Page 47 of The Bride
Had things been weird since the towel incident? A little.
I struggled for a while to figure out what it was. I knew she was a virgin, so yeah my dick was the first one she probably saw. Maybe that had freaked her out. Or the weirdness of seeing me basically naked. We’d always been close but never intimate.
Since then I could tell she was more cautious around me. She had this sweatshirt thing I’d never seen before that she started wearing at night, complaining the house was too cold. When the temperature had never bothered her before.
When I said something she decided was sexist—I did it a lot mostly to egg her on—she used to rub my arm and tell me what caveman I was and how sorry she was for my next wife.
Not one touch since the towel incident. And I had said a lot of sexist things.
I hated the shift.
In our not-normal world, we had found a way to be normal.
Janet accused me once of falling for Ellie, and I was so damn proud to say that I hadn’t. That she’d been wrong. That all men weren’t assholes with dicks and no brains. That it didn’t matter that Ellie was beautiful because she was still freaking seventeen. And that when she turned eighteen that wasn’t going to magically change anything either.
I wasn’t a man waiting for a number.
Not going to lie, when I went to Missoula for those few days this past summer I had felt a little… guilty wasn’t right. Awkward, maybe? Not because I picked up some girl in a bar and basically had nonstop sex with her for three days. That I had no guilt over.
I had needed that, and it felt good. It was just that coming home to Ellie reminded me that I wasn’t so noble I couldn’t abstain for sixteen months while we got through this thing.
So I was a man, and I did have a dick. But I wasn’t some damn animal who couldn’t restrain myself with my brain when I needed to.
Yay me. The problem was, since the towel thing, despite her caution, Ellie had been giving me these looks.
Sometimes I would actually catch her staring at me, like she didn’t even know she was doing it, and I wanted to know what the hell was going through her head.
Only I didn’t want to know. I didn’t want to know for a second that she had thoughts like that. Which if I verbally communicated to her she would say was sexist.
She was going to be eighteen. She was allowed to have sexual thoughts. I was a man who was very much in her world. I wasn’t an asshole, but I knew I was attractive to most women.
I had had zero problem picking up… what the heck was her name? Sherry? Shari? Something like that.
It was not unheard of that she’d seen me and realized I wasn’t some eunuch she was living with. I wasn’t her father. And though we’d basically been raised together I wasn’t her brother.
Which sucked if that turned into some kind of crush. Imagine having a crush on your husband, only to have him turn around and divorce you in a couple of months.
Because that had to happen. I could not stay in that house one day past her eighteenth birthday or everyone would think something was going on. That something had been going on.
No, I was leaving on April twenty-third, and I really hoped when I did, I didn’t hurt her.
“I’m going to go mingle,” she told me.
“I’m going to stand in this corner and drink my beer.”
Her head tilted in that way it did when she was disappointed in me. “You’re so predictable. Do you realize that about yourself?”
“I do.”
“It’s a party.”
“And I’m here. Don’t overdo it on the punch.”
She sighed. “Kay.”
I did as I said I would. Nursed my beer because I was driving and checked out the room of people. The same room of people who were here last year, all in different sweaters.
“Hi Jake.”
