Page 113 of ClickBack

“So do I. Nearly left it in the drawer, though.”

“Why?”

“Saving it.”

“For what?”

I think of how easily I answered the woman in the store. For me. Two words I had trouble carrying all the way home.

“I don’t know,” I admit. “An occasion. You coming over. A reason besides wanting to wear it.”

Jarrett looks down at the camisole, then back at me. “You need a reason to put on your own clothes?”

“When you say it like that, no.”

“How would you say it?”

I rest my hand on his stomach and think about whether I want to answer. He doesn’t fill the pause. The television moves on to a commercial, louder than the show, and he turns it down again without looking away from me.

“I liked buying it,” I say. “I liked looking at myself in it. Then I started wondering what that said about me.”

“That you found something you liked.”

“That would be the sensible answer.”

“What’s the other one?”

I look past him at the lamp. There are conversations I have had with Di for years, in pieces small enough to laugh over before either of us has to do much with them. Jarrett is lying beside me waiting for an answer I have never put together for a man.

“When I got pregnant, people stopped needing to know anything else about me,” I tell him. “They had the part they thought explained everything. Before that, I could be smart or helpful or somebody’s daughter. Afterward, even doing well meant I was making up for something.”

He turns onto his side. “You were sixteen.”

“Yes.”

“Sixteen, Zel.”

“I know. I can look at a girl that age now and know how young she is. Back then, I was mostly trying to make people stop looking at me the way they did.”

He takes my hand off his stomach and holds it between us. I can feel how badly he wants to say something. For once, he waits.

“I learned to be useful,” I say. “Dependable. The woman you could leave in charge. People got comfortable with that version of me, and I did, too.” I glance down at the silk. “She didn’t require much explaining.”

“And this does?”

“It shouldn’t.”

“I’m asking you.”

I look at him. “Sometimes it still feels that way.”

He moves closer, then stops with our knees touching. His face has none of the teasing I rely on when I want to get out of a conversation.

“Is that what happened after the call?” he asks.

“Some of it. You went away, and I started wondering whether I had done too much. As though you hadn’t just asked to come over.”

“I should’ve told you what was happening.”