Chapter Twenty-Seven
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
T HOMAS’S MIND BLANKED.
I want to have an affair.
I think we should court.
“I beg your pardon?”
But Evelyn was equally confused, a fact that only perplexed him even further.
“I beg your pardon?” she asked.
“I said I wanted to court you. And you said—”
“That we should have an affair, yes.”
Still, they stared at one another as though they were speaking different languages without a phrasebook to help them translate.
“What do you mean, an affair?” he spluttered.
“You’re a grown man, Thomas,” she said. “I hardly think I need to explain the mechanics to you. You certainly didn’t this afternoon at Coney Island.”
Considering how long it had been since his last full, pre-Evelyn indulgence, a refresher wouldn’t go amiss.
“Besides,” Evelyn continued, “I don’t know why you’re looking at me as though I’ve just proposed a murder. Or worse, as though I’ve just proposed that we court .”
“It’s not such a ridiculous proposal as murder,” he said, an incredulous laugh bubbling to the surface.
“You’re right. It’s worse.”
For the first time in his life, he wanted partnership—not a dalliance on one hand or an alliance on the other. Yet here was the one woman with whom he could see himself taking on the world, and she had no interest in being anything but his own personal featherbed.
“Miss Cross—”
“ Really , I think if we’re going to embark on an affair, we should call one another by our Christian names, Tom.”
“I never agreed to an affair.”
Oblivious to his inner turmoil, Evelyn fluttered her eyelashes, the minx. “You’re going to hurt my feelings. Don’t you want to hop into bed with me?”
God, yes. He’d wanted her from the first moment they’d met, and that desire had only become more potent with every minute they’d spent together. The more she talked about it now, the more carnal images his mind conjured, the more he yearned for their connection from this afternoon, and the more he thought of that, the harder refusing her became.
And the harder he became.
“That’s not the point.”
“And what is the point, exactly?”
“That I don’t just want to …”
Make love to her? Bed her? Fuck her? He couldn’t get the words out; they all seemed too intimate, too forward. Well aware that most other men in his position would have taken her in their beds the moment she so much as suggested she was amenable to it, Thomas tried not to shrink in embarrassment as he held firm to his convictions.
“Courtship has rules. It has guidelines and structure. It’s safer for both of us if we proceed from this point with caution.”
“Safer for whom? Yes, courtship has rules and guidelines and structures, Thomas, but it also has an endgame. Marriage.”
Marriage. Yes, he supposed courtship did imply such a commitment. It was one he wasn’t ready to make, not yet, anyway. Filing that “yet” away for later contemplation, he focused instead on what marriage meant. Not just financial and legal bonds, but emotional ones, too.
If his parents’ marriage, the one by which he judged all others, was any indication, to be married was to be one’s entire, unashamed self. It was vulnerability. It was trust. It was to be truly known. And to take the broken pieces of yourself, join them to someone else, and become whole again in the process.
Maybe he and Evelyn would never be married. But the promise of marriage? To be seen after a lifetime of hiding? To feel un-alone after a lifetime of solitude?
“I shouldn’t wish our relationship to be purely physical. And I suspect that desire is shared. You have always said you could see through me. But I see through you, too, Evelyn.”
She shuddered. He continued.
“You use sex as a shield. Whenever you think you’re in danger of exposing your heart, you put it between us. I couldn’t bear the thought of being just another conquest. I didn’t expose myself tonight so you could remain concealed. I won’t be another body you’ve used and thrown away in your eternal quest to keep yourself safe from … Well, I don’t rightly know what , exactly, you think you’re protecting yourself from.”
Her physical attitude didn’t change, but something in the timbre of her voice did. It still danced musically as usual, but now, the sound rang hollow. “If we’re doing story time tonight, I may as well tell you. But don’t go falling in love with me just because I spilled a few secrets, you hear? I’m only telling you so you’ll let me get into those trousers of yours.”
Another evasion. Another clever use of sex to keep him from getting too close.
“Understood.”
She rushed into her speech. The sentences stumbled over each other like clumsy chorus girls unable to fall in line. “It’s an old story, my parents’. My father was a top hat, you know? Rather like you, but with even more money and a family name as old as time. My mother was a new immigrant fresh off the boat from Germany, so new her clothes still reeked of pretzels and sauerkraut. She finds employment as a lady’s maid, meets a man who promises her the moon, gets her pregnant, and then immediately abandons her. Fires her from his household staff, too, just to add insult to injury.”
The scoundrel. In his time spent around high society, he’d met too many men just like Evelyn’s father. They acted selfishly, completely oblivious or uncaring to how their actions might echo. If he had been born with what he had now, he might have become one of those men.
He and Evelyn—and their stories—couldn’t have been more different. But at the heart, they were the same.
An old tune sung with new lyrics. Both shunted between the upper class and the lower. Both haunted by bodies and lives that didn’t belong to them. Ambition fueling them. Pain never quite leaving them. Hearts big as the whole outdoors hidden behind matchbox firewalls.
“Anyhow, my mother raised me on her own and she never took another man. She loves that bastard who left her even to this day. Even after what he did to her. She’s dying a very, very slow death of a broken heart.”
During the length of their acquaintance, Evelyn only ever peered out from behind her internal defenses. At turns bawdy and brassy and absurd, and then sentimental and loving, she was always putting on a show, holding herself separate from her audience. But now, as she was talking about her mother, Thomas thought he finally saw her in fullness. In all her beautiful and biting and realistic and fantastical glory.
“Everyone who knew my mother before she met that man said she was a brilliant, vibrant woman. I wish I could have met that woman instead of the one who raised me. I bought her a little farm up in Queens. Pay her an allowance. Give her all the comfort and care she deserves. She’s sweet. But she could have been so much more.”
The sadness in her eyes was nearly enough to break him.
“What happened to him? Your father, I mean.”
“He was killed. One of his other conquest’s fathers found out about their dalliance and shot him dead in the middle of Park Avenue.”
“A tragedy,” he remarked dryly.
“Only tragedy is that I wasn’t the one to pull the trigger.”
They wallowed in the delicious filth of that comment for a few silent moments.
“And that’s why you won’t indulge in romance. Your past experiences have cured you of the affliction,” Thomas said, in summation.
“Precisely. See, you understand.”
“No, I don’t.”
And he truly didn’t. She did love many, many people. She loved more deeply and with more passion than he’d believed possible. Theoretically, what was one more person to love?
“I’m never going to give some man the power to hurt me like my mother was hurt. Affairs, I can handle. They are physical matters. Sex is about power and pleasure. I always know what I am putting into it, and what I expect to get out of it. But courtship? Feelings? No. I won’t have it. If your addictive nature and your need for control are your biggest weaknesses, then my heart is mine.”
“It’s not—”
“Fine, then. My biggest vulnerability. A massive, gaping hole in my armor. I have lived my life with one rule. One simple rule. Never fall in love. I won’t risk breaking that rule. It’s best for all parties involved.”
They really were more alike than he ever could have imagined. Two cynics who had spent their entire lives clinging to rules—trying to light out the long shadows cast over them.
Thomas had half a mind to end things there. He shouldn’t push her. He shouldn’t pressure her. If she didn’t want this, then, fine.
But he couldn’t hold back. Not when she shivered even in his warm room, not when she looked as though she needed someone to wrap their arms around her and whisper that everything would be alright.
“Things can be different, you know. It won’t always be like your father and mother’s story. The world, people, the times. They can change.”
“Oh, I’m well aware,” she replied with a big, sad grin. “It’s just that they usually change for the worse.”
A beat passed between them. He had nothing to say to that. He’d experienced enough of society to see how it treated anyone deemed different or lesser. He thought of Clement, of those poor elephants, of his younger self. Maybe she was right.
When Evelyn was finally finished cleaning her wounds, she rose to her feet, brushed at her ruined skirts, and squared her jaw in his direction. The attitude told him this was either the end of things or the very, very beginning.
“An affair is what I’m comfortable with. It’s what I’m offering. If you don’t want that, I understand. I’ll still be your business associate. And, if you’d like, your friend. But intimately, you can have me like this, or you can have me not at all—”
He didn’t hesitate before crashing his lips to hers.
They were two people bound by rules. No contact outside of working hours. No recklessness. No love affairs. Rules, rules, rules.
Perhaps it was time to see how it would feel to finally break them.
A NOTE FROM THE HISTORIAN
Now, this is probably the part of the story where you’re bracing yourself and wondering, “Oh, God, wasn’t the ‘fingering her at Coney Island’ thing bad enough? Is she really about to give us a fully realized sex scene between these two?”
And to your question, yes, fuck you, I’m writing a sex scene, and with God as my witness, if I hear one more peep of complaint, I’m going to make the rest of this story nothing but sex scenes.