Chapter 25
He washesmy hair in the shower, washes my body and my feet. I look down at him as he kneels to do it, my foot resting on his naked thigh, water sluicing over his back and shoulders. It ripples over the still-red scar on his shoulder and drips off the ends of his hair. It’s his bath product he uses on me, and the large stone-lined shower smells like him. Like minerals and rain and earth.
Like petrichor.
This is something we do in the Church, wash each other’s feet, and it’s disorienting to see Mark doing it here, with more care and attention than I’ve ever seen on Maundy Thursday. He makes it seem like the most natural act in the world, and when he’s finished, he bends his head to kiss the top of each foot, right in the middle.
This cannot be the same Mark who striped my thighs with a riding crop, who left me after taking my virginity—and yet it is, it undeniably is, because when he lifts his eyes to mine, I see the same glittering gaze I saw the night I learned I was supposed to marry him. It’s the same danger, the same utter command, the same unfathomable secrets.
It’s all him.
It’s just somehow all him.
After we finish in the shower, Mark wraps a towel around his waist and then tucks one around me, his fingers lingering over my breasts as he does.
“Let’s take the day off,” he says suddenly, impishly.
It’s the middle of the week, and as much as my job is for show, I still have to pretend it matters in order for the pretense to stand. “To do what?” I ask, a little doubtfully, even though inside I’m feeling a little… Ah, this is stupid. I’m feeling blushy that my husband wants to spend time with me.
Mark traces the branches of my collarbone with a pleased finger as he answers. “To fuck,” he says, like it’s self-evident. “To play chess. To go to the grotto together and sweat. To have a meal that isn’t polluted with people we secretly can’t stand.”
All of that sounds amazing. And leaving my pretend job for a day almost feels like leaving my real job for a day. I can, of course, justify it by reminding myself that seducing Mark is my task—as much as anything I’ve done with a knife or by crawling through a window—but I don’t want to think about it right now. I just want to be with him.
Bad.
This is bad, Isolde.
“Okay,” I murmur. “Let’s take the day off.”
A huge grin, just like the one he gave me over the chessboard on our wedding night. It’s infectious and warm and so, so perilous to my well-being.
“I knew I’d persuade you,” he says, kissing me once on the lips, hard, and then pulling me into our bedroom.
He dresses simply—barely—in linen drawstring pants and nothing else, and I follow his lead, pulling on a lacy bralette and soft drawstring pants of my own. We send whatever emails we need to send, and then he makes me a breakfast of thick toast with soft butter, cut fruit, and coffee—espresso for me, cappuccino for him.
We eat at the table, the autumn sun clouding over as we do, and he pulls me into his lap when we’ve finished, kissing my neck, my collarbone, my breasts. He tugs down the lace of bralette and sucks on my nipples.
“I want to fuck you again,” I pant.
“Is there a question in there?” His voice is dark and playful, both.
“Can we fuck? Sir? Please?”
“Only because you asked so nicely,” he purrs, and in a moment’s time, our pants are off and I’m riding him, his mouth hot and wet on my breasts, leaving little scrapes and nips everywhere.
Even after earlier, I feel stretched, and sitting on him like this, he’s so deep that I can barely breathe. After he’s done abusing my breasts, he leans back in his chair and allows me to explore his body, to stroke the corrugations of his stomach and the lines of his chest. To play with the crisp hair on his pectoral muscles and abdomen. To trace around the scar on his shoulder, the reason Tristan came to get me from Ireland instead of him.
Funny to think that everything that’s happened between Tristan and me is because of that scar.
He lets me caress his neck and then closes his eyes as I run my fingers through his soft hair. It catches the now-silver light, a treasure in my hands. I follow the straight, thick tracks of his eyebrows with my fingertips and find the slight ridge in his nose. I push my thumb against his lower lip and make his mouth open for me so I can see his white even teeth and the slick pink of his tongue.
He indulges all of this—until he doesn’t. He bites my thumb and then works my hips over his lap until I’m releasing with wet seizes and he’s pumping inside me, leaving me filled with his semen.
When we finish, he has me stand up so he can see me drip. He plays with it a minute, catching it with his fingers and pushing it back inside me, and then he smacks my ass.
“Is this you saying you’re ready to play chess now?” I laugh.
“How did you know?”
We’re four moves into a game when there’s a knock at the door.
“Come in,” Mark calls carelessly, and the door opens to reveal Tristan in his usual black suit.
When he sees me and Mark—Mark shirtless, me in the bralette and lounge pants—scarlet seeps into his cheeks.
“Ah, sir, I didn’t—ah. I can go.” Tristan takes a step backward.
Mark tuts, waving him in. “No, no, come on in. I forgot to tell you that we’re taking a holiday today.”
“Um. We are?”
Tristan doesn’t know? I saw Mark with his phone just before we ate; I assumed he told everyone. Perhaps he only told Sedge and Dinah.
“Well, Isolde and I aren’t working, so I certainly don’t expect you to. You have the day to do whatever you’d like.”
I’m treading a fine line here, but the blush on Tristan’s cheeks and the look of longing he gives the chessboard make my chest squeeze. “Why don’t you spend it with us?” I propose.
I think my suggestion surprises all three of us.
Then Mark smiles, one of those big heart-stopping smiles. “That’s an excellent idea. I’m sure you have some novel with a dragon in it to read—come read it on my sofa while we play. I may need my knight to defend me against Isolde’s school chess club strategies.”
I glare at him, and he smiles even wider.
“I—” Tristan doesn’t seem to know what to do. Finally, he steps all the way inside the apartment and shuts the door. “Okay, sir.”
He doesn’t go get his dragon book, but he does peruse Mark’s groaning bookshelves while Mark and I start moving our pieces on the board again. I can feel Tristan behind me, confused and a little shy, and I wonder what he’s thinking. If he can perceive the shift between Mark and me, the change in Mark’s demeanor.
Has Tristan ever seen this side of Mark before? This side that’s mischievous and yet still menacing—open and yet still unknowable? Jealousy flares like a freshly lit wick at the thought, which is stupid, so foolishly stupid.
It doesn’t matter what came before now; Mark has promised he’ll be faithful to me.
But the flame won’t die down or even flicker. I think of the two of them together, sharing smiles and touches, showers and coffee as a storm rolls in. I am jealous of the sex—I was jealous of Isabella Beroul when I saw her here at Lyonesse on our wedding night—but that Tristan might know these big smiles of Mark’s or that Mark might know that Tristan sings to himself while he’s getting dressed…
That’s worse.
I don’t have a claim on their past, I know that. But isn’t jealousy still understandable in this case? Natural, even? When they only stopped because of me, and it’s not like either of them has become less tempting since I arrived?
Mark does win the game, but it takes him a long time, and it’s very close. There’s a slaughterhouse of onyx pieces beside the board when we’re done. He considers them a moment and then stands up.
“Lunch, I think.”
“Tristan,” I say as Mark walks into the kitchen. Tristan—who ended up picking up a spy thriller that Mark informed him gets almost everything wrong—is looking at where the waistband of Mark’s linen pants hangs low on his hips, and swivels his head guiltily when I call his name.
“Come play chess with me,” I say.
Tristan sighs, put-upon, and sets down his book. He’s taken off his jacket, tie, and shoes at Mark’s behest and looks casually delicious in rolled-up sleeves and socks. The top button of his shirt is unfastened, showing off the knot of his throat.
“I’m no good at this,” he tells me as he sits down, as heavily as a person sitting down to read someone else’s family genealogy.
“He has no strategy,” confirms Mark from the kitchen, pulling things from the fridge.
I’m moving the pieces back to their places on the board. “I think you just don’t like anything you’re not immediately good at,” I tease, and Tristan’s face gets a little sulky.
“That’s not true,” he protests in a mumble, and maybe to prove it, he straightens up in his chair to play with me.
I try to walk him through my decision-making as we go, but Mark’s right: all strategy is lost on Tristan.
“You don’t have to boost the morale of your pieces with heroic sacrifice,” I attempt to explain after the third pointless piece he’s lost. “It’s not going to make them fight harder.”
Even Mark gets involved, coming over from the kitchen with a towel draped over his shoulder and several sprigs of thyme in his hand. “Tristan, you have to stop protecting the king at some point, especially in the endgame. Let the king protect himself while you go after the queen.”
It’s a bloodbath, and I almost feel bad for wiping him out until I remember that Tristan really is good at everything else he tries. The prom king turned war hero who can sing like an angel and screw like one of Mark’s demons. It’s a righting of some heavenly scale somewhere that he’s terrible at chess.
Mark makes us veal tartare with hazelnuts and figs, served with a side of mushroom risotto with truffle butter and thyme. We eat, the three of us, at the dining table while the skies finally open. Rain rolls down the floor-to-ceiling windows and speckles the river.
“I was thinking that you should accompany Isolde on her trip to Belgrade in a few weeks,” Mark says to Tristan.
I had hoped, when I’d mentioned the trip to Mark earlier, that he would agree with me that I didn’t need any security, that it was the kind of boring antiquities trip I’d be taking often with my new job, and that it would be a waste of employee resources if I stole away security staff every time I needed to hop on a plane. I see now that Mark’s thoughtful hmm hadn’t actually been an agreement.
Tristan’s eyes meet mine. “If that’s what you think is best, sir,” he says to Mark.
“I do. Antiquities isn’t always a clean business.” Mark takes a drink of his gin. “And I know Isolde will submit to me in this.”
I hear the challenge in his words. Will I gainsay my own pledge of submission so quickly? Not that I could without inviting unnecessary curiosity as to why I would want to travel alone…or avoid being alone with Tristan.
“Yes, I will,” I murmur, and take a drink of my own.
“Why don’t you sing for us, Tristan?” asks Mark suddenly.
Tristan looks as startled as I feel, his forehead furrowing. “Sing?”
“It occurs to me that it would be very nice to hear, with the rain around us.” Mark sips his gin on the rocks and leans back in his chair. “And I haven’t heard you sing in some time.”
Tristan’s eyes move to me and then he quickly looks away. “Okay, sir,” he says. And he straightens up a little in his chair and begins to sing.
It’s a Catholic hymn, adapted from the prayer of St. Francis, and it’s beautiful against the rain, the notes melancholy on their own, but even more melancholy from the lips of someone who has not been a channel of the Lord’s peace, who was not able to sow love instead of hatred.
I realize Mark is watching me as Tristan sings, his face less open than it was earlier. I check my own expression, my own body, instantly terrified that I look how I feel: like I adore Tristan. Like I want to kiss the sadness off his full mouth and shield all that hopeless goodness from the evils of the world.
No, Mark can’t be suspicious. That’s my own guilt and worry tugging on me; I look like anyone would look like listening to Tristan sing, which is to say impressed and grateful.
Then Tristan finishes, and I help Mark clear the dishes away, and he says, “Have either of you used the spa in the grotto yet?”
And the moment is gone.