Chapter 26
I check my phone—thesame fruitless glance I’ve been giving it for over two months, hoping for a text or call from Cara Sims—and see nothing. I look up just in time to see Isolde stepping out of the imposing concrete museum, the wind tugging at her hair and her heels clicking on the street as I lead her to our waiting car.
It’s a cloudy day, cool, befitting the red-orange color of the trees in University Park across the street from us. Heads turn as Isolde walks to the car: the straight shoulders, the trench coat belted around her waist, the opaline hair.
It is the cold honesty of her beauty—not only the symmetry of it, but the reticence of it too, the faraway and silent reserve. Looking at her, even when she’s kneeling on the floor, even when she’s cuffed to a St. Andrew’s cross with tears dripping off her chin, you feel as if you’re gazing at something priceless through glass. Looking at the majesty of a golden altar and tabernacle, but only as glimpsed through the carved rents of a choir screen. It is the kind of beauty that almost makes you sadder for having seen it.
She is a statue in an empty room. Cello notes in the dark.
She’s quiet on the drive to the penthouse Mark has arranged for us to stay at—a favor from a Lyonesse member, and a generous favor at that because the place is embarrassingly luxurious. I don’t speak, having grown familiar with that look of hers while we spoke about dead mothers and guilt on Mark’s yacht. Like she’s trying to solve an equation using math that exists only for her.
We pass a mix of architecture—brutalist apartments, art nouveau hotels, neo-Byzantine churches—until we get to our building, a white-stone edifice with wrought-iron balconies marching up to the roof.
I thank the driver and confirm that he’ll be on call for us later as Isolde slips out and goes to the front door of the building.
“It’s good that you’re with her,” the driver tells me before I shut the door. “Belgrade is safer than it used to be, but people are dangerous with art and” —he hunts for a minute for the words he wants— “old things.”
“It’s why her husband had me accompany her here,” I assure him. “He’s very aware.”
Not that I understand why it’s dangerous. Isolde is here looking at a strange bowl unearthed in a museum’s archives, and when she showed me pictures of it on the plane yesterday, I wasn’t impressed. It is a very ugly bowl, dusty and lumpy—and it’s not even useful as a bowl. It’s got seven cup…things…molded inside of its basin, just as dusty and lumpy as the rest.
Isolde laughed when she saw my face, a rare laugh that felt like a sudden shaft of sunlight through the clouds. “It’s four thousand years old and made for ritual purposes, Tristan,” she said. “It wasn’t made for some Renaissance patron to show off at parties.”
In the apartment now, Isolde has taken off her coat and put it away, and she is on the balcony, looking out over Belgrade. Low hills swell at the horizon, parks and trees and plazas press between the buildings, and we are just high enough to make out the flat glint of the Sava and the Danube.
“Do you know how much longer you’ll need to be here?” I ask her. Not that I mind. The opposite, almost. I want her to tell me that we’ll have to be here for another week for her to evaluate the lumpy bowl, another month. When Mark suggested I accompany her here and I realized it would just be the two of us, just Isolde and me alone for the first time since before the wedding…
I’m ashamed of what I felt then.
But because I’m nothing if not miserably inconsistent, I am restless without Mark, my mind lighting on the memory of his voice or his hands nearly every moment of the day. I want Isolde to myself, and I want Mark to myself. And I want them both to myself, like the day I watched them play chess and I sang for them. And then we went down to the sauna and sat until we glistened with sweat and dared each other to jump into the icy plunge baths and sat in the hot tub while Mark and Isolde argued about an Old Testament story where a woman and her servant sawed off a guy’s head.
That had been a perfect day.
“I’m still not sure,” Isolde says, wrapping her arms around herself. She’s in trousers and a white blouse, and it’s a little cool to be on the balcony without a jacket. “I’m waiting for a few different assessments from my colleagues to come in. I might need to meet with a different curator with expertise in this field too.”
“It’s a lot of work for one bowl,” I remark doubtfully, and she looks up at me, her face serious.
“Things that matter take time,” she says, and goes inside.
* * *
I don’t meanto overhear the first call.
I’m being a good bodyguard to a married person and putting myself to bed early, with only a polite good night and no lingering stares.
Except then it’s the yacht all over again, knowing Isolde is so close and my body humming with the awareness. Every inch between us, every foot, feels not like empty space but like a tether, like one of the silk ropes Mark keeps in every playroom. I could tug on it and she’d feel it, I think.
I wonder if she’s tugging on her end now.
I decide a glass of cold water and a few minutes of cool night air are necessary. I don’t think I can jerk off now and actually scratch the itch—God knows, I’ve been trying to scratch that itch since their wedding, going to my room alone every single night after watching Mark and Isolde do all manner of things to each other, like porn made especially for me. The two people I want most in the world, the two people who have grown into my veins and between my ribs and into the chambers of my heart, doing everything together that I so want them to do to me, and how could I not react to that? How could I not try to chase after a ghost of what they find together without me?
I pad quietly into the kitchen and drink some water and then find the stairs up to the second floor, where the rooms open onto a long rooftop terrace. I’m stepping onto that terrace from an empty bedroom when I hear a low, throaty moan.
I know that moan.
She’s blocked from my view by the horrible boxwood trees that always seem to be in places like this, but I can hear her panting, and worse—I can hear who she’s panting for.
“Quiet, deadly girl, or poor Tristan will hear you,” chides Mark. His voice is electronic, a little muffled. She’s on the phone with him. “Now let me see that cunt again. That’s right, show me.”
His own voice is throaty and thick, and I don’t have to see to guess what they’re doing together…but I want to see. I want to know if she’s sitting or lying down. If she’s holding the phone or if it’s propped up.
I know I’m not as quiet as Isolde or Mark, but I do my best, and the chilly wind helps too, a constant blow over the terrace, chasing itself through the balustrades of the railing and snagging on cornices and friezes.
I can see her through the sparse branches of boxwood now, and I’ve been blessed by some kind of voyeuristic deity because she’s angled away from me, enough that I can see down the slope of her body to where her fingers are buried in her pussy. She’s supine on one of the outdoor sofas, a silk robe unbelted and lying in shimmering ripples around her hips. She’s completely naked underneath, wearing only goose bumps.
The phone is propped against the end of the sofa, and so I can see that too, see the screen with Mark. He’s in a suit, a glass of gin on a table next to him, his expression avid. His arm is moving in slow, rhythmic motions, and tragically, the phone cuts off just below his chest, so I can’t see him handling that inexorable cock of his.
“What a wet cunt,” he says, both indictment and praise. “Why don’t you make your nipples wet too? There you go.”
Isolde uses her fingers to smear her arousal on her already erect nipples. They shine in the strung lights above the terrace, immediately pulling even tighter in the brisk air, so tight that they look like they hurt. She arches a little, her belly quivering.
Clever of Mark, to find a way to hurt her from the screen of a phone.
It’s not fair.
The thought comes to me—quick, childish, irrefutable in its hurt.
It’s not fair. This is supposed to be an arranged marriage; they’re supposed to be business partners. Isolde is supposed to resist wanting him, and to him, she should just be a means to an end and nothing more.
But this is not performing for the people in the hall—this isn’t necessary to sell any version of their marriage. This is private. Like their chess games, their little fights over Bible stories.
I knew she was in love with him, but I thought?—
I don’t know.
It doesn’t matter anyway. I’ve already found the waistband of the athletic shorts I’m sleeping in tonight, already curled my fingers around my tumescent dick.
“I can almost taste you from here,” Mark says softly, his arm still working. “You know how I love tasting you, don’t you? It’s the taste of mine. My cunt. Find your clitoris and stroke it for me. You can come whenever you’d like.”
It doesn’t take her long. She presses her fingertips to the needy place between her legs and rubs and rubs, hard and fast, and, within a minute, is crying out, her legs pulling up to her chest.
“Keep your legs apart like a good whore,” Mark says calmly. His words are like a kick to the stomach, and I start jerking myself at a brutal pace. My balls are already close to my body, tight and hard and full. “Let me see.”
Isolde barely manages to comply, her head thrashing on the cushion, her chest jerking with shallow, ineffective breaths, and then Mark’s jaw goes tight as his shoulder and arm flex even faster under his suit?—
I come at the same time he does, biting off my groan before it can alert Isolde to my presence. My seed spatters onto the terrace in white stripes and pools, and it keeps coming until my knees are about to buckle.
On the phone screen, Mark is still coming too, his head thrown back to expose his throat, one hand pressed to his forehead while the other milks his climax. I can tell that his hips are bucking up into his fist, and twice, I see heavy ribbons of cum shoot into view and land on his suit jacket or tie.
The image slides through my mind, briefly, of my semen dripping from the cuff of his wedding tuxedo, and I shudder.
And then we are all there, Isolde shivering as her breathing returns to normal, Mark and I left with the visible evidence of our prurience for her.
“Thank you, little bride,” Mark says. “I needed that.”
“I did too.” Isolde sounds like she’s admitting something she doesn’t want to admit. “I…miss you.”
A new smile around the edges of his mouth. He pulls his lower lip between his teeth and says, “I miss you too.” And now he’s the one making the admission.
“I didn’t think I’d feel jealous leaving you at Lyonesse, but I am a little,” she says, sitting up and pulling her robe back over herself. “I feel possessive of you.”
He seems to like that. “Good, because you know how possessive I am of you. But we made a promise, did we not? Mutual fidelity?”
“We did,” she says. There’s a lilt of uncertainty in her voice.
“At any rate, I’m not at Lyonesse. You might have noticed that it’s night where I am too?”
He’s not at Lyonesse?
“I thought you were inside,” Isolde says. “Where are you?”
“Currently? Stockholm. Soon, Malm?.”
“Why?”
A shrug. It looks cold and dangerous on him despite the ejaculate drying on his shoulder. “Why else? Lyonesse business. A club member wanted me to come collect her membership dues in person, and while I’m in Sweden, I thought I’d drop in on an old friend from my operator days.”
“Ah,” Isolde says.
“Maybe I’ll make it down to Belgrade before you’re finished with this bowl of yours.”
“I’d like that. Sir.”
Pleasure moves across his face. “Until tomorrow night then, my wife.” And the call ends.
That night, I hear her nightmares from my room. But I don’t trust myself to go help.