“Okay.”
“So anyway. That was the point. That I’d waited. That I thought Alan was The One. So when we got engaged…”
Fox wasn’t going to waste time on euphemisms. “You did the deed. And he hurt you?”
“No.”
“He scared you somehow?”
“No. Nothing like that. It went great.”
“So…”
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She turned on him in a fury. “If you catch cold from this walk because of me, I’m going to shoot you myself.”
“Threat accepted. So go on.”
She lifted her hands in a helpless gesture. “So that was the problem. That it went great. I didn’t understand at first. We were engaged. Why would he be unhappy if things were going well when the lights went out? Yet from that first night, he started pulling back.”
Ahead, a rabbit hopped into their path, stared at them and then hopped back under cover like any sane animal would have done.
“I guess you could say I got more adventurous. I was…blind. This whole part of life seemed…great to me. Natural. Wonderful. And I believed I loved him, so there was nothing I wasn’t willing to think about or talk about or try.”
“And?”
“And he was repulsed.”
“Say what?”
“You heard me.”
“I couldn’t have,” Fox said bluntly.
She sighed. There was a time she thought nothing would mortify her, but trying to talk about this did. “I could claim that we both wanted to break the engagement, but the truth is…he wanted out. It’s not like he didn’t want to keep sleeping with me, but he shut me off any time I brought up marriage plans after that. The better it got between the sheets, the less he trusted me. Anything I said or tried to say, somehow I ended up feeling dirty. Amoral.”
“Phoebe, we may have to run through this again, because something’s wrong with my hearing.
Somethinghas to be wrong, because I couldn’t possibly be hearing what you’re telling me.”
“I know you’re trying to be funny. And it is, in a way. There’s nothing new about the old double standard. It’s been around since the beginning of time. I’m not blaming him. I’m saying there was something ingrained in him. And maybe it’s ingrained in a lot of men and women. That women who are…sexy…must be of low moral character.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
She persisted quietly, firmly. “There’s a fear that a woman ‘like that’ won’t be faithful. That if she’s a great lover, she won’t make a steady wife. I know, I know, we allsay differently out loud. Alansaid differently, too. But that’s how he felt deep down. The more times we slept together, the more he pulled away, the less he trusted me, less he shared with me. Oh, for God’s sake. Let’s head back to the car and get out of this ridiculous rain before we both catch our death.”
“Wait a minute—” He hooked her arm, not roughly, but determined to spin her around to face him.
She faced him, but she also shook her head. “I really don’t want to talk anymore about this. I know Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
what you’ll say. That it’s all wrong. That he was a creep. That of course a guy wants a hot woman. I mean, come on, we’re not kids.”
“Maybe I wasn’t going to say any of that.”
“Oh, yeah, you were.” She lifted her face, ardently wanting to kiss him—wanting to be kissed. Actually wanting anything but to still be talking about this. “But I don’t need logic or that kind of reassurance, Fox.
I was just trying to tell you what happened. How it made me feel. How it affected me.”
“You moved away. Gave up regular physical therapy completely. Concentrated on work with babies.”
He added, “I understand it took you a while to get over him. But it’s been a while. Youhave to know it isn’t that way with me. I can’t believe you’d paint me with the same brush as that jerk.”
“It’s not about painting you with the same brush.” She knew it’d be impossible to explain. Even to Fox.
Especially to Fox. “It’s about…feeling different about myself. I grew up thinking that sensuality was a good quality in myself. He…crippled that.”
“You let him cripple that.”
She felt stung. “Come on, that’s not fair. When you knife someone where they’re the most vulnerable, it’s pretty hard to just…go on…as if your life hadn’t been seriously changed.”
Fergus touched her cheek, whispered, “You think I don’t know that?”
His voice—his words—struck her with the surprise of a slap. Hedid know that. As totally unalike as their problems were, it wasn’t being physically injured that had crippled Fox. It was being hit in the heart, because it was a child who’d injured him, and it was children where his whole self-image—as a man, as a leader and teacher and a role model—was founded. She’d always understood. When a child betrayed him, he felt as if he’d betrayed the child, as well.
And now she saw the parallel. When her innermost nature betrayed her, she’d felt as if she had become her own worst enemy. How do you recover when something you had believed was totally good in yourself turned out to hurt you?
Fox looked at her. Rain had soaked through his sweatshirt. It dripped from his brows, had turned his hair dark. “Is that where you want to leave it, red? You can do what I did. I gave up teaching, my life.”
“I didn’t give up sex. I made love with you, didn’t I?”
“Yeah, you did. Which is really fascinating, when you think about it. You took on a man who was running straight to loserdom. No job. No future. Wallowing in self-pity, hiding in dark shadows. So what the hell were you doing, sleeping with me?”
“That’s completely different, because you were never a loser. You were never at fault for what happened to you, even if you thought you were. None of that was who you were. You were just…hurt.
You just needed time to heal.”
“Maybe that’s true—but you couldn’t have known that. You took a chance on me. You took
