Chapter 39
I’m in my garden,alone in the dark.
There are lights strung along sections of the enclosure, lovely golden glows suspended in the dark, but the light barely touches me back here, near the fountain and under my tree. A fog has crept up from the river, and it veils the air, creating curtains and cloisters and making a hazy sanctuary of my little corner.
I’ve long since stopped trying to pray, and now I’m just sitting, my thoughts as aimless as the fog.
I can’t kill Mark. I can’t kill him because I love him, because I’m fascinated by him, because he said, I have you now. You belong to me. And he meant it.
At least once, at least however briefly, he meant it.
But here is the unyielding truth: I can’t not kill Mark. My entire life has been about serving the Church, and I have given God everything I have. My dreams of becoming a nun, my body, my innocence, my eventual guilt.
Mortimer left me with both a warm smile and a chilly warning. He loved me as if I were his own daughter, he said….and also if I failed, he would need to rethink my role as a saint.
And who am I if I am not this? Who am I without my honeysuckle knife and my footsteps in the dark? Without my certainty that I am God’s hand here on earth?
What if God is withholding my certainty now as a test? What if it’s my own doubt that’s punishing me with even more doubt?
What if I obey and I feel right again?
It doesn’t matter how many times I wipe the tears off my face, my cheeks are still wet. My face is cold when I touch it, but so are my hands, and so is all of me. I have no idea how long I’ve been out here. Several hours at least. I’m supposed to be in the hall tonight—there are guests ahead of the celebration tomorrow. It’ll look strange that I’m not there, and however Mark feels about me after learning about my infidelity, he won’t like that.
But I can’t make myself move or stand. I feel as insubstantial as the fog and also as rooted as the cherry tree behind me. I don’t know if I can be around Mark right now, if I can even look at him and hear his voice. How can I hold this bitter choice inside my body while I’m also surrendering that body to him?
And if we were alone…if for some reason he’d decided to put what happened in Belgrade behind us and we returned to our little idyll of sex and chess, what then? Do I think I can hide it from him? Do I really think I can endure being curled against my husband’s hard chest and silently weighing suffocation against stabbing? Poison versus a quick fall from Lyonesse’s roof?
“Isolde?”
I look up and see Tristan coming toward me. With the barely-there glow of the lights behind him and the silvery cling of the fog, he doesn’t look real at first. He’s an idea, a story. A memory of a dream.
And if I let myself, it’s easy to see him like he’d be in a dream, with his hair long and a fur-lined cloak slung over his shoulders. It’s easy to imagine torches instead of strung light bulbs, the roar of the Atlantic rather than the purl and chatter of my fountain.
He reaches me, and of course there are no torches or cloak or ocean. It’s just Tristan with his tousle-ready but neatly cut hair, his professional black suit. It’s just us in the middle of DC, in the garden of a man who hurts people for fun.
Except it’s not even us, not in a way that feels real, because Tristan and I are not the same. He is good and sweet, and his soul is clean of secrets; his intentions are available for anyone to read. I have lied to him and to Mark and to everyone aside from my uncle, and I am so full of secrets that I’m certain if you speared me through the heart, more secrets would come than blood.
I am not good.
I am not sweet.
Everything that everyone thinks of me is a lie. And if I kill Mark, I will kill the person who’s possibly seen me the clearest. If I kill Mark, I will have to leave Tristan behind too.
There can be no question of implicating him—and anyway, once Tristan learned that I’d been the one to kill Mark…
I shudder to think of his disgust then, his hatred. I don’t know if I could bear it.
No, it would be better for me to end things and to leave and never see him again.
The loneliness comes thicker than fog, deeper than cold, and Tristan must see it on my face, even in the dark, because he kneels in front of me and takes my hands in his. They’re so warm and big. A prom king’s hands, a hero’s hands. How can he stand to be so kind and so earnest? How did he get so lucky that being good was as easy as doing what he was told to do?
“Isolde?” he murmurs, looking up into my face. There’s barely anything to see with this little light and the fog, but my eyes have grown used to the dark, and I can make out the shine of his eyes and the suggestions of his features. A strong nose, a carved jaw. Eyelashes like dark wings. “Mark sent me to look for you. He was expecting you in the hall. Honey, what’s wrong?”
I can’t tell him. I can’t tell him anything, and I am so fucking tired of living like this, of being…this.
“Is it Mark?” Tristan asks. “Is he still mostly ignoring you too? I know how it feels—it’s been awful since Belgrade. But I think he’ll forgive us. I see him looking at you and I know he misses you. How things were before.”
I want so badly to be an Isolde whose biggest problem is loving two people.
I start crying again, hating myself for my weakness, my shallowness. Only a coward would ask someone to comfort them now, only a traitor would think their tears were worth drying. I’m like Judas trying to give back the thirty pieces of silver.
“No,” I say and push Tristan’s hands away as they try to wipe away my tears. “I’m fine. It’s fine.”
“You’re not fine,” Tristan says gently. “You’re freezing in the dark, alone and crying and missing a night in the hall, which you never do.”
“I’m just tired,” I say. Which is true in its own way. I’m exhausted down to the marrow of my bones. “Can you tell Mark that I’m not feeling well? I’ll be there tomorrow.”
Somehow. Somehow I’ll manage to be around him tomorrow.
“I’m not leaving you right now,” murmurs Tristan, and he pushes my hands away to wipe at my tears. I don’t stop him this time because his hands are so kind and so warm and I can almost pretend that I deserve the comfort, that I matter to someone no matter what I’ve done or what I’m planning on doing.
“Sometimes I wish I’d never been born,” I say, and I don’t know where it comes from, only that it’s true. “Sometimes I wish I’d died when my mother died. Or that I could have died instead of her, if God needed to take someone.”
“Shh, you don’t mean that,” Tristan says urgently. “You can’t mean that.”
I stare at him through my tears, at the shadowed suggestion of him. “I do,” I say. “The things I have done—the least of the things I have done—even before she died, I knew I was bad. That I wasn’t good like the priests said to be. And everything I’ve become since she died—I just wanted to be good, Tristan, I promise. I thought this was how. That if I couldn’t be the kind of good like you are, I could at least do the bad things that needed doing for good. I thought that if I laid my desire to be good on an altar and burned it for God, that would be atonement enough, but I?—”
I’m crying too hard to finish, and I know he doesn’t understand what I’m talking about, that he thinks the worst of my sins is adultery. And what does it matter? It’s very possible that he will know the worst things I’m capable of in the very near future.
“Please,” Tristan says, “please look at me.”
I do my best as he cradles my face. His thumbs rub along my cheeks.
“You are incredible and brave and intelligent?—”
“Stop,” I say quickly. “Don’t?—”
“You are, and I won’t stop because I think you need to hear it.”
“I can’t bear to hear it,” I say desperately. “It’s hard enough loving you when you are so noble, but I can’t have you deluded into thinking the same about me.”
His thumbs stop rubbing. I think he doesn’t breathe for a moment. “You love me?”
Has he really not seen it yet? Divined the truth for himself? Am I that skilled at deception now that I can keep even this elemental fact hidden?
I put my hands over his. He deserves this, no matter what happens. “I love you,” I say. “I love your open heart, and I love your loyalty, and I love how deeply you feel the world around you. I want to keep you safe, and I want to give you everything of me, and I can’t, and it kills me.”
His eyes are closed. And then he presses his forehead to mine. He’s shuddering, trembling.
“You know I love you,” he whispers.
“Yes.”
“You know I love him.”
“Yes.”
“You still do too.”
I hesitate but then speak anyway. It doesn’t make a difference if anyone knows the truth. “Yes. I still love him.”
“Isolde,” Tristan says, and his voice is that of a sinner kneeling in church. “We’re not real in the dark.”
His kiss when it comes is wet with my tears but softer than anything, softer even than the fog on our skin. His tongue parts my lips, tender at first but soon pushing in with that wild need that overtakes him in his desire. I let it, welcome it, this one thing that pushes through the numb and empty night.
His hand comes around to my neck, cupping my nape, and his other hand drops to my neck and then to my trench coat, palming my breast hard. You’d think we’d been separated for years, that our bodies had burned in isolation for decades, that this was a lifetime of pent-up longing and not only a few days.
“We shouldn’t,” I say as my hands find his neck and the tidy knot of his tie. “We can’t.”
“We shouldn’t,” Tristan agrees, his mouth dragging from mine over to my jaw. His hands are dropping to the belt of my trench coat and pulling impatiently. Heat kindles behind my belly button, sends flying sparks everywhere through my body. “We know it’s wrong.”
“And we both love him.” I unbutton Tristan’s suit jacket and press my hands to his chest underneath. I can feel the incessant drum of his heart against his ribs. He’s the only real thing in the entire world. His heartbeat. His lips on my neck. His hand sliding up the outside of my thigh and finding the top of my stocking.
“We do both love him,” mumbles Tristan against my throat. He pulls back right as his fingers find the crease of my hip. He watches me as his hand moves under my dress and ghosts over the silk waist of my panties. We both shiver. “Much good it does us.”
“No good at all,” I agree. Falling in love with Mark was the stupidest thing I’ve ever done.
Tristan and I are looking at each other as I part my thighs, and so I see the violent shudder moving through him. He drops his touch reverently, stroking my folds over the silk until my thighs are as wide as they can go while I’m perched on the edge of this fountain. Then he pulls my panties aside and bends to taste me.
I jolt, the hot velvet of his tongue so fucking good, and then he finds my clit and nurses on it a moment, just until I’m spearing my fingers through his hair and pulling like I want to punish him for how good it feels.
He lifts, his wet mouth shining in the night, and slots his lips over my own, feeding my own taste back to me as his hands drop to tear off my panties and then to work open his fly.
“Won’t last long,” he warns in a grunt as he edges a little closer on his knees. The tip of him is invisible in the dark, and blunt and hard. We both suck in a breath at the first touch, and then all hope is gone, all control is gone. He shoves in rough, wild, and I have to hold on to his shoulders because even on his knees, even with the first few strokes, he’s knocking me off-balance.
“Sometimes I think I can stop myself,” he mutters. His hands find my ass, holding me on the edge of the fountain as his cock splits me open. “That just a touch would be enough. But it’s never enough. Why is it never enough?”
I don’t know. I just know that wanting him—loving him—is a ray of light in a darkness of my own making. And when we are skin to skin, I am not alone.
His erection is huge inside me, and I’m only barely ready for it, and the friction is hot and biting. It curls my toes.
“I’m so sorry,” he whispers. “I have to come already.”
And he does, his hips wedged between my thighs, his thick flesh pumping semen inside me with thick spurts. “Your cunt is too good, Isolde. Fuck.”
His face is in my neck as he finishes, giving me a final stroke or two for good measure, and then he’s dropping down onto his hands and?—
“God help me,” I exhale as he starts eating me again, deep, ravenous noises vibrating from his mouth to my swollen sex. It’s so wet down there and wet from him, but he doesn’t hesitate to swirl his tongue into my channel, as deep as he can get, before moving up to lave at my clit.
My nipples were already hard from the cold, but now they hurt so badly and all I can imagine is a hot mouth around them, maybe teeth, maybe with stubble scraping the curves of my breasts around them. I imagine dark-gold hair, large hands digging into my waist.
Maybe one hand would be on the back of Tristan’s head, steering him, controlling him. Forcing him to kiss his own orgasm off my needy flesh…
I seize abruptly, my womb clenching into a fist, my breath shivering in my chest without leaving my lungs. And then with a cry, everything shudders into undulations of filthy, gorgeous pleasure, and I’m grabbing Tristan’s head and fucking his face as hard as I can. That dark-gold hair is still in my mind, though, that hot mouth around my nipple. And there would be cruel words as I came, for Tristan and me both, and the cruel words would be unbearably depraved; they would light me on fire.
I’m still rocking my hips into Tristan’s mouth when I hear the voices.
Tristan and I are fast—faster than most people—and tonight, we are almost fast enough.
Almost.
Mark, Andrea, Dinah, Lady Anguish, and a handful of people I’ve never seen before emerge from the fog, clearly on some kind of pleasure stroll. They’re in club clothes, holding drinks, smiling and laughing, and Tristan and I have fixed our clothes and sprung apart by the time we can all see each other. Except…
Except my panties are lying crumpled on the flagstones near Tristan’s feet. A white-silk beacon in the dark.
The laughter and chatter die down as everyone sees us, as everyone sees that Mark’s wife and Mark’s bodyguard are standing alone in a dark corner of the garden. I can see them starting to look at Mark, straining to see his expression in the hazy gloom, to see if he’s angry or indifferent or confused.
I pray the darkness is enough to hide my and Tristan’s swollen lips and stained cheeks. I pray that he doesn’t see the panties, that he will come to the conclusion that would have been true fifteen minutes ago—that I was alone in the garden and Tristan was trying to fetch me because that’s his forever job. Isolde fetcher.
I pray even that Mark’s pride will urge him to cut the moment short, to pull me close and pretend nothing is wrong and then punish me and Tristan later.
But then Andrea says, her voice full of malign triumph, “I told you, Mark. I told you they wouldn’t stop.”
I can’t see enough to be sure, but I think Mark closes his eyes. The people around him are completely silent now, and their curiosity is as thick in the air as the fog, and Tristan is angling himself in front of me, like he can shield me from their suspicion.
I wish I could shield him from whatever happens next. I wish I could shield him from what I’ll have to do in the name of the Church.
Something pinches in my chest as reality returns. As I remember that it doesn’t matter how Mark feels right now or what he does.
I’m still supposed to kill him.
Mark steps forward, his dress shoes moving from wet grass to the damp flagstones. He bends down and picks up the handful of silk at Tristan’s feet.
“Your mouth is still wet,” he says to his bodyguard as he stands up.
And then to me, he says, “We’ll talk tomorrow.”
I step forward, but it’s too late. He’s moving, taking his retinue with him, and with one last venomous look from Andrea, they’re all gone in the fog.