Chapter Five #2
“All I have of that night are my reactions afterward,” Saskia said, her eyes narrowing as if she was seeing only monsters when she looked at him. “Cutting off my hair, dressing in drab, dark colors and trying to hide. What does that suggest to you?”
Thanasis wanted to move closer. He wanted to take her in his arms and kiss her until she came to her senses.
Maybe she didn’t remember him, but he knew from the other night that her body did, as clearly as he remembered her.
But if he did that, no matter if she thrilled to his touch again, it would only prove this case she was trying to build.
This version of his relationship with her bore no resemblance to reality, but the fact that she might imagine it—and the possibility, however slight, that the Saskia who remembered him might see it that way too, if he could reach her again—well. He couldn’t risk it.
He cared too much about what had actually happened between them. He wouldn’t let memories, or the lack of them, change that.
Thanasis stayed where he was. “I would say that everything you’re describing sounds a lot like a person who suffered a significant traumatic event,” he said quietly. “And was likely depressed and confused in its aftermath.”
“But what was that traumatic event?” she asked sharply. “The train derailment? Or you?”
And she would never know, no matter what she remembered, how deeply that wounded him.
“Saskia,” he said, though it hurt to say her name, “I won’t deny that I could easily have hurt your feelings, but I would never—”
“But you don’t know, do you?” There was something hot in her gaze, a kind of knife’s edge that matched her voice. “All this time, you’ve been mourning something you might have broken yourself.”
And for what was, possibly, the first time his entire life, Thanasis was speechless. He could only stare at her—this woman back from the dead, the love of his life, who was treating him like some kind of criminal.
Who was suggesting things to him that made him want to howl and roar—
But he didn’t.
He couldn’t have said how long they stood there like that, staring at each other.
Thanasis found himself playing the whole of their relationship over and over his head, and that was nothing new.
What was new was the way he felt as if it was a forensic examination today, as if he was turning it all over, poking at it, looking for clues to prove that she was right.
Not only that she was right, but that he had deeply and fundamentally misunderstood the most important relationship of his life. The only important relationship in his life.
Until he’d met Saskia, he had not believed in love. Until he’d touched her, he hadn’t understood how one person could connect to another like that.
He had grown up here, after all. In this circus, where everything was for show, nothing was ever as it appeared, and any sign of weakness was swiftly and ruthlessly punished.
Only with Saskia had he dared experiment with the notion that it was possible to feel, and deeply, and yet exhibit no weakness whatsoever—only strength.
But how could he explain this to this woman who lived in her body and wore her face, but was not Saskia, somehow? How could he convince her that the way she had decided to twist their relationship was not only wrong, but something like ruinous?
He couldn’t. And he almost wished he’d never seen her again, he thought then, even though he knew that wasn’t quite true.
What was true was that there was a part of him that would always regret, now, that she had so quickly and resolutely tarnished his memories of those two years they had shared.
Then again, perhaps the real loss was that he could no longer trust himself, or his own memories where those years were concerned.
“You have nothing to say, do you?” She made a face, as if she expected nothing else from him.
But he remembered that it was this woman, not his memory, that had kissed him back like her life depended on it.
It was this Saskia who had clung to him and rode his hand as if she had pulled it to her body herself.
That made him feel better.
To some degree.
Because it meant he wasn’t going mad. There was some solace in that.
“I understand that you can’t know,” he said, perhaps more to himself than to her. “That you can’t recall the things I can. That you feel you must make these things up.”
“What I feel,” she said, in that same edgy way, “is that I am marrying your father and it is just as well for the both of us that I can’t remember any Zacharias but him.”
Somehow— somehow— Thanasis did not reply to that the way he wished he could.
The way every atom within him demanded he should.
“My father is neither a good man nor kind man,” he told her, as coolly as he was able.
“I understand that you think I’m insulting him when I say this, but I’m not.
Do not take my word for it. Ask anyone. His only virtue is that he knows it.
He knows exactly who he is and he delights in seeing how far people will go to cozy up to him no matter how repugnant his behavior. ”
“I have seen no repugnant behavior,” she replied, her chin tipping up again.
“You will,” Thanasis assured her, his voice quiet. “I hope you do not, but you will.”
He made himself move, then. He went over to the briefcase he’d stashed beside the bench and pulled out a business card. “I can’t stand here and try to convince you that my memories are true, not when you’re so determined to think the worst of a relationship you can’t even remember. I won’t.”
“Convenient,” she murmured, but there was something about the way she was looking at him. Something that made his heart kick a little harder.
“Ask yourself this. Why did you take nothing with you if you were running away from me? Not even a wallet. If that train hadn’t derailed, you likely would have been tossed off at the next stop because I don’t think you paid for your ticket.
” Saskia frowned, but she didn’t argue. He kept going.
“But none of that matters. What matters is that you are engaged to a man that everyone considers a monster, even the man himself. You should look into that. You should ask yourself what it is he plans to do with you, once you are his wife.”
“He plans to let me paint,” she told him, and he didn’t think he was imagining the note of defensiveness in her tone, then. “He’s given me an art studio where I will be free to do as I wish.”
“Will you?” Thanasis shook his head. “I hope for your sake you’re right.”
He handed her his card, but she didn’t take it.
She stared at it as if it was a live snake.
He felt his lips shift into some sort of curve, though it felt to him more like a grimace.
He reached over and tucked the card beneath the strap of the bra he could see beneath her shirt.
It sat there on her shoulder and he barely touched her as he did it.
But they both reacted as if he’d doused them in gasoline and then lit a match.
“Maybe,” she got out, hoarsely, “she left you because you thought she was an object you could treat as you liked.”
“She wasn’t leaving me,” he told her in the same voice, and even more intensely. “Someday, when you remember what actually happened that night, we will revisit it. But I’m not discussing it with you.”
“Because you know you can’t defend yourself.”
“Because I know what happened, and you don’t.
” He reached over and tapped the card he’d slid beneath her strap.
“In the meantime, keep that card. Everything on this island belongs to my father in one way or another. There may very well come a time when you might like to leave. And if he would prefer that you stay, you’ll need help. ”
He remembered trying to leave himself, when he was a child. He also remembered the precious few times his mother had tried to do the same, and had been turned back to the villa by every last villager with a boat.
Pavlos’s power here was far too great.
But Saskia couldn’t know that. “Are you so delusional that you think I would ask for help from the man who—”
“I would be very careful with any accusations, Saskia,” he said, quietly. Much too quietly. “Because I know exactly what happened on that beach. I remember precisely how you responded.”
“I wasn’t…”
She looked lost, there for a minute. It made his chest hurt.
“You have already accused me of predatory behavior. Toward a woman you don’t believe you ever knew.”
She frowned again, and he wondered if any of this was getting through to her. If somewhere, deep inside, there was even the faintest possibility that some memory of what it had actually been like between them was getting through—
But she shook her head, as if shoving it away.
“You’re right that I don’t know what happened between you and your Saskia five years ago.
But I do know that what happened between you and me the other night was wrong.
I’m engaged to your father. That’s the beginning and the end of anything that needs to be said between us. ”
It was the hardest thing he ever had to do—it felt as if he was tearing his own ribs out of his chest as he did it—but Thanasis nodded. “Agreed,” he said curtly.
Somehow.
And it was as if Saskia had been standing there pushing with all her might against an immovable wall, only to see it crumble. Her body shifted as if the wall had given way. She looked something like crestfallen.
It was terrible to watch. All Thanasis wanted to do was to sweep her into his arms. He wanted to comfort her. There had been a time when he was the only thing that could ever comfort her, even if he was also the reason she had been upset in the first place.
She had told him so herself, a million times.
But this Saskia saw darkness where there had only been light, love, and arguments that had gone round and round because both of them were stubborn. Both of them were passionate. If they hadn’t been, they wouldn’t have gotten together in the first place.
There are words for women like me, she had shouted at him that night.
Yes, he had shouted back. Mistress. I chose it deliberately. You used to like it.
Because it had once been its own source of heat between them. It had lent itself to all manner of games that they’d played until they were sated and silly with it.
Because both of them found power dynamics particularly exciting.
One night he had only allowed her to say yes, sir .
One weekend, she had greeted him at the door naked and had stayed that way until Monday.
They had exulted in it, this archaic arrangement where he was in control—except she was the only thing on the planet that threatened that control. By her very existence.
They had been entwined with each other, irrevocably. She had told him she was leaving, but only to clear her head. To see a sky that isn’t yours, she had told him. If only for a little while . He had known she was coming back.
There was no other option. Not for either of them.
Maybe it had been toxic, but it had been theirs.
How could he explain this to a woman who patently refused to believe it?
Who wouldn’t understand what he was telling her, because if she didn’t remember anything that had happened before that night, she couldn’t possibly remember the blaze of their connection or the ways they’d exulted in it, sinking just as deeply into the dark as into the light.
He couldn’t explain it to anyone.
Having her back, but only a part of her, was an exquisite agony.
Thanasis was not certain he would ever recover.
“Whatever you think of me,” he told her when he was certain he could speak, in as even a tone as possible, “know this. There is absolutely nothing I would not do to help you. And there is very little that is not within my power. All you have to do is call.”
“I won’t,” she told him, but her eyes were wider than before, and glassier.
Most importantly, she made no move to take that card from the place where he had stashed it. If she meant what she said, surely she would have ripped it away from her body and thrown it on the ground.
So he did something he would have sworn was impossible. He took one last look at his Saskia, risen from the grave, and he soaked her in as best he could.
Then he walked away, into the cottage, and did not go out again until she was gone.
He made some excuse about business to his father, in a text, and was back in London before nightfall.
But he didn’t go to his house on Hampstead Heath.
He went to that flat in Chelsea instead.
He let himself in with his key and then he stood there, drawing the scent of her that lingered there—or perhaps it was a phantom, but he didn’t care, it was still the only part of her he had—deep into his body.
He stayed there until dawn, tortured by the ghost of the Saskia he’d lost.
And, worse, by the terrible loss of the Saskia he’d found.