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Chapters (55)
  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright
  4. Dedication
  5. Acknowledgments
  6. Cast of Characters
  7. Part One
  8. One
  9. Two
  10. Three
  11. Four
  12. Five
  13. Six
  14. Seven
  15. Eight
  16. Nine
  17. Ten
  18. Eleven
  19. Twelve
  20. Thirteen
  21. Fourteen
  22. Fifteen
  23. Sixteen
  24. Seventeen
  25. Eighteen
  26. Nineteen
  27. Part Two
  28. Twenty
  29. Twenty-one
  30. Twenty-two
  31. Twenty-three
  32. Twenty-four
  33. Twenty-five
  34. Twenty-six
  35. Twenty-seven
  36. Twenty-eight
  37. Twenty-nine
  38. Thirty
  39. Thirty-one
  40. Thirty-two
  41. Thirty-three
  42. Thirty-four
  43. Thirty-five
  44. Thirty-six
  45. Thirty-seven
  46. Thirty-eight
  47. Thirty-nine
  48. Forty
  49. Forty-one
  50. Forty-two
  51. Forty-three
  52. Forty-four
  53. Forty-five
  54. Forty-six
  55. A note on the Author

“Daddy, oh Daddy. I thought we had so much time together. I was just getting to know him. I thought we had the rest of our lives.”

I couldn’t even bring myself to masturbate because I had to think of him to come.

“I’ll never love again.”

“Ruby,” my father sighed, pushing aside a stuffed toy as he squeezed me tight, “you’re twelve years old.”

“But I feel it. I feel it here.” I lay my hand on my pale, protruding stomach. For the rest of my life, I would wake with a start, in different men’s beds, wondering where he was, with whom, and if it had all been a dream.

Three

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Different men’s beds

I hadn’t meant to cry during sex. And I hadn’t meant to go mute for the next hour while Scott shook me and begged, “What? What have I done?” And I hadn’t meant to stay awake while he was sleeping. And I never planned to abandon the sleeping man who had just served his grieving wife with divorce papers. I didn’t mean to make dicks hard. I just wanted to sleep in someone else’s bed. I didn’t want to have to wash my sheets but I didn’t want to sleep on them either. I’d pretend there was nothing between Scott’s legs, like a Ken doll, but then it would snake up, inflate, and get hard. I wouldn’t touch it, but it would touch me.

I tiptoed out. The sleeping man had left his wife because I forced him to. But it was all a terrible case of mistaken identity. I had believed I wanted him enough to take him from her. Then as soon as I had him, I realized it was like thinking a new kind of shampoo was going to change my life. I thought of Scott less as a lover than as a hair-care product.

The night I left him, it wasn’t nighttime anymore. It was the early hours of the morning, close, by my estimate, to the hour Liev must have left me. Just like me, the day I woke up to a dying mother and absent lover, the sleeping man wouldn’t know what he had done wrong either.

I had gone out there to audition for a hundred-million-dollar Roman epic. Every actress in Hollywood was fixated on it because it was a great role, or they knew it was going to be a smash, or they knew they’d look cute in sandals. Big, big names deigned to take screen tests. As I walked down the hallway to the hotel suite to meet the producers, Jennifer Lopez was on her way out with her entourage, their cell phones ringing in harmony. She looked like a silent-film star and I wondered if she had ever seen a silent film or if she couldn’t bear to be around quiet.