Page 17 of Bonds of Shame, Bonds of Lust

"I don't even know where I would start," I admitted. "I went from my father’s house to college to Brad. I don't know how to flirt. I don't know what people expect now, what the rules are, whether there even are rules. I don't know if I can let someone touch me without half my brain lighting up with everything I'm supposed to feel bad about." I stopped. That was more than I meant to say.

Janice tilted her head. "What are you really scared of? Not the surface things. The real one."

I held the mug tighter. The real one.

"That I won't feel anything," I said finally. "That someone will look at me and want me and I'll just be numb. Whatever switch gets flipped in normal people got disconnected in me somewhere along the way. And I won't know until I'm standing in the middle of it, and then I'll know for certain, and that will be worse than not knowing." I looked down at my coffee. "Brad said there was something missing in me. When he left. He said it like it explained everything."

Janice was quiet for exactly long enough.

"He said that," she repeated, very evenly, "while he was fucking two of his students on your couch. And then he took your money. And now he wants more of it."

"I know."

"That man," she said, "has the self-awareness of a decorative gourd."

I laughed, a real one, surprised out of me. It felt strange in my chest, like a muscle I had forgotten I had.

"You are not numb," Janice said, leaning in again. "There is nothing missing in you. You are a thirty-five-year-old woman who got told no, and that's unreasonable enough times that you stopped asking. Those are different things." She held my gaze and did not let it go.

"You didn't lose your appetite. You just stopped being fed."

11 - THE PROWLING CAT

Janice

I'd had the photograph ready for days. There's a timing to these things. Too early and she bolts; too late and the moment closes. You wait for the day she's soft.

Oh, but she's always so soft, said my inner prowling cat.

Down, girl! I told myself.

Because today Lacey was ready. Brad telling her nobody would want what was left of her. What I felt like doing was driving to wherever Brad was and putting my thumbs through his eyes. Between her dad's moralizing and Brad's… whatever, I doubt she'd ever had a second of guilt-free sex.

"So," I said, and got the phone out, tapped it twice, held it across the table like it was nothing.

She looked. Ricardo. Against the brick wall, guitar, laughing at something off-camera.

"His name is Ricardo," I said. "Twenty-four. Graduate student, music theory. He's not looking for anything heavy. He's kind, he's safe, he's clean, and in all the time I've known him he's never once made a woman feel anything but completely at ease."

She meant to look for a second. Then another.

And there went her throat, pink climbing up out of her collar, and she hadn't the faintest idea it was happening. I watched it go up her neck and felt it pulse in me, the way it only ever does with her. Married to a man who told her she was cold. Cold, for fuck's sake. There is a furnace in this woman and I've watched her hand the pilot light to an idiot. I imagined what that furnace would be like. I imagined that a great deal.

She surfaced, and I watched the sensible reasons arrive, the whole tedious committee she convenes whenever she feels anything.

I took the phone back.

"Mm," I said.

"Don't."

"I didn't say anything."

"You said 'mm' in the specific way that means you saw something."

"I saw you look at a photograph roughly four times longer than you look at anything." I stirred my latte. "Your neck also went pink."

Her hand flew to her throat, then thought better of it. "My hormones are having a very difficult month."