Page 26 of Love What's Left
I can only eat a quarter of the delicious sandwich because I want chocolate cake, and if I finish the whole thing, I won’t have room. When he picks up his fork and digs into his dessert, I perform another swap.
Chocolate melts on my tongue, and all my taste buds fire at once, my mouth reacting with violent joy to the sweet confection. I don’t moan, but it’s a near thing.
The man watches me eat, a smile crinkling the corners of his eyes, as though he’s beyond happy to be sitting here with me, eating cake. He hasn’t demanded that I do anything yet, unless you count begging me to eat.
“What do you want from me?” I ask.
“For you to be healthy and happy.”
“What’s in it for you?” I speak the words slowly, careful to say what I mean.
“I want my wife back,” he says hoarsely.
“I don’t . . . understand.”
“I love you.”
“No you don’t.”
Something cracks behind his eyes, old and new at the same time. “You can tell me how you feel. You don’t get to decide what I do.”
“I don’t love you.” Only after I speak the words, do I process that if he told the truth, then I’ve just been horribly cruel.
“You will.” He clears his throat and looks away. “For now, you can think of me as a friend. The important thing is your recovery.”
“Where will I go after?” Suddenly, the idea of leaving this man sends despair into my veins. It’s like whiplash, fearing and needing him. Maybe it’s Stockholm syndrome. With food in me, I can think more clearly, and my stomach is full to the point of cramping, so why do my heart and gut feel hollow at the idea of running?
“When you feel ready to get back to normal life, we can go home to New York.”
He says those words with patience, but I sense he’s told me this before. I want to rip away his calm and see what’s underneath. I want to poke at that crack until I see the kind of person he is when he’s angry at me. Then I’ll know.
“Home,” I say slowly, testing the word. With this man who scowls, then feeds me and holds me, and just showed me that smile. Who says he loves me, but I don’t know him.
The crotchety orange cat rubs against my legs, and I bend to run my fingers through the soft fur on his head. An image pops into my head of him yowling at me to feed him. He’d eaten the center part of his dinner, and the bottom of his white and blue bowl was showing. I had to shake the dish to redistribute the food, so he understood it wasn’t actually empty. “Why are you so goofy? Stop staring at the empty part and look at the rest of the bowl.”
It’s a new memory. Maybe all I need to do is go home. Sleep in my own bed. Eat from my own dishes. “I should go b-back to the g-group home. Call Franny.”
His face fills with so much regret that every muscle I have goes rock-hard in fear.
“I’m so sorry, but Franny passed five years ago. And that group home hasn’t existed for more than a decade.”
Loss layers over loss so thick I can barely pull air into my oxygen-starved lungs. Franny was staff, not my mother. But she was a good person. She did her best. She was the one who didn’t change jobs or placements every six months. It wasn’t great living in a group home, but it meant I stayed in one place and could focus on grades and soccer. It was the closest thing to a home I had.
I stand to face him. “How old are you? How could you . . . t-take me away?”
“I didn’t take you—” His eyebrows twitch, then smooth back out as he shakes his head. “I’m thirty-three. We were married a little over a year ago.”
“Gross.”
He covers his eyes, then rubs his temples.
Heshouldbe ashamed of himself. “I don’t care how pretty or r-rich you are. Marrying a teenager is sick.”
When he drops his hand, the haggard expression from this morning is back. “You’ll turn thirty on your next birthday.”
“You lie.”
He shakes his head. “Would you like to see your driver’s license? Your social media accounts?”
