She was saying most of the things that he wanted to hear, but Will wasn’t sure what to do with them. He was still hurt. He was still bruised from the way she had treated him. He knew the battery acid in his stomach was going to keep festering if he didn’t find some way to make it go away.
He said, “Angie did that. What you did.”
She looked like he’d slapped her. “Tell me.”
Tears were already rolling down her face. He wasn’t sure he could keep hurting her like this.
But he said, “She pushed me.”
Sara bit her bottom lip.
“She wanted me to be rough with her. But not—” He hated the lingering, bitter taste of Angie’s name in his mouth. “She didn’t want me to hit her, or … I mean, not like … But that’s the only way she would do it with me—rough. And she wouldn’t—you know, she wouldn’t finish. I tried, but … Christ.”
This was too hard. Will used his thumb to squeeze the blood out of his knuckle. He watched it roll down his finger, drip onto his desk. He looked back at Sara.
She was waiting for him to continue.
“It’s like …” Guilt weighed on him, because this wasn’t just Will’s private misery. It was Angie’s, too. He knew so much about her life, the deep, dark, horrible things that strangers could only guess at. There was a reason she was so drawn to violence. Sometimes, he thought of himself as her Pandora’s Box. That was the problem between them. They had known each other’s most intimate secrets. He didn’t want to make the same mistake with Sara. “I don’t know.”
She carefully stroked his hair behind his ear. “I knew the first time I made love to you that she had never let you in.”
Will felt embarrassed. There were so many invisible ways that Angie had screwed him up. He was like a constantly reincarnating suicide bomber, but Angie held the detonator every time.
“You are inside me,” Sara told him. “You have my heart. You have every part of me.”
Will looked at the printout on his desk. The letters blurred. If something happened to him, all that would be left were reams of typed pages with stupid misspellings that even a third-grader would spot.
He told her, “I’m sorry.”
“My love, you have nothing to be sorry for. I was wrong. Everything I did with you yesterday was wrong. I am so lucky, so grateful, to have you.” Sara gently turned his head back in her direction. “You are smart, and funny, and handsome, and sexy. And I love the way you make me finish every time.”
Will’s jaw tightened. He hadn’t asked for compliments, and he felt stupid that she thought he needed them.
“I know we can’t be okay right now, but can we be all right?” Her fingers lightly smoothed the tension out of his jaw. There was nothing sexual about her touch. She was reconnecting with him, trying to clear away his doubt. “What can I do to make you sure of me?”
Will did not have an answer. She was right. He was not okay. The only thing that would get him to all right was to stop talking. He pulled Sara into his lap. Her arms wrapped around his shoulders. She laid her head on his chest. He could tell she was listening to his heartbeat. He breathed deeply, trying to slow the pace. He felt confused and whiplashed. He yearned for that safety that only Sara had ever given him.
Two knocks at the door introduced Faith.
She saw Sara in Will’s lap and said, “Oh. Shit.”
Will tensed, but Sara simply raised her head.
She asked Faith, “Is the meeting about to start?”
“Yep. Yep-yep-yep.” Faith clasped her hands together. “Yessiree.”
The heel of her shoe got caught in the door as she rushed to close it.
Sara told Will, “I brought you a suit from home. When you didn’t show up at your house this morning, I figured you’d need a change of clothes.”
He got a petty kind of solace at the thought of Sara waiting for him to come home.
She looked at his bleeding hand. “I want to clean that before you leave.”
He grunted.
“I should get my notes for the meeting.” She stood up and adjusted her dress, which was light and flowy in all the right places.
Will realized that she was not wearing her usual work uniform of light-colored slacks and a dark blue GBI shirt. Her long, curly hair was hanging down around her shoulders instead of clipped up out of the way. She was wearing heels. Her eyeliner was darker than usual. She had even put on lipstick.
If Will had noticed these things when Sara had first walked into his office, maybe he wouldn’t have had to tell her that Angie’s idea of a good time was antagonizing him into fucking the shit out of her.
“I’ll see you there.” Sara stroked his face one more time before leaving.
Will stared at the back of the door long enough that the blood on his desk congealed. He gathered his notes. Out of habit, he reached for his jacket off the back of his chair. He tried to re-center his thoughts on the case. Lena Adams. Gerald, Beckey and Heath Caterino. He was going to have to talk about them. In front of other people. People who knew him. Some of whom knew about his reading issue.
Amanda never asked Will to lead briefings. She usually let Faith take the lead because Faith loved taking the lead. He didn’t know if Amanda was punishing him for not dressing professionally or if she was calling on him the way his teachers used to call on him because they thought they were helping Will come out of his shell when in fact what they were doing was exposing him to his worst nightmare.
He looked for Faith in the hall. Then in
