Page 70 of Face Off

The question surprised both of us.

Charm set the fork against her plate without releasing it. “Do you really want to know?”

“I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t.”

“I’m better.” She considered the answer before continuing. “I don’t say recovered because it makes it sound finished. It isn’t. I still have bad days, and sometimes the first thought in my head is the one I spent years teaching myself to believe.”

“What thought?”

“That my body is the problem.”

My jaw tightened.

Charm held my gaze. “I was sicker than you knew.”

“I knew you weren’t okay.”

“You knew the parts I couldn’t hide. You knew I was anxious, that I took vanity to the next level. You knew I would complain about pieces of my body.” She swallowed. “You didn’t know what happened when I was alone.”

“Tell me.”

Her eyes searched mine. “I measured everything. Sometimes more than once a day. My waist, hips, thighs, arms. The number never reassured me for long, so I’d stand in front of the mirror and pinch whatever part of myself I thought had changed. I called myself things I would never say to another person.”

“What things?”

“Disgusting. Weak. Out of control.” Her voice remained quiet but steady. “Sometimes I stood there and told my reflection I hated her until I cried. Then I hated myself for crying because that felt weak too.”

The image drove directly through me. Charm alone in a bathroom, putting her own body on trial while I believed wanting her loudly enough might teach her how to stop.

“I depended too much on the way you looked at me,” she continued. “When you wanted me, I could borrow your version of me for a while. I felt beautiful because you made it impossible not to believe you. Then you’d leave the room, and everything I hated came back.”

“You never told me.”

“I didn’t know how. I also knew you were already carrying too much of me.”

The truth in that pissed me off even while I understood it. “You don’t get to decide what I could’ve carried.”

“I know that now.”

“I would’ve wanted to know.”

“I know.”

“I spent months thinking if I told you enough, touched you enough, or showed you how fucking obsessed I was with your body, eventually you’d believe me.”

“I did believe you.”

“Only while I was there to keep saying it.”

Her eyes glistened. “Yes.”

I leaned back and dragged one hand across my mouth. That answer could’ve opened every old wound if I let it. It could’ve turned the dinner into another examination of everything I failed to recognize and every way Charm had hidden while I fought to reach her.

I refused to let it.

“What happens now?” I asked. “On the bad days.”

“I tell someone. I step away from the mirror. I eat the next meal even if my head tells me I haven’t earned it.” Her fingers tightened around the fork. “If I slip, I say it before one skipped meal becomes permission to disappear again.”