Page 32 of Beach Bodies

Annoying, really. I’ve done just fine without it for five years.

But have you?

Everything in me wants to turn around.Stone cold, I remind myself, and even though my heart pounds like it’s trying to get out of the jail I’ve shoved it in, I don’t acknowledge him.

It sucks– in fact, itreallysucks– but on the other hand, it’s reassuring that I’m sticking with my earlier decision.See? I’m still in control.

What makes it even suckier is that Daniel has insights about me that no one else has ever had, not even Jessica. I know in some deep part of me that he could really get me– if I let him. Yes, Jess was the love of my life, but I try not to wear rose-coloured glasses about anything– not even her– though it’s tempting, isn’t it, to cling to the fairytale version scrubbed of all the shit? The truth is, itwasa fairytale.Andthere was shit. Both are true. With her, I was mymost authentic, naked self; for a while, in the safety of her love, I experienced a freedom I have never since felt. Right before the end though, we stopped truly seeing each other. The curiosity Daniel has about me? The way he looks at me, like he’s on a mission to figure me out? Jessica and I stopped doing that. Instead of seeing each other, we just saw our own hurts. And that made us feel alone. Even together, we felt alone.

I think back to our return from the Riovan. We got back to Cincinnati in the afternoon and took a taxi home. As soon as I unlocked the door, Jess stomped off to the bedroom and started unpacking her bag. Doing that silent, angry cry, where tears just spilled down her cheeks. It had all started at the airport during our Miami layover. I bought a bag of M&M’s, and she snuck a handful. I didn’t realize until she started crying that she’d made a commitment at the Riovan to do a thirty-day junk food ban, and was pissed at herself for breaking it within the first few hours of leaving.

‘My nutritionist said I’m fat because I make lazy choices,’ she said, angrily– but at herself, I could tell, not the nutritionist.

‘That was a horrible thing for him to say, Jess,’ I said, both shocked that someone would say something so appalling to her, and stung that she hadn’t told me about this interaction before. If she’d told me while we were still at the Riovan, I could have gone to bat for her and raised hell with a manager. ‘I hope you told him to go fuck himself.’

‘He’s the expert, Lil. And maybe his delivery wasn’t on point, but he was right.’

I reached over and rubbed her shoulder. ‘No, babe. He wasa dick to you, and I totally would have kicked his ass if I knew. No one gets to talk to you like that, OK?’

She pulled her shoulder away from my hand.

Wait– was she mad atmenow? I was on her side! Anyway, her ‘screw-up’ was just a couple of minuscule pieces of chocolate. Now that I knew about her commitment, I could support her.

I sat on the bed, feeling frustrated. Jessica’s back was to me. The ring was still in my pocket. The moment to propose had never come, and now it felt like it was slipping further and further away with Jessica’s dark mood.

Couldn’t we be mad together at the nutritionist?

‘It was just a few M&M’s,’ I said.

‘Your body is a history of your decisions,’ Jessica said fiercely. Where had I just heard that? Oh yeah, one of the seminars at the Riovan. ‘Every decision is important, Lily. Especially the small ones. That’s what I realized this week, and I’ve already fucked it up.’

‘I’m sorry you let yourself down, or whatever,’ I said, determined to get back on track. I’d been looking forward to a cosy, snuggly evening watching a movie. We could have salad for dinner. Kale chips, or a bulgur bowl. Whatever Jessica wanted. ‘I’m sorry I, like… facilitated that, by buying those stupid M&M’s. I get that—’

‘No,’ she said, whipping a dirty T-shirt towards the laundry hamper and missing. ‘You don’t get it. You can eat whatever you want and you don’t gain any weight. You don’t even work out, and… !’ She turned, face raw. Her hand swept up and down through the air, like she was saying,Look at yourself.

I wrapped my arms around my torso as an all-too-familiar wave of shame broke through me. A shame I hadn’t felt since meeting Jessica, but which was also familiar as dirt. It used to cling to me like a second skin. When I moved, it moved with me, like a shadow self. During the foster care years, I heard it again and again, in not so many words.Beauty means trouble.My looks were not to be celebrated. They were a liability. A target. A vulnerability and a weapon. I know that’s why my first foster family only kept me for two months.

‘She’s too much of a handful,’ I overheard the mom, Dana, explaining to the social worker on the phone as she folded laundry. I had the door of my bedroom cracked so that I could listen. ‘She’s not a bad girl, but… it’s just not a good fit right now. I have to think of the whole family.’ Like her husband Scott, who couldn’t keep his eyes off me. Like their teenage son Tim, just a year younger than me, who was clearly in puppy love with me. I’d seen my name written over and over again in his notebook.It’s not my fault!I wanted to scream.I didn’t do anything! I’m sorry I was born this way!

When Jessica waltzed into that bar with her college friends the night we met, it was like she gifted me with a new self. She erased all the old feelings. Jessica made me feel like my beauty, my body, were finally on my side. My beauty didn’t just get her attention. It opened the door to love.

On the bed, watching her unpack, a hurricane of feeling raged through my body.

‘I’ve always loved you just how you are,’ I exploded. ‘How dare you throw the way I look in my face?’

Jessica was never cruel, but that afternoon, her laughsounded cruel to me. ‘You have no idea what it’s like to live in a body you hate.’

I went so cold in that moment. The wordsYes, I fucking doburned in my mouth. I swallowed them like an ice chip. They hurt going down.

I’d only given Jessica the barest sketch of my tumultuous childhood. It was understood between us that I didn’t want to talk about any of my ‘befores’– not the trailer park, or Mom’s death, or foster care. Jessica and I were living in our happily ever after, and that is where I wanted to stay.

So maybe, in retrospect, it was my fault that she didn’t understand how for so long I felt that my body was the enemy, attracting danger, marking me as trouble, chasing me from one family to another. How beauty made me the predator and the prey. How for years and years I hated my body, just like her.

But in that moment, I wasn’t thinking clearly. I wasn’t thinking logically. All that mattered was that my Jessica, my love, my safe place, was suddenly telling me that it must be so easy to be me because of my beautiful body, when I’d spent most of my life wishing it away.

The words I had swallowed surged back up like bile.

‘Yes. I. Fucking. Do.’

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