29. Elena
29
ELENA
A fter Atlas doubles the number of ways I’ve successfully managed to orgasm, we spend the next several hours developing film. Atlas is a quick study—he’s almost able to spool the film all on his own by his third attempt.
“I can see why you like this,” he says, pulling a dripping photograph of the Monarch out of the bath. “It’s not quick washing these damn things fourteen times, but it is sort of soothing.”
“What do you do to relax?”
“Read,” he says. Then he opens his mouth partway and immediately closes it again, like there was another item on the list but he decided not to tell me.
I’m way too curious to let that pass. “What was that? You were going to say something else…”
Atlas looks mildly surprised that I caught him—and mildly annoyed. “I don’t want to tell you the other thing.”
“But I have to know.”
He heaves a pained sigh. “I write sometimes. Just for fun. Not like your fiancé.” The ring on the shelf gets a malevolent glare.
The ring receives nothing from me because I’m too interested in what Atlas just said. “You like to write? Why didn’t you want to tell me that?”
Atlas scowls, hands jammed in his pockets. “I don’t tell anybody. Dane would be thrilled to know he could have been giving me shit about it this whole time and not stopped with that poem I published in the fourth grade.”
“You write poetry ?” I squeal.
I should have reined that in. Now Atlas is truly embarrassed, and he’s not going to tell me anything else. Or show me this goddamned adorable Baby Atlas poem.
“Not much anymore,” he says with his last shreds of dignity. “Now I mostly write character sketches. That’s what I like about the hotel—every kind of person passes through here, every shade of human nature. I see things happen every day that are stranger than fiction. It’s endless inspiration.”
“I want to read them.”
“I don’t know about that.” Atlas is already looking regretful, and I can’t let that happen. Not when I have an irresistible chance to look inside the locked vault of his head.
“Please show me,” I beg. “It’s only fair. You’ve seen my photographs.”
Fairness is an effective lever with Atlas. His sense of honor is unconventional but ironclad. He’ll pay what he thinks is owed.
And he expects the same in return.
“I’ll make you a deal,” he says, in that dangerous low voice, gently brushing back a strand of hair from my forehead. “I’ll show you my writing…but only if you take a photograph for me.”
“I already took two!”
“Not a photograph of me,” Atlas says patiently. “A photograph for me. Of you.”
My heartbeat quickens. “What sort?”
Lorne’s pornography flashes through my head, all the extreme and degrading poses.
But Atlas looks in my eyes and says, “Whatever you want. As long as it’s you.”
I go warm and soft and mushy inside. But not weak. No, actually, the opposite happens…something deep inside of me becomes firm and resolved.
I don’t want my first time to be with Lorne.
I want it to be with Atlas.
And I can’t stand for it to be anything different.
But in the same moment I realize that one burning desire, I also understand its opposite:
That’s the thing that Lorne would hate most. The thing that would make him angriest.
“Come see me after dinner,” Atlas says when I really do have to leave, when I’ll barely have time to change clothes.
“It’ll be late,” I warn him.
Lorne’s been keeping me at dinner until I’m yawning and practically falling asleep at the table. I’m sure he’s doing it on purpose, and I’m sure it makes the waitstaff hate us.
“I don’t care how late it is,” Atlas says. “But meet me in the library—I don’t want you to come all the way down here alone.”
I hesitate. “Lorne writes in there sometimes at night.”
Atlas shakes his head. “Not my father’s library—my mother’s. On the sixth floor.”
“I didn’t know there were two.”
He smiles. “You’ve never turned left?”
“I didn’t know you were hiding extra libraries up there. Why are there two?”
“Oh, because my parents hated each other. Yeah, it’s true.” Atlas nods in the face of my disbelief. “They really did sometimes. Couldn’t stand to be in the same room. But other nights…they would have set the hotel on fire for each other.”
“Why did they fight?”
Atlas tilts his head, considering, his eyes completely black in this light, no green at all in them and no differentiation between iris and pupil. At last, he says, “There are two hearts in every soul; that’s what my mother used to say. And both of those hearts want things very, very badly. But only one of them will admit it.”
I think about that for a moment. “You mean…people want things that conflict?”
“What it means,” Atlas says, “is that we’re driven by impulses all the time, some very powerful. And some disguise themselves, pretending to be other things. So all of us are acting all the time, thinking we’re in charge. But none of us know what our secret heart wants or how it’s subtly influencing us.”
“What did your mother want?”
“She thought she wanted love, marriage, kids, this hotel…”
“But what did she actually want?”
Atlas sighs. “Freedom.”
He looks so unhappy that I ask him, “Did she leave?”
But Atlas shakes his head. “No. Because it’s not an off-on switch, one or the other. She wanted freedom. But she also wanted us. And so she stayed, but she did contrary and angry things because she was at war with herself. And when that other part of her was winning, it warred with us and, most of all, with my father. Because he had his dark side, too.”
I think of the wounds inside of families. The hurt done to one that impacts the others.
When I was hurt, when I lost the people I loved, I closed off and hid in the bookshop for years. I only came out because I had to.
But because I’d sheltered myself, cut myself off from the world, I came out from the dark bleary-eyed and blinking, easily blinded by anything that dazzled. And Lorne knows how to dazzle. He’s very, very good at it when he wants to be.
I stumbled right into the wrong man’s arms, and now I’m not sure how to get out again. Because I don’t think Lorne will easily let me go.
“I’ll meet you,” I say to Atlas. “In her library, tonight.”
He kisses me, his huge hand warm on my jaw. “I’ll be waiting.”
Before I leave, I have to slip Lorne’s ring back onto my finger.
Nothing has ever felt more wrong.