Broken

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His body didn’t flinch, but his eyes did. “Bad habits should be broken, though, right?”

He turned on his heel and stalked away. Panic flared in me. He was messing up the parts we’d been playing for the past two years. What did that mean? That he wouldn’t be back? Or just that he wouldn’t have another story?

“Joe!”

He didn’t turn, and I had too much pride to call after him again. I waited until he’d disappeared beneath the hanging greens and I was alone in the quiet before I sat on the bench again, my mutilated fists in my lap.

The flowers reproached me, but since they had no voice, I didn’t have to listen.

Chapter 02

I met Adam at a party my freshman year of college. Not at a frat house, this party was at “lit house,” a three-story Victorian monstrosity that had been home to half the English department, grads and undergrads, for as long as anyone could remember. It was its own frat house, in a way, though the graffiti on the basement walls featured quotes from Wilde, Shakespeare and Burns, and the limericks were clever in addition to being filthy. I was there by invitation of my roommate Donna, an English major.

I wasn’t much a fan of beer, but I carried a cup anyway. Donna had abandoned me to hook up with a cute guy from one of her classes. I moved among the crowd in search of the bathroom, listening to drunken discussions about iambic pentameter and poetic imagery along the way.

In the kitchen, looking for the toilet I’d been assured was “just through there,” I found Adam. He lounged on top of the kitchen counter, his incredibly long legs encased in faded blue corduroy pants, immense feet shod in the shabbiest brown oxfords I’d ever seen. He wore a T-shirt emblazoned with the name of a famous punk rock band. He had an earring glittering in one lobe and long hair. He had a cigarette in one hand and a green short-neck bottle of Straub beer in the other.

“Bathroom?” When I nodded, he pointed to the small door just beyond the door to the cellar. “The door doesn’t lock. But I’ll watch out for you.”

He flashed me a grin of perfect white teeth, the upper front tooth slightly crooked. I was smitten. I used the bathroom and came out to find him in discourse about the writing of Anaïs Nin and how it compared to present-day erotica. I didn’t leave the kitchen for the rest of the night.

It was the first time I ever got drunk.

Later, stumbling home, Donna asked me who he was.

“I don’t know,” I said with beer-bleary lips. “But I’m going to marry him.”

Two weeks later, as I left my room to go to class, I saw him leaving a message on the door of Rachael Levine, my resident assistant. Rachael was fond of lecturing the rest of us on the dangers of drinking too much and having indiscriminate sex. She didn’t seem much good at applying the same lectures to herself, though, even at twenty-two still hitting the frat parties and making a point of leaving her ample supply of condoms out in her room for anyone to see. She also liked bragging about her “brilliant” boyfriend.

His name was Adam Danning.

He turned and flashed me the smile that had so intoxicated me. “Hey. I know you.”

Between one heartbeat and the next, my entire life changed.

“You’re Sadie.”

He knew my name.

How did I talk to him? Tall, handsome Adam. Brilliant lecturer on the differences between erotica and pornography. Drinker of Straub beer and smoker of Marlboro. Boyfriend of Rachael.

As it turned out, I didn’t have to talk much. He walked me to class and spoke about his work in the English department. About the University. About a movie he’d seen the night before. He made it easy to be silent, and I drank his words with more enthusiasm than I’d consumed the beer.

“Lit house party this weekend,” he said as we parted ways at the top of the hill, he to work and I to my introduction to psychology class. “Will you be there?”

Oh, yes. I’d be there.

Six weeks into my first semester, we were eating lunch together three or four times a week and walking to class more often than that. We talked about everything. Politics, movies, art, books, sex, drugs and rock and roll. He recited poetry to me. Adam introduced me to the power of words.

He never talked about Rachael, though she spoke of him, often, to anyone who’d listen and anyone who didn’t. Though Adam and I made no secret of the time we spent together, she didn’t seem to consider me a threat. She went out of her way, in fact, to take me under her wing. She gave me advice, unsolicited, and kept back rolls of toilet paper for me during rush week when the fraternity pledges were ordered to steal it from the dorms and all the stalls went empty. She treated me like an amusing, perhaps slightly retarded, younger sister. She didn’t view me as a threat, probably because I’d carried my “smart” façade along with me from high school. If I’d been “the pretty one,” she might have worried more.

Adam quickly became the mirror in which I saw reflected the woman I wanted to become. He didn’t tell me what to do or think, nothing as crass as that. He just made it easy to like what he liked. Adam led me to discover places in myself I’d never known. I didn’t know what I wanted to study; he was already beginning his graduate work in English literature. He was a devout agnostic and I still went to Sunday mass. He liked the Sex Pistols and I listened to Top 40 radio. There were five years between us, which at the time seemed like an eternity. He was more mature than the boys in my dorm. He had his own apartment, a car, a job. Adam thought and fought with passion burning bright. He was vibrant and alive in a way I envied, admired and coveted. He smoked. He drank. He rode a motorcycle fast on dark roads and had insane hobbies like bungee jumping.

He was brilliant and wild, my Lord Byron, whom Lady Caroline Lamb had called “mad, bad and dangerous to know.”

While playing the part of the brainiac, my sexual experience had been limited to one high school boyfriend who’d been a fan of receiving but not giving oral sex. I’d held onto my virginity more by circumstance than determination. Most of my friends had already taken the plunge into “womanhood,” few with stories compelling enough to make me want to consider it myself. I’d dated a few boys but never tumbled head over heels into the crazy tempestuousness of adolescence so many of my friends had undergone. It might have been better if I had. A sort of training. As it was, I’d never felt the depths of emotion that sent me soaring and plummeting within minutes of each other.

Until I met Adam.

I told nobody of this internal roller coaster. Not Donna, who’d become my best friend. Not my sister Katie, who, two years younger than I, had her high school dramas to keep her busy. I kept the secret of my love inside and turned it over and over constantly, seeking a way to either break it up or figure it out. Like a Rubik’s Cube, or one of those pictures with the hidden images not everyone can see. I’d never been so confused, despairing, desperate and so elated and infused with joy.

I was in love with Adam Danning, and I had no idea of how he felt about me.

I should’ve been ashamed of asking Rachael to give me some of the condoms she was so proud of displaying when I knew I meant to use them to seduce her boyfriend. But when you’re mad, bad and dangerously in love, many things seem excusable that normally wouldn’t.

My first semester had passed unbearably fast. Faced with a month of distance in which Adam would be spending his time with Rachael, I could wait no longer. The day before I was supposed to go home, I armed myself with brand-new panties and the handful of condoms, and I went to Adam’s apartment under the pretense of dropping off the gift I’d bought for him.

He opened the door, shirtless, hair wet from a shower. My throat clutched. Every nerve thrummed. My heart beat in my wrists, the hollow of my throat. Between my legs.

“You got me a present?” He seemed pleased and took the package, which I’d been careful to wrap in nondenominational paper. “Sadie, wow. What is it?”

“Open it.”

Standing in his living room, my knees shaking and my palms sweating, I felt I’d reached a precipice. I wasn’t one for leaping, but I was ready to jump, no parachute necessary and no bungee cord, either. I was going to leap, and I was going to fly.

Adam hefted the volume in both his hands, his grin all the thanks I needed. “e.e. cummings, the Complete Poems.”

“You don’t have it, do you?”

He shook his head and leafed through the pages with the reverence every true book lover has when touching a new volume for the first time.

I’d marked one page with a ribbon of scarlet silk, and as I watched his fingers turning page after page on the way to revealing it, I forgot to breathe. I waited, each moment like drops of honey dripped from a spoon, every one its own universe but tied to all the rest by the thin strands of time.

He stopped when he found the ribbon, and his eyes scanned the words on the page, top to bottom, before he looked up to me. I remembered to breathe, sipping oxygen like wine. My pulse pounded in my ears, similar to the rush and crush of waves.

“Any illimitable star,” he said, and I knew at once I hadn’t made a mistake.

Adam put the book aside. We stared at each other without words but needing none. He held out a hand, and I took it. Our fingers linked, his hand warm and mine cold.

He pulled me onto his lap, straddling him. His shoulders beneath my palms were warm, his skin smooth. My groin snugged up against his bare stomach, and his hands fit naturally on my hips, as if they’d always meant to be there.

We kissed for a long time, sitting that way. His hands moved up and down my body. His erection nudged my rear until we shifted and it pressed up between us. I explored the lines and curves of his body every place I could reach without leaving his mouth or his lap. I traced the lines of his ribs, the bulges of his biceps. I circled the twin round spots of his nipples and counted the bumps of his spine with my fingertips.

By the time we moved toward the bedroom, I was wetter than I’d ever been. My nipples were taut and aching. Sensation crackled along my nerves like Independence Day sparklers, and everything had gone slow and languid, petroleum jelly smeared on the camera lens. Soft and out of focus.

Adam pushed aside the covers on his rumpled bed to lay me down on sheets that smelled of him, his mouth never leaving mine. We stretched out, my legs opening to cradle him against my body. His lips left mine to find the sensitive places on my jaw and throat, then lower as he unbuttoned my blouse to reveal my breasts in my new black lace bra.

He unwrapped me like a package, with slow fingers and low murmurs of appreciation. His hands passed over my skin as he unhooked, unbuttoned, unzipped. When I was naked, he bent to kiss my mouth again and his body aligned with mine, a puzzle with only two pieces. Adam and me. Fitting.

He traced my body with his lips and tongue. I tensed when he nuzzled the curve of my belly, then my thighs. He parted my curls with a fingertip and kissed my clit. When he licked it, I arched into ecstasy at once, giving myself up to his touch. Adam made love to me with his mouth, slowly, until I couldn’t do anything but ride the waves of pleasure and try to remember to breathe.

Adam didn’t fumble with the condom or struggle to figure out how to enter me. He used a hand to guide himself inside, dipping the head of his penis first to smooth the way for the rest. I was so wet he was able to fill me with one thrust.

We both cried out. He bent over me, his face buried in the curve of my shoulder. His teeth grazed me, and I answered with the scrape of my nails on his back. We didn’t move at first. Pleasure had immobilized us. The immensity of what we were doing became real. Only for a moment, and then he eased out with a smooth shift of his hips. Back in, all the way, and I lifted my hips to meet him.

Inexperience should have made me clumsy, but arousal choreographed us. In and out, bodies shifting. Give and take.

It didn’t last long enough for me to come again, a feat of which I didn’t know myself capable at the time. Adam cried my name when he came. His last thrust hurt me more than the first had and I cried out, too.

After, I lay curled in the circle of his arms and slept until it was time for me to get up and leave for home. It took my body three days to recover, until I could no longer feel the effects of him inside me, and by that time Adam had called me twice a day and made arrangements to come see me at my parents’ house. I never asked him what he told Rachael. I didn’t really care.

We were inseparable after that. We got married the June after I earned my masters in psychology. A year later, while I was working on my post-doctoral experience so I could sit for the licensing exam, the binding on Adam’s left ski broke as a result of a manufacturer’s defect. He skied headfirst into a tree, suffered a C5-level spinal cord injury that put him in a coma for three weeks and left him without sensation or voluntary movement from the shoulders down. He was only thirty-six.

Losing my virginity hadn’t made me a woman, but almost losing my husband had. He could have died. There are days I weep with gratitude that he didn’t.

And then, there are days I wish he had.

At home that night, I let myself in the front door with my key. I smelled something good, savory. Probably soup. Mrs. Lapp likes to make soup in the winter.

“Mrs. D?”

She always asks, though who else would be coming in at dinner time? “It’s me.”

She bustled out of the kitchen, wiping her hands on her apron. Her tidy gray bun had gone a little askew and wisps of hair had come down around her flushed face. Dolly Lapp cooks and cleans like a dream come true, but she’s more than a housekeeper. She’s a mother, nurse, friend and my life would be impossible without her.

I hung my coat on the hook and set my briefcase in its accustomed spot by the front door. Everything had to stay in its place in my house. There could be no room for clutter, nothing to snag or catch on wheels and block the way.

“I made soup. Come in and have a seat. I was getting worried. You’re so much later than usual.”

“Traffic was bad.” I lied with nary a flinch. Traffic had been fine. The fight with Joe had so unsettled me I’d gone driving, around and around, unable to face the idea of coming home. “But you’re right, it’s late. I should go check on Adam.”

Mrs. Lapp nodded her apple-doll head. “He’s in bed already, I helped him in about an hour ago. Soup’s in the Crock-Pot, Mrs. D, and I’ll just get going. Samuel’s been here since half past five. I set him up in the kitchen with a mug of coffee and the newspaper, but you know how he gets rutchy, setting too long.”

Guilt at my selfishness pricked me. “You go on ahead. I’m sorry you had to wait.”

She fluttered her hands. “Pshaw. Not to worry. Just remember to turn it to low when you’re done, so’s it don’t boil down, and I’ll put it away in the morning. Oh, and your sister called. I wrote down her message by the phone.”

She really took excellent care of us. I smiled. “Thanks, Mrs. Lapp.”

She nodded and headed back the hall toward the kitchen and her impatient husband. Belly empty and growling, I postponed my dinner for another few minutes. I climbed the narrow stairs, a hand on the carved and polished railing Mrs. Lapp kept so clean.

At the top of the stairs, I stopped to listen. To my right was the short part of the hall, with the bathroom, the guest room, the elevator and the stairs to the third floor. To my left, the long part of the hall, with two more rooms, the entrance to the back stairs and the master bedroom and bath. From upstairs I heard the faint sound of the television and then the creak of footfalls. Dennis. A moment later he peered over the railing.

I liked Dennis. At six-foot-two-inches and 230 pounds, he looked like a linebacker, but he was equally sensitive as he was strong. Though he’d only been with us for two years, I could no more do without him than I could with Mrs. Lapp.

“Hi, Sadie. You’re home late.”

“Traffic,” I told him, too.

“I’ll be going out in about twenty minutes. I’ll check on him before I go,” he told me and disappeared into his room again. I heard him talking, then making some calls.

Everything has its price, and the cost of having Dennis and Mrs. Lapp was my privacy. No matter how often I wistfully remembered being able to walk around in my underwear and eat peanut butter straight from the jar, that life was a part of the past. My mother-in-law euphemistically called them “help.” I called them necessity. The three of us worked together like synchronized machinery to keep this household functioning. Without them, I’d have been lost.

I paused in Adam’s doorway to put on the right face. A pleased half-smile with just the right touch of weariness to indicate the battles of the highway. A fond gaze.

Adam was already in bed, but he turned his head to look at me when I came through the doorway. He’d been reading something on his laptop. “Close program,” he ordered the computer. He could operate most everything in his room via the voice-operated command system. “You’re late tonight.”

“I feel so loved. You’re the third person tonight to tell me so.” I kept the reply light, joking, slipping so easily into the role of wife.

I pushed the computer table out of the way and bent to brush his lips with my evening kiss. His mouth felt cold beneath mine, and I closed my eyes, willing it to warm.

“Long day?” Adam asked when I’d pulled away. “You look bushed.”

Even before I could answer, my stomach gurgled, and I put my hand overtop to quiet it. “Mrs. Lapp made soup. I’ll go have some. I wanted to say hi, first.”

He smiled again, still looking so much like the man I’d fallen in love with it made my guts hurt. “Hi.”

“Hi.” I reached to push his hair off his forehead. His mouth had been cold but his forehead and cheeks were flushed. “You feel warm.”

“Ah, you caught me reading.” He wiggled his eyebrows. For a man without the use of anything below his shoulders, Adam never had a problem making his expressions clear.

I looked at his laptop. “You’re reading smut again?”

“Please.” He affected a haughty tone. “It’s literature.”

“For class or for fun?” I stroked my hand across his forehead again, pretending a caress but really checking for fever.

“Class.”

Adam’s poetry had once won national awards. Now he taught online English courses for Penn State University. As far as I knew, he no longer wrote poems.

“Prison Poets?” I straightened a hand that had fallen askew, legs that had bent a bit during the course of the day. I tucked blankets in all around him with swift, practiced movements, making him a mummy.

“The Marquis de Sade versus Oscar Wilde.” Adam’s eyes followed my course around the bed.

“Sounds positively kinky.”

I leaned across him to tuck the blankets on his other side. He breathed in deep and his lips grazed my throat. Heat and memories flooded me.

“You smell so good.” Adam’s voice was hoarser than usual.

I froze. He tilted his head to brush his lips against my skin, and breathed in again. He nuzzled me. My nipples tightened and knees got weak as instant arousal, eager as a puppy, bounded through me at that one, simple caress.

His tongue flickered out. “You taste good, too.”

I turned my face to his and kissed him, our mouths parting. His tongue stroked mine and another bolt of pure liquid pleasure washed over me. I put a hand on his shoulder to steady myself. The flannel of his pajama shirt was soft, the bones beneath padded enough by the fabric not to hurt my palm.

I wanted to kiss him forever, to melt into him. The kiss broke and left both of us breathing hard. I leaned in again, my mouth seeking his and finding it closed to me. Shut out, I pulled away.