. “We made sure.”

I meet the questions collecting in Kenan’s eyes, but he doesn’t ask how one “makes sure” someone goes to hell because I think he knows that is, believe it or not, the least important part of this story.

“When I told my mother what he’d done,” I continue, the hardness melting into a sorrow I’m not sure when or if I’ll ever be able to shed. “she didn’t believe me.”

A hollow laugh spills over my lips. “Or she did believe me, but didn’t care. Not enough to give him up.”

“You’re saying she stayed with that motherfucker?” Kenan demands, pulling back to stare at me. “After what he did to you, she stayed with him?”

“She chose him and sent me to live with MiMi.”

“That’s how you ended up living with MiMi?” Kenan’s voice rises, powered by outrage and fury and scorn. “What kind of woman does that? Baby, what the . . .”

He stands abruptly, prowling in tight circles like he’s caged and doesn’t have full use of the expensive apartment, only that tiny portion his feet outline in the carpet. His breathing changes, becoming erratic.

“Kenan,” I say gently, standing and approaching him. “It’s okay.”

“The hell it’s okay.” The words charge out of him like a battle cry, and murder and bloodlust seethe in the eyes looking down at me. “How could she choose that piece of shit over you? Over her own daughter, knowing that he . . .”

He slams his eyes shut maybe against images that for me are more than imaginations. They’re memories.

He shoves breath through his nostrils like a bull. Just this morsel of the dismay I’ve eaten all my life nauseates him, turns his stomach and sickens him. His fists open and clench compulsively at his sides. He can barely contain his rage on my behalf, and it makes me love him that much more.

I love him.

There is no more falling. There is no more choice or turning back. It’s done. I’m his in every way but one.

“I didn’t have trouble with sex,” I tell him, calm falling over me like a veil. “I needed to figure out why I’d always been able to have sex and feel nothing, until it made me sick that I felt nothing. I’d been detaching emotionally.”

“So you stopped having sex,” he says, searching my face.

“Yes, I had to figure it out. My counselor says our minds do that sometimes to protect us. We forget, compartmentalize, detach. Whatever mechanism it takes to survive, we do it, but then when it stops working, you have to deal with the shit you’ve hidden from yourself.”

My laugh is dry and self-mocking. “Mine stopped working this summer. So I decided to stop having sex right when the sexiest man I’ve ever met started sniffing around.”

“You better mean me,” he says, humor breaking through his scowl for the first time since I started my story.

“Yeah, you,” I confirm softly. “I was so afraid to risk myself with you at first, and then I was afraid that the same emptiness, bleakness I felt with sex before, I’d feel with you.”

I walk over to stand in front of him and take his hand, link our fingers. “I was afraid it would happen again.”

“What would happen?” he asks, confusion in the glance he gives me.

“I’d have sex and feel nothing but emptiness, bleakness,” I say uneasily. “But the last time I had a flashback and panicked. I was so scared. As soon as it was over, I cried like a baby.”

“And you thought that might happen with me, too?”

“I was afraid if it happened with you, there was no hope, considering how I feel about you.”

Tension throbs in the beat of silence following my statement.

“And how do you feel about me?” he asks, his eyes alert, intense.

The words lodge in my mouth. Too many confessions in one night. Too many things I’ve exposed to him. I’m tired of telling. I want to show him how I feel. I don’t need words to tug at the tiny crystalline bow holding the shells together that cover my breasts. It loosens easily. Liberated, my breasts fall free. Kenan’s eyes drop to my nipples, hard and round, before returning to my face and waiting for my next move.

I shrug one shoulder, letting the sleeve slip down my arm until the shirt dangles from my body. I shrug again and the other sleeve slides away, dragging the insubstantial scraps of silk to the floor.

Still his unblinking stare doesn’t stray from my face, searching my eyes.

I slide a finger into the tiny slit holding my velvet pants together at the waist, unbuttoning and pulling them down over my hips and stepping out. They lay with the blouse in a pool of expensive fabric at my feet. His expression is as stony and impenetrable as the face of a cliff, but his fingers twitch, and I know he’s dying to touch me. I’m dying to touch him back. I tuck my thumbs under the little strings of my thong and start pushing, but his big hands at my hips stop me.

“No.” It’s his first word since I started stripping. “Let me.”

Our glances tangle. My mouth tingles, trembles. I lick my lips with something approaching nervousness and nod my permission for him to finish undressing me.

Finally, his eyes roam all over my body, from my toes and knees, over my thighs and hips and waist, lingering at my breasts. A lifetime passes before I feel the slightest pressure at my hips, his long fingers pushing at my thong. His palms slide down and under the strings to cup my bare ass. My breath hitches when he squeezes gently. His hands are so large, they cup each cheek completely. He keeps pushing until the thong slides the last few inches past my shins to cuff my ankles.

I stand before him completely nude, but feeling no more exposed than I did when I told him about Ron, about my mom and my struggles. That was true nakedness. This body he’s seen before, but you wouldn’t know that by the intent way he watches me, like if he looks away he’ll miss a breath.

“Is there anything I should know?” he asks, searching my face. “Anything you don’t like, or don’t want me to do?”

“Don’t . . .” I haul in a breath. “Don’t hold my arms over my head.”

“Okay,” he agrees softly. “Anything else?”

“Everything we’ve done so far has been amazing, but I’m not completely sure what might, um . . . trigger me.” I shrug and lick my lips. “But I want to try with you. I want you.”

“You sure?” he asks, and there is a quality to his voice that speaks of restraint at its limit. I know for a fact that if I said right now I couldn’t, I didn’t want to, he wouldn’t, but I also know that as soon as he’s sure I want this as much as he does, he will devour me.

And I want to be eaten whole. Don’t parcel me up. Don’t take me in small bites. Consume me in one starving gulp, because that’s how I want him.

I tip up on my toes, pushing my breasts into him, relishing the bite of the buttons from his suit vest pressing into my naked flesh.

“I’m ready,” I whisper, my voice breathy and nearly broken with suppressed desire.

My words unleash the storm. He sweeps me up and walks us to his bedroom, kicking the door closed. This isn’t his first time seeing me this way, but now we both know I won’t stop. Tonight, we’re taking a step I didn’t know when I’d be ready for, and if I’m being honest, I can’t be sure how I’ll respond to it. I won’t know until I try. My mind might play the same tricks on me, on my emotions. My body and my heart are ready, but my mind may not comply. I could end up sobbing alone in Kenan’s shower the way I did Chase’s.

The tenderness in Kenan’s eyes makes my heart pause, skip beats and then pound. No, I won’t sob in the shower alone. If I cry, it’ll be in Kenan’s arms. If it feels bleak, I’ll let him past the walls to comfort me. That’s the bond of intimacy we’ve established—one I never had with anyone else.

Once I’m standing in front of Kenan, I venture under his suit jacket, finding his shoulders to slide the perfectly tailored coat over sleekly muscled arms, like steel inside the expensive cotton. A man in a suit vest has always set me off. Kenan in the vest, the crisp white shirt contrasting, is almost beyond bearing. I deftly begin undoing the buttons and he doesn’t stop me, nor does he offer assistance.

He’s a magnificent mountain of a man, every line, sinew, and muscle sculpted with a master’s skill and attention to detail. Even his roughest edges appeal to me. The scars and nicks in his flesh from battles on the court. The hands callused from years of ball handling and the rigors of professional sport. I’m in awe of the physical specimen standing in front of me.