Page 77 of Dial L for Lawyer
She sets down her mug, hands steady now, and looks at me from under wet lashes. "You know, my shrink once told me that my biggest flaw was wanting things too much. That as soon as Iwanted something, I'd start tearing out the floorboards, hunting for the trapdoor that meant it was all going to disappear."
I trace the edge of her jaw. "Do you want to talk about that with me?"
"What do you mean?"
"What that trap door looks like. And why you expect to find one."
She sips her coffee with both hands, turning the cup around and around so the logo faces me, then away, then back. She's nervous, and for once I don't want to break her tension with sex. I want to hold the silence open until she fills it with something of her own.
"Have you always been the guy with the charm and the looks?"
"Pretty much," I admit. "I mean, I had an awkward phase around thirteen, but?—"
"Right. An awkward phase." She laughs, but it's bitter. "I had an awkward decade."
I stay quiet, letting her find the words.
"The moment I hit puberty, my body turned against me," she says quietly. "I gained weight like it was my job. Sixty pounds in two years. My face was a constellation of acne. I had glasses thick enough to see the future." She traces the rim of her mug. "I went from being invisible to being visible in all the wrong ways."
"Kids are assholes."
"Kids are honest." She shrugs. "They called me Pizza Face. Shamu. Four-Eyes. Michelin Man. Creative bunch. And honestly, my mother wasn’t any kinder. She’d leave diet pamphlets on my pillow. She signed me up for Weight Watchers when I was fourteen. Said no man would ever want me if I looked like that." Her voice is flat, devoid of emotion, which is somehow worse than tears. "And for a long time, she was right. The guys who did show interest... they wanted me in the dark.In their cars. Never in daylight. Never where their friends could see."
My jaw aches from how hard I'm clenching it. Every word is a gut punch. This is the source of the shame, the reason she hides. It’s not just teenage bullies; it was her own mother. It was every man who treated her like a dirty secret. I pull her off the stool, settling her onto my lap so she's straddling me, my t-shirt a tent around her. I wrap my arms tight around her waist, holding her against me. "They were fucking idiots," I say, my voice a low growl against her hair. "All of them."
"I'm not telling you this for pity," she says quickly. "I'm telling you so you understand. You've always been..." she gestures at me, "this. Tall, handsome, probably had girls throwing themselves at you since middle school, kind of guy."
"That's not?—"
"Let me finish." She takes a breath. "I wasn't the object of anyone's desire. I wasn’t the prize. If anything, I was the source of ick. But when I was in college, everything came to a head. I could barely stay awake, exhausted all the time, gaining more weight despite barely eating. Finally found a doctor who didn't just tell me to 'eat less, move more.' Turns out my hormones were completely fucked. PCOS, insulin resistance, the works."
I don't interrupt, just hold her as she speaks.
"It took two years to get the right medication balance. Two years of different pills, shots, different doses, blood tests every month. But it worked. The weight came off. My skin cleared up. I got contacts." She looks at me. "And suddenly, people saw me. Men noticed me. I went from invisible to visible, but this time in the 'right' way."
"That must have been?—"
"Confusing as hell." She laughs shakily. "But here's the thing no one tells you about losing that much weight—your skin doesn't always snap back. It's not like those before-and-afterphotos where everything's perfect in a smaller package. I got slim, yeah. But the old me is still there, hanging off me like a deflated balloon. I traded one embarrassing body for another."
"It's not embarrassing?—"
"To you, maybe. But I lived in that first body for twenty years. I know what people really think about women who look like that. And now I'm in this body, which looks acceptable in clothes but underneath..." She gestures at herself. "I'm like a poorly wrapped gift no one wants to open."
"That's not?—"
"Don't argue. Just listen," she says, voice softer now. "You can say all the right things, and honestly, I believe you mean them. But you've never lived in a body you were taught to apologize for. You have no idea how many ways the world tells women like me that we can only be loved if we're extra—extra smart, extra funny, extra humble, extra accommodating. Never just… enough as we are."
She stops, looking sideways at the infinite skyline outside my windows, lashes wet. The pause stretches, but I don't move to fill it. She's doing this brave, terrifying thing—handing over a part of herself she's spent years hiding. I won't dilute it by rushing in too soon.
"Even now, when you say my name, when you make me coffee, when you tell me I'm beautiful, I can't help but wonder if there's a punchline. Or if you're just waiting for the moment I disappoint you. Because that's what happened, again and again. People said they wanted to know the real me, but only until it stopped being pretty. Then they bailed. Or worse, they pretended I wasn't the same person they started with."
She shrugs, not looking at me. "So, yeah, I've been engineered at a molecular level to expect the trapdoor. That's what my shrink called the 'inevitability of shame.' It's always waiting under the floor you just swept clean."
I hold her tighter, my throat thick with a rage so potent it’s a miracle I can speak. I want to hunt down every person who ever made her feel like less, starting with her mother. But that won't fix this. Only I can.
"I'm not going to tell you that you're wrong to feel that way," I finally say, my voice raw. "Because what they did to you—your mother, those assholes—it was monstrous." I pull back just enough to force her to meet my eyes. "But I will tell you this. There is no trapdoor here. Not with me. No conditions. No fine print." My thumb strokes her cheek, wiping away a tear. "I love you, Serena. All of you. The girl with the glasses and the woman in my t-shirt. There is no shame here. Only us."
She goes completely still. "You can't just say that," she whispers, sliding off my lap so she’s standing in front of me.
