Page 73 of The Frog Prince
Brian returns from the kitchen, hands me a soda instead. “Sorry about the mess.” He nods at the boxes and crates. “I need to get more bookshelves, I think.”
You think?
“Have kids?” I ask, and I don’t know why. There’s just something so lonely about a small apartment without furniture, blinds at the window, without a feeling of home.
“No.” He uncaps his beer, takes a drink. “We spent too many years fighting to ever make love.”
“I’m sorry.” And I am. Brian Fadden just feels so big, so real, so imposing that this little apartment strikes me as wrong. “How long have you been here?”
“Nearly four years.” He flashes me his wry smile. “Ever since I returned from Fresno.”
“I thought your divorce was only recently finalized.”
“It was. I waited a couple years to file. She said she didn’t care. She said I could do whatever the hell I wanted. So I took her literally and didn’t bother to do anything.” He gestures to the brown futon hunched pathetically on the floor. “Have a seat.”
I perch on a windowsill instead. “She went down to Fresno with you?”
“For a while.” He takes another sip of his beer and grabs a milk carton, drags it forward, and sits down on it, his denim-clad legs looking a mile long. He’s wearing loafers—with tassels—but the loafers are so old and scuffed and water-stained, they look fine.
“Do you want kids?” I persist.
“Maybe. Someday. You?”
I circle my soda, the can so cold against my skin. Yeah, I want kids. I want two, three—you know, the usual. “I did. My husband didn’t.” And it feels so funny even to call Jean-Marc my husband now. I’ve been in San Francisco only five months, and yet our life together—that brief span of time—seems light-years away.
It probably doesn’t help that Jean-Marc never acted like my husband, either.
“Is that why you divorced?”
“That and—” I break off, shocked that I almost blurted,He didn’t want to do me, as if that’s something you can say.
“And?”
I hesitate. “He didn’t want to be married to me.”
“He’s a fool.”
I shake my head, bite my lip.
“Maybe he’s gay,” Brian says.
It’d be convenient to believe, and it’s what everyone likes to suggest, but I don’t think it’s true. I think it’s me. I did something to Jean-Marc’s libido. I killed whatever attraction… desire… love existed.
Brian leans forward, grabs my hand, and he’s pulling me to my feet, moving me toward him, and I resist only a little. I don’t wanthim, but I could use comfort.
Yet do I want comfort from him?
No. Truthfully, I’m not sure what I want from Brian. I like him; I enjoy his company; he’s interesting and he makes me laugh. But part of me is still numb and chilly on the inside, as if I were standing one person removed from myself and couldn’t quite figure out how to get back inside my own body.
But Brian brings me between his knees. He’s sitting on a crate, sitting low, but he’s still so tall, we’re nearly at eye level. “How old are you, Holly Bishop?”
He’s combing his fingers through my hair, and I feel a little colder. Someday someone will have to touch me. When will that someday be? When will I enjoy skin again? I’m trying not to panic, trying to tell myself to relax, and this is Brian, and you like him, but part of me wants to cry.
“Almost twenty-six.”
“I’ve got at least ten years on you,” he says.
And he’s still touching me, and I’m still standing here, and everything inside me is quiet. It’s as if I had gone to sleep and just handed myself over to him.