Caroline #2
There's a marble fireplace big enough to roast an ox. And above it, no moose head, thank God, just a single oil painting of a stormy sea. The furniture is clean, mid-century modern, gleaming leather and smooth wooden curves. A bar cart glitters in the corner.
What strikes me most, though, is how empty it feels. No photographs. No clutter. No sign that a single human being has ever actually lived here.
Just like the cabin.
"You…" I turn in a slow, amazed circle. "You have this? And yet you voluntarily chose to live in an unheated shack?"
"I live where I want to live." He sets his keys on a marble foyer table by the door. "The cabin is who I am now. This is who I was."
I drift to the window because I don't know what else to do with myself.
The park spreads out below me, all the way to the towers on the other side.
In the near distance down there is my whole tiny ordinary life, which feels like it belongs to a different person now.
I've never felt poor—white-shoe law firm partners like my dad aren't exactly "down on their luck"—but there are levels to wealth, I'm learning.
"Feel free to explore," Afon says. "I'm going to take a shower."
He turns and slips down the hall on silent feet. I hear a door close and water begin to run through the pipes.
So I go snooping.
But there isn't much to explore, honestly.
The apartment is huge, but it's empty and personality-free, like a hotel suite.
The kitchen is stunning, but the appliances look like they've never cooked a single egg.
A dining room holds a long table and eight chairs, with no scratches, no water rings, no sign anyone ever sat there and laughed until they cried.
In the master bedroom is a bed bigger than the one at Lukas's place, made up with crisp white sheets, military-cornered.
I open a closet and find a row of suits. Black, charcoal, navy. All of them expensive and severe. A row of shoes lined up beneath, polished to a shine.
There's no flannel in sight.
This isn't the closet of the Afon I knew. It's the closet of a man named Mr. Satyrin who walks into dark rooms and does bad things inside of them.
Shuddering, I close the closet door and wander back to the window with the view of the city.
We have to get married. I turn those words over and over, looking for a seam, a way to make them mean something other than what they mean. It's not symbolic, Lukas said. Well, not only symbolic.
But it is symbolic. That's the whole problem. Two days ago, I would have done it. Back then, if Afon had gotten down on one knee in the snow and asked me to marry him, I'd have said yes before he finished the sentence.
Eyes open. On purpose. I picked him.
Yet now, here I am, being asked to pick him again—-except this time I know exactly what those hands did. My mother screamed in her sleep because of the man in the shower down the hall. My father is in an early grave because of his sins.
I don't know how long I stand there. Long enough that the sun comes up over the clouds clustered on the horizon and begins to melt the snow on the glass, until little rivulets of water trickle down the panes.
Then I hear footsteps behind me, and I turn around.
And I stop.
I genuinely don't know who I'm looking at.
Afon's beard is gone. All of it. He shaved it down to nothing, and underneath is a jaw I've only ever seen in shadow.
It's square and hard and clean. It belongs on a magazine, honestly, if not the freaking MOMA.
He's in one of those suits from the closet.
The one he chose is black as midnight. It fits him perfectly, and I remember that Lukas isn't the only one with unearthly proportions.
Huge shoulders stretch the jacket to its limit, and above the V of the white, open-collar shirt, I spy the tip of that eight-pointed star tattoo.
His hair is combed back, still damp, dark but shot through with gray.
It's like one of those teen movies, where the girl takes off her glasses and shakes out her hair and everyone gasps. Except backwards. And real. Mountain Man Afon, with the woodpile and the cans of beans and the moose head, is gone.
In his place is this.
Filthy Rich Afon.
Mr. Satyrin.
Then I look at his eyes.
And any heart flutters I might've been feeling die a quick and brutal death.
Because they're concrete again. There's nothing behind them. No fire. No lust. No half-inch crack. Certainly no trace of love.
It's the most honest thing about him, those eyes.
The suit is a costume. The cabin was a costume, too, I'm realizing.
But the eyes… the eyes are the man. Closed-off, chained, deadbolted.
A man who killed and lied and pulled my father into the dark and let me fall for him anyway because he's a selfish bastard.
This is who he is.
The realization guts me. It scoops me out clean.
"Okay," I say, numb and resigned.
He frowns. "Okay what?"
"I'll marry you." I don't even recognize the deadened voice coming out of my own mouth.
"That's what you wanted to know, isn't it?
That's why we drove three hours. So I could see all this and understand what I'd be marrying.
" I gesture at the suit, the apartment, the man, and all he represents. "Well. I see it now."
His frown deepens. "Are you sure you—"
I turn back to the window so I don't have to look at his face. "Eyes open. Isn't that what you keep saying? Well, they're fully open now. So let's get this shit over with."