Total pages in book: 57
Estimated words: 54871 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 274(@200wpm)___ 219(@250wpm)___ 183(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 54871 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 274(@200wpm)___ 219(@250wpm)___ 183(@300wpm)
"Are you OK, Scarletta?"
The question is simple. His eyes search my face as he asks it, and I can see genuine concern there, genuine worry that he's pushed too hard, or taken too much, or damaged something that can't be repaired.
"I'm fine," I say automatically. The words come out before I can think about them, the reflexive reassurance I've been offering people my entire life. Don't worry about me. I'm fine. Everything's great. No need to concern yourself.
But I stop.
The lie hangs in the air between us, incomplete and obviously false, and I find myself asking the question I've been avoiding for as long as I can remember.
Am I OK?
Am I actually OK, or am I just saying what I think he wants to hear because that's easier than examining the truth? Am I fine, or am I so practiced at pretending to be fine that I've lost the ability to tell the difference?
The tears come before I can stop them.
They spill down my cheeks in hot streams, and I'm shaking my head no, no, I'm not OK, I'm not fine, I've never been fine, and the admission feels like pulling a thread that's been holding everything together for twenty-two years.
His face changes when he sees my tears. The concern deepens into something that looks almost like sadness, like my pain is causing him pain, like he actually cares about my answer instead of just asking the question because it's what you're supposed to do after you've made someone come until they almost passed out.
But the unmasked man doesn't tell me I'm wrong.
He doesn't try to convince me that actually, I am OK, that I'm just being dramatic, that I'm overreacting to a perfectly normal experience.
He doesn't do what Derek used to do, which was dismiss my feelings as inconvenient obstacles to his own pleasure.
"Tell me," he says instead. "Explain it to me."
The words stick in my throat.
This is the part where I'm supposed to be good with words. This is the part where my supposed talent for language should kick in and help me articulate the tangled mess inside my head.
I've written forty-seven stories about women who feel exactly what I'm feeling right now, and I've found the perfect sentences to describe their shame, and their longing, and their desperate need to be understood.
But those were fictional women.
Those were characters I could control, puppets I could manipulate into saying exactly what needed to be said at exactly the right moment.
I'm not a character.
I'm a real person with real emotions that don't come with a backspace key, and right now I can barely string together a coherent thought.
"My whole life," I start, and my voice cracks on the second word. "My whole life I've felt like something was wrong with me."
He's watching me with total attention. Not the performative listening I've experienced from therapists, and counselors, and well-meaning teachers who were really just waiting for their turn to talk.
This is something different.
This is him actually hearing me, actually caring about what I'm trying to say.
"Even when I was little…" I force the words out through the tightness in my chest. "I knew I wasn't like the other kids. They could make friends so easily, just walk up to someone on the playground and start talking, and within five minutes they'd be best friends. I could never do that. I would watch them from the corner of the schoolyard, trying to figure out what they were doing differently, what secret social code they all understood that I couldn't crack."
The tears keep coming, but I don't try to stop them.
"My mother used to tell me I was too sensitive. Too much in my own head. She said I needed to stop daydreaming and start paying attention to the real world, but the real world never made sense to me the way the worlds inside my head did. The real world was loud, and confusing, and full of people who seemed to operate according to rules I couldn't understand."
He strokes my cheek with his thumb, wiping away tears that are immediately replaced by more.
"So I retreated. Into books, at first. Then into my own writing. I created characters who felt the things I felt, who wanted the things I wanted, and I gave them happy endings because I couldn't figure out how to get one for myself. And the more I retreated, the more disconnected I became from everyone around me, eventually, I just stopped trying to connect at all."
The words are tumbling out now, faster than I can organize them, a flood of confession that's been building for years.
"I hate myself," I whisper. "I've always hated myself. For being weird. For being different. For wanting things that nice girls aren't supposed to want. My mother found one of my stories once…"
I can't even finish as the memory floods in. My sobbing gets louder. The pain of that day, so real again.