Total pages in book: 116
Estimated words: 108905 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 545(@200wpm)___ 436(@250wpm)___ 363(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 108905 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 545(@200wpm)___ 436(@250wpm)___ 363(@300wpm)
We went to the bedroom, me to the dressing room and him to the bathroom. I heard the taps turning on. I found a slinky gold peignoir set and brought it with me to wear after I got out. Maybe it was a seduction thing. Maybe it wasn’t. I hadn’t decided, because I hadn’t gone over my mental future conversation with Neil, yet.
He wouldn’t care, I told myself, then guilty changed tacks to add, but you would.
I went to the bathroom and found El-Mudad stirring the bubbly bath water with his hand. “Do you still love this tub as much as you did on my first visit?”
“More,” I said with an exaggerated groan. I stripped my shirt over my head, and I noticed, in the second before the collar came up over my eyes, that the action surprised him. “Absence makes the heart grow fonder,” I finished as I slid my t-shirt down my arms.
“I must say, you’re handling this situation much better than I expected. From what Neil said…” El-Mudad’s voice trailed off.
“Oh?” I tried to keep my tone light. Neil had sent El-Mudad to me because he was worried. But was Neil so worried because he thought I couldn’t handle taking care of Olivia and myself without him?
“He simply thought—”
“I know what he thought,” I said, and the anger crept in. I let it. “You know, if he was so goddamn worried that I couldn’t handle this, why did he leave me?”
“He didn’t leave you,” El-Mudad corrected me quietly.
“But he was going to!” I didn’t want to be saintly Sophie, anymore. I wanted to be selfish and angry, the way I’d never allowed myself to be angry with Neil before. He’d nearly abandoned me, so many times. Sure, he couldn’t have controlled his cancer, or his addiction, or his daughter dying. He wouldn’t have gone through any of it, if he’d had the choice.
He didn’t have a choice when he was suicidal, I reminded myself. You know this.
I knew it, but I hated knowing it. It would have been so much easier if I didn’t.
“I have all of this pain,” I bleated helplessly. “I don’t know what to do with any of it.”
El-Mudad came to me, catching one of my hands and holding it at my side. He cupped my cheek in his palm. “Give it to me.”
Cradled in the womb-like confines of my tub, I spilled my guts like the bathroom was a slaughterhouse killing floor. I told him about how I’d given Neil that first drink the night Emma had died, and the guilt I’d been carrying over that ever since. I told him how angry I’d been at Emma, and how awful I felt for even saying it out loud. With every admission that should have made me seem like a horrible person, El-Mudad just listened sympathetically, offering a kind word now and then, but never trying to take my pain away. Never trying to fix me. When the water grew cold, he ran more to warm it. And, when I was tired, he helped me out and wrapped me in a towel, drying me as though I were helpless as a child.
We didn’t have sex. The ghost of Neil was very much between us in the bed, conjured by our mutual longing for him. We held each other, and just having the contact of human skin against mine, heat and weight there to reassure me when I woke in the night, healed me in a way I could never have anticipated.
El-Mudad stayed with us for four days. He helped care for Olivia, encouraged me to spend time with Mom—whose judgmental eyebrows came out once or twice at the idea of my brutally hot friend staying in my house while my husband was hospitalized, but otherwise, remained sympathetically put away—and most importantly, to take care of myself. He would somehow manage to make getting dressed in pants that didn’t have an elastic waist sound like a great time, and praised me for what should have been obvious things like curling my hair or putting on makeup.
I hadn’t realized how much of my normal life I’d abandoned. Sure, there was probably something insidiously anti-feminist about the idea that I couldn’t be happy without mascara and a curling iron, but I felt like I was slowly crawling back to a constant in my new, ever-changing normal. I loved getting made up and doing my hair, so if that was enough to make me feel good, I wasn’t about to worry over where my self-care fit with my personal politics.
We were eating breakfast before El-Mudad had to leave for the airport for his late afternoon flight, when the house phone rang.
I frowned at the way the caller ID displayed the name, repeating to myself, “AR Spec?” as I hit the button. “Hello?”