Chapter 4
Four
Mark
I wish I could say that I don’t know how long I stand there after I zip up my pants, but the clock on the mantel tallies my weakness in relentlessly measured increments.
Half an hour. I stand and watch the firelight dance over their exposed skin, watch Isolde’s fingernails card through Tristan’s hair.
I can almost feel it between my own fingers, thick and soft, strong and silky.
I sometimes wonder if the barber at West Point wept as they shaved Tristan’s hair on R-Day.
Finally, Tristan pushes himself off the floor and lifts Isolde in his arms. She slips her arms around his neck, her eyes hooded but a faint pulling between her eyebrows.
She’s troubled, I think, but already resigned to worrying about whatever it is tomorrow, and it’s a shame I’m not in there, because I would have made her as loose-limbed as Tristan.
I would have made it so you had to ladle her off the carpet.
Maybe all husbands like to think so.
I ease back into the shadows of the corridor as Tristan emerges with Isolde, but I needn’t have bothered.
Tristan carries her off to my bedroom without so much as a glance in the opposite direction.
Which is a good thing because I very nearly follow them, a sudden swell of possessiveness making me step forward, my hand lifted, like I’m reaching for them.
I catch myself before I do anything stupid—well, anything else stupid—and wait until I hear the bedroom door close. I give it a few more moments and then slip into the library.
Once inside, I sit at my desk, pull out a piece of paper and one of the heavy fountain pens left behind by my grandfather.
It’s not a long letter that I write. It doesn’t have to be—Isolde won’t believe a word of it anyway, and Tristan will be by her side regardless of what she chooses.
And I don’t hope I can convince Isolde that everything I said on our wedding night was real.
Why would she believe me when she knows I’ve been false about so much else?
But I write the letter anyway. I won’t say that I deserve her forgiveness, but neither does her uncle, and if she’s going to resume her work as a saint of the Church, then she should know who she’s really working for. And if she’s not going to resume her work as a saint, then she needs to run.
Or come home to me.
I finish the letter and return the pen to where I found it, a strange ache in my throat as I look at the thick wooden ruler tucked neatly inside the drawer.
I’d used that ruler on Tristan this spring.
I’d layered neat red welts up his thighs like a ladder, and then I’d shoved him to the floor and climbed that ladder to heaven.
I used to have some degree of control, I think.
The moment I felt it slipping with Isolde, I stepped back.
I refused Tristan when he first begged me to use him, because I knew it was dangerous.
I knew it was flirting with a darkness that I’ve kept carefully fenced for a very long time.
I learned control in the Army, in the Rangers, in the agency.
I learned it on Eliot’s body as he learned it on mine.
I mastered it in the years after, when revenge burned like a sun inside my chest, when it choked me, when all I wanted to do was fly across an ocean and make everyone pay. I had nothing if I didn’t have control.
I think of the cum still sliding down the paneling on the other side of the wall and rub my forehead with my hand, closing my eyes.
Where is that vaunted control now?
I get up and break apart the last smoldering log in the fire, thinking that I might need to add a stern postscript about fire safety to my letter, which I should not have to tell Tristan with his half farm childhood, or Isolde, who is a consummate arsonist.
Satisfied that there’s nothing but cooling embers left on the grate, I tuck the letter into my pocket and go into the kitchen, where I find a rag under the sink, and then I go back into the hallway to clean the mostly dried streaks off the wood.
If only the cuckold fetishists at Lyonesse could see me now, witness the solitary and ridiculous reality of scrubbing your cum off a wall while your wife sleeps in someone else’s arms. Hardly the stuff of fantasies…
unless your fantasies include a trip to the laundry room and serious consideration as to whether you need to polish the antique wood you just scrubbed clean.
As for my fantasies, well, I already lived them, didn’t I? On a wicked Samhain night, the three of us together, both my sweet toys at my disposal, my wife mine to give to the little soldier who was mine to take.
It was perfect. For one night, it was absolutely perfect.
The rag goes into the basket in the laundry room, and then I go toward my bedroom, knowing this is a very bad idea and doing it anyway.
A wise man would leave the letter on the kitchen table or stick it to the front door like his own dark, accusatory theses.
A wise man would go back home and accept what he can’t change.
But I have to see them one last time.
I want them.
I hate them.
I love them.
I’m careful as I open the door—the latch sometimes catches on the strike plate—and push it open with infinite slowness.
The night is quiet, aside from whatever scraps of wind manage to pour in from the moor, and I imagine I can hear the thud of my heart against my ribs as I step inside the room.
I almost want them to be awake, to scream at me, attack me, fall to my feet and nuzzle their faces against my thigh, but once I’m standing at the foot of the bed and my eyes adjust fully to the faint moonlight, I can see that they’re both fast asleep, facing each other.
Tristan’s hand is folded protectively over Isolde’s where it’s curled between them.
And the jealousy nearly cuts me in half it’s so sudden and sharp, not a sword but an axe, not made of steel but of loneliness and obsession.
This , more than any number of orgasms on the library floor, makes me want to claw the hills apart and boil the sea. My Tristan and my Isolde curled toward each other like a set of beautiful parentheses, the heartbreaking clasp of hands, the tangle of feet under the blanket.
I could laugh if I could breathe. Mark Trevena, famously jaded, famously immoral, and he’s furious over cuddling .
And I should have known—I should have fucking known because I was seething when Andrea told me about Tristan and Isolde in Belgrade, when I learned that Isolde broke her promise to me.
But it was the ensuing realization that they’d been pining for each other like characters in a fairy tale that broke me apart.
That they’ve been slipping through each other’s thoughts, that they’ve been catching glances across the room.
That any unexpected blush on their cheeks might have come from a secret flame whose warmth never touched my skin.
I felt a reasonable envy when it came to their lust, but when it comes to this? I am unreasonable beyond compare. I am livid with distrust and spite; I am as resentfully possessive as one of those dragons Tristan is always reading about.
I am mortally wounded by them holding hands.
I step forward, managing to drag in a breath as I do, some kind of swelling recklessness making me dizzy with possibility, with impending disaster.
Me , I’m the disaster, and I will bring the full force of myself upon them, I will remind them that they pledged themselves to me, promised their hearts to me?—
I pull up short at the foot of the bed. Something is gleaming just below their linked hands. Isolde’s knife, as cold as the sky outside, as sharp as my love for them. Inches away from Isolde’s hand, as if she wanted to be able to grab it at any moment.
To defend against an intruder? To defend against me?
The thought does what no amount of logic can do, and it stops me. It arrests the crazed obsession still pumping through my veins.
She ran away from you. She chose Tristan and she ran away from you. With good reason.
Running away was smart; it’s what anyone with any shred of sense should have done. And I’m glad she has Tristan with her, even if it hurts like hell to see her with someone trustworthy and honest and good, even if it means he chose her over me.
They should be wary of me. They should want nothing to do with me. I should be met with the point of a knife.
I breathe out. It’s better this way, and I know it: this had been part of my original plan after all. The two of them together, and me forgotten, existing to them only in scraps of memory and bad dreams.
I’ll leave. They’re safe here, they have each other, and they need not worry that I’ll come drag them out of their idyll just for the sake of my pride or my revenge. I’ll have revenge enough without them.
But…hopelessly, selfishly…I want one last piece of them. Something I can hold on to.
So I take Isolde’s knife.
Deftly but silently, I reach over her sleeping form and replace the knife with the one I brought with me, a blade made of matte black nylon and glass fiber, sharp enough to cut paper. I leave the letter underneath it.
I don’t dare to kiss them, so I let myself imagine it, a brush of my lips over a cheek or along a jaw. I imagine crawling between them and pulling them both into my arms and sleeping until the late, gray daybreak of December comes and I can afflict them with myself as I so love to do.
And then I leave the lovers sleeping at Morois House, my knife between them and the truth too, and I accept that my heart—as hard and pointed and resistant to light as the blade now on the bed—is left there too.
I find my coat and my shoes in the laundry room, and I see myself out, careful not to leave tracks in the snow-splotched yard. They don’t need to know how I got in.
A husband should have some secrets yet.