Chapter 21 #2
We finish, and I have Isolde wait in the shower while I get a towel, not wanting to risk her slipping while her feet are wet.
I dry her off, starting with her face and ending with her hair, and after I fold her into one of my robes, I catch her looking at me with eyes now slightly clearer than before.
Hope is a corrosive pest, but I still allow it to eat its way inside my chest.
“I’d like you to drink more water now,” I tell her, and she breathes in and nods. It’s the clearest communication I’ve gotten from her yet. “Will you go into the kitchen and do that for me?”
She hesitates, but she goes eventually. I peel off my wet underwear, towel off, and then pull on sweatpants and a long-sleeved T-shirt.
When I pad barefoot into the kitchen, she’s holding the now-empty glass of water.
“Very good,” I praise, and then I have her sit on the counter while I make a very quick meal for her. Toast with butter, apricot jam, and sea salt and then some apple slices with peanut butter.
I watch her eat slowly and then more quickly as her body remembers how it’s done, until she’s licking jam and sea salt off her fingertips. I catch her hand just as she reaches her ring finger and lick it myself, curling my tongue around the pad of her finger and then pulling it between my lips.
I pull back, our gazes meeting, and there is no question what either of us are thinking of right now.
The freezing rain has finally come amidst all this, and the sky has gone dark.
“An early bedtime, I think,” I say, and while it’s a little delayed, surprise tugs at her mouth.
“We’re not going to the hall tonight?” she asks, and the hope in her voice breaks my heart.
“I think we’ve earned a night off.”
“And you’ll…you’ll stay here tonight? So I don’t have to sleep alone?”
I think of the rumples on my side of the bed. Of the nightmares she might have been suffering through alone. My throat aches; I have to clear it before I speak. “Yes, Isolde. I’ll stay. Let me clean up here, and then we can get ready for bed.”
She chews on her lip and then slides off the counter and goes to get ready for bed under her own steam. After I finish with the dishes, I follow, brushing my teeth with a spare toothbrush and then finding an unfamiliar charging cable to plug in my phone.
Two weeks ago, I lived here, and now it feels like a hotel.
It’s unpleasant.
Isolde is already in bed, on her side, and when I slide under the covers, she stays where she’s at, even though I can feel the loneliness rolling off her like fog on ice.
“What’s your safeword?” I ask her.
“Hyssop,” she answers, confused.
“Great.” Without any other discussion, I grab her and pull her over to my side of the bed, manhandling her until she’s tucked against me and half draped over my chest.
And then…then I can’t stop petting her. Stroking her. Shaping my palms against the curves of her shoulder or the subtle muscles of her back.
Fuck, I’ve missed this. Just this. Touching her.
Holding her. It’s how priests and monks and other holy people must feel when they’re allowed to handle their reliquaries, all those beautifully wrought vessels made to carry sparks of God.
I could pray right now, this very minute, that’s how good it feels to have her in my arms.
“Why were you in the garden?” I ask, staring up at the ceiling.
There’s no water in the rooftop pool right now, so the ceiling is a glass canopy of darkness, limned in blue at the edges.
At the windows, winter presses in with biting rain and the occasional spit of sleet.
Below us, the club will be in the full thrum of evening, with music and guests and some suspension experts on the stage.
Isolde takes a minute to answer. She’s been silent all this time, but she’s warm and fed, and she’s been tracing the ink on my arm. The soft exhales on my chest have been steady and not labored.
“Why did you come looking for me in the garden?” she asks rather than answering.
I find a strand of silken hair and twist it around my finger. “I couldn’t find you. I was worried.”
“You haven’t tried to find me before.” Her finger still moves along my forearm, tracing the curved beak of the tattooed bird. A Cornish chough, which mates for life. She finds a long, raised ridge in its wing, a few raised scars nearby.
“It’s important to find a reputable tattoo artist,” I remark when she rubs at the ridge inquiringly.
But she doesn’t let me change the subject. “It feels like you’ve been avoiding me.”
There’s no point in lying. “That’s because I have been. I thought it better. For you.”
A dull laugh. “Yes. So much better.”
“You didn’t run away on Samhain because you wanted to keep sharing a life with me,” I state.
“And you didn’t come back because you missed me.
You ran because I lied to you and because you couldn’t bring yourself to kill me, and now you’re here again because it’s the best chance you’ve got at holding your uncle at bay.
An uneasy alliance isn’t the same as trust, and I didn’t imagine we’d go back to blow jobs after breakfast just because your uncle has done us the favor of threatening you directly now.
” And I don’t want you to hate me when this is done.
I want you to know that I at least tried not to take more than I needed.
I don’t tell her those last parts though. They’re selfish thoughts, even for me.
“But that’s not all of it, is it?” she asks. “You hate us for leaving you, even if you still love us too. You want to punish me, and if Tristan were here, you’d want to punish him too.”
I acknowledge this. “Yes.”
“So I’m not supposed to believe that you’re staying away to hurt me?”
I sigh. “Give my mercenary nature a little credit, Isolde. Why would I choose a punishment that wounded myself ? I can’t be plainer about this than I’ve been: if I were the god of my own little world, I would have you and Tristan at my fingertips, and I would spend my days and nights afflicting you with my attention.
Like a pillar of cloud and flame, I’d be with you always.
So no, I haven’t been staying away to hurt you.
I’ve been staying away because the conscientious course of action also happened to be the most strategic way forward, and believe me when I say that almost never happens in my line of work. ”
She shifts and turns so that she’s propped up on one elbow and looking down at me. “And today you decided that, what, it wasn’t conscientious to ignore me anymore?”
The light from outside filters in through the windows and the ceiling, a little mottled from the ice and rain, and paints her in shades of indigo and Alice blue.
I find a new skein of hair and wrap it in a blue-silver curl around my finger.
“You’ve been fading since Saturnalia. I thought maybe…
I suppose I thought it was a protective measure, that you were only trying to give the club as little to work with as possible, that you were simply missing Tristan and your freedom and resenting me for taking both of those things from your life.
I didn’t realize how much everything was affecting you, and I should have.
I shouldn’t have been so far away.” I let out a tired sigh. “Forgive me, Isolde.”
She studies my face. “I don’t know that I should forgive you, but that’s the problem, isn’t it?
It would be absurd to trust you ever again, and yet you know that and you agree .
You’re not courting my trust or my forgiveness…
and that in itself makes me want to trust you more.
And then when we are stacking lie for lie, sin for sin, broken vow for broken bow—our sums aren’t so far apart in the ledger, are they? ”
“I’m ahead,” I say. “By my reckoning.”
“Yes, you are still the bigger monster,” she says and lies down again, putting her head on my shoulder.
“But I’m not far behind. And perhaps I’m worse, because I don’t even know why I am what I am anymore.
You’ve at least scratched your sins into the ledger yourself.
The things I’ve done…I think I’ve done them for something that isn’t real at all. For something that’s never been real.”
I hear it in that last sentence, the same desolation I saw in her face in the garden. The pointless stains on her knees from kneeling on frozen tree roots.
Opera music curls in my mind—handfuls of magnolia petals flutter down to a coffin lid gleaming in a hole.
There’s a faint trembling under my hands and against my side now. The shallow stutter of a breath accidentally catching in a cinched throat.
“You took the boxes with you, so you know that Eliot died in a friendly fire incident in Ko?ice,” I say, stroking her shoulder. “But did you know that I was the one to drag his body into the dark and bring him home?”
“No,” she says a little shakily. The sobs are close, which is okay. I’m not frightened of her tears. “I didn’t know that.”
“I watched as he was shot by American soldiers—soldiers who’d been lied to, but God, so easily lied to —and I listened to a soldier render aid to one of his own.
One of our own. And instead of asking for help, instead of helping them , I had to creep up to my husband’s dead body and tug him over wet cobbles and muddy grass and pray that no one heard me.
His shoe came off—he was always so vain about his shoes, would never wear something practical?—”
I stop short, having forgotten that small ostentation of his. The memory lances clean through me.