The words sounded strange aloud, as if admitting something I’d barely allowed myself to think.
“After a while, you start wondering if the problem is you, like you’re broken.”
His thumb brushed slowly along my arm.
“You’re not broken, Sloane.”
I shrugged a little.
“Maybe not, but after four years I still looked at Peter and felt exactly what I’d felt the first night I met him: attraction, desire sometimes, but overall nothing. So I figured it was time to stop pretending.”
Callan’s voice came carefully, measured.
“Was he good to you?”
I laughed quietly, not much humor in it.
“He was fine.”
That answer seemed to sit wrong with him.
“‘Fine’ isn’t exactly glowing.”
I hesitated.
“Yeah.”
“I got tired of being treated like a convenient thing, a toy he pulled off the shelf when he had nothing better to do, merely to fuck and put away. Did our relationship get physical? Yeah, sometimes it did, but never anything I probably didn’t instigate.”
His arm went rigid around me. I could sense the anger rising in him.
I kept my eyes on the water.
“You know that thing where someone touches you and it has nothing to do with you? Like you’re just… there, like you’re a prop in their life instead of a person.”
He didn’t answer, but I could hear his breathing change behind me—tighter.
“That’s what it became,” I said. “That’s what it always becomes.”
My voice was quieter than I had meant it to be.
A long silence, I added with a dry, bitter little laugh—
“Plus, the guy called me fat.”
Behind me, Callan made a strangled sound.
“Fat?”
I shrugged.
“Yeah.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?”
“Nope.”
“Sloane,” he said, disbelief thick in his voice. “That guywasa fucking idiot.”