He stared at me, the corners of his eyes crinkled and his scowl soft enough to touch. "I said it was an accident. I said we'd had a strongly worded discussion about a case and the rest of it was a million-in-one shot."
I bobbed my head because I'd figured that much. He wouldn't have complied with the group therapy if he'd blamed me for the entirety of the incident. "What was the outcome of that conversation?"
"Same as you," he said with a heaving eye roll. "Eight weeks of counseling and an emphatic request to not create more problems."
"Except it wasn't the same," I said. "There's a formal reprimand in my personnel file and I got a lecture from the Chief that included the word 'tantrum' and a detailed reference to my father and all of his professionalism. Apparently there was some expectation of apples and their short fall from the tree."
"That's bullshit," he said. "But you know it's institutional bullshit, not bullshit I've caused. You know the difference and I'm not going to let you pretend otherwise."
"These two months have been difficult for me. This has been stressful, Sebastian. I told you before, you have all the power. I have a formal reprimand and a reminder to play nice. So, when you ask me if it's been that bad? Yes. This has been bad for me. Have I discovered that, under all your growls and scowls, under your arrogance and contempt for the entire world, you are not the miserable asshole you want everyone to believe you are? Also yes. Yeah," I added when he looked out at the ocean, "you're not the only one who knows how to hide."
A moment passed when it seemed the only next step would be wrestling each other into the water, but then Sebastian let out an aggrieved sigh, saying, "I don't want to go home to screaming at each other outside your door and—"
"Be real. You love screaming at me outside my door. That has a pretty high rate of positive return for you."
The stare he gave me said he didn't appreciate my attempt at humor. "I don't want to go back to fucking and fighting only to go home alone afterward. Fuck, I really don't want to go back to watching a visiting professor hit on you and—"
"If you think I am going to another one of those dinner parties, you're insane," I muttered.
"—and not have the right to make it clear to everyone that you're my screech owl."
I shook my head. "Is that supposed to be a term of endearment?"
"I don't want to walk down the hall and have to pretend I don't know you in a way no one else does. Do you hear me right now? Because I'm not promising I'll never fight with you again—god, that's out of the question—but I'm saying it doesn't have to be the way it was. We can start over—or start where we are right now. We can start wherever you want, but I need you to want it too."
I was so certain that I knew myself. That I knew my mess, my perfectionism, my savagery. I knew what I wanted, what I needed, and what I believed.
I was so certain.
Until this man with his dark eyes and dark moods showed up and sent my perfect little stack of index cards flying. Every last one of them, flying. It didn't matter to him whether they were color-coded and alphabetized, whether some were creased and dog-eared while others were taped together. He'd scooped them back up and he'd taken good care of those cards, but his handling meant they'd never be quite the same.
And I was so very certain that there was something dangerous and destabilizing about his card-throwing entrance into my life that I'd never considered the possibility that I'd choose to keep him around.
All those times we'd hurled insults at each other and fought over little scraps of nothing, I'd coded that as toxic. Filed it into my deck of cards as very bad for me, must avoid.
The sex—which I'd participated in willingly, which had crushed my preexisting notions about pleasure and how I experienced it—had been very good, but also very bad. It existed in the risky borderland where hate wasn't hate and enemies could fight on the same side so long as they both got what they wanted. Very bad. Must avoid.
And all those moments when it wasn't sex or anger or any of the other things we did to each other, those were just the in-betweens. The timeouts. The cease-fires. If we could've been gentle and generous with each other, we would've done that from the start.
Those moments when we'd stopped being awful, they were the exceptions. This was the exception. Nothing we'd found here this week was the rule.
That was how I'd organized these index cards, all without considering whether I had any of it right. Whether I was so busy being a mess, a perfectionist, a savage-hearted bitch that I didn't pick up on Sebastian playing an entirely different game. Whether I was allowed to forfeit my game and choose his instead, I still had to figure out.
"I need to think about that," I said. "I—I just need some time."
He gathered my hair up in his hands, let it fall. Then he did it again. "Time," he repeated.
"I'm sorry, I—" I stopped myself. I didn't have to breathe life into those ancient aches today.
He gathered up my hair again, twisted it around his hand. "What have these days been if not time?"
"This has been a break. An escape from our regularly scheduled mutual hate and loathing."
"I've never hated you," he said.
"Sure, you just do a fantastic job of pretending otherwise."
"I've never hated you, you crochety little witch. Even when I wanted to wring your neck. Especially when I wanted to wring your neck. And you know that." He dropped my hair and stepped back, a deep sigh rattling out of him. "What the hell are we doing, Sara? What do you want us to do? Answer me this time."
Eventually, I admitted, "I don't know."
He watched as I shifted, stared out at the ocean. "Would you tell me why it's so difficult to envision a world where the time we spend together isn't employer-mandated? I want to understand why that looks so terrible to you, because it can't be all about institutional bullshit and me picking on plastic surgeons. You're tougher than that."
"Has it ever occurred to you that requiring me to be tough is half the problem here?"
He stepped in front of me, blocking my view of the water. "It's not half the problem. You're the toughest little cookie I've ever met and I know a lot of tough cookies. You just haven't realized that you don't have to be tough with me."
"You pick fights with me all the time," I yelled.
"Because it's fun," he yelled back.
"All this time, I've been battling you and you've—you've been having fun?"
"And you weren't?"
"No!" I cried.
"The time you pummeled me with stuffed animals? That wasn't a tiny bit fun for you?"
"It was—you know what that was," I said impatiently.
"And the time you paid a hostess to ask me if I was the most arrogant surgeon in the city? You weren't having any fun then?"
"I didn't have to pay her," I replied with a sniff. "She did it for free."
"And what about the time you tried to drown me in the Charles River? There wasn't a single drop of fun in that for you?"