7. Maren
MAREN
By the third morning, I have started to keep two lists in my head, and I do not enjoy what they reveal.
The first list is Cassian, in public. He is the man who, at breakfast, tells Sienna her column is excellent in a tone that makes her sit up straighter without realizing she's done it.
He is the man who, when my mother asks about the orchard wedding for the fourth time in two days, redirects with a story about a cousin's destination ceremony in Provence — a cousin I have to assume is invented, because everything he says about his family is invented, and yet it lands like a memory because he tells it like one. He’s the man who rests a guiding hand at my back as we enter a room and lifts it the instant the room takes note of us. Calibrated. Always calibrated.
The second list is Cassian, in private. He is the man who, when he saw me at breakfast yesterday push my eggs around and not eat them, sent toast up to my room at ten with butter and honey on a tray, and a note that said only Eat.
He is the man who passed me a glass of cold water, unprompted, after my third glass of wine at lunch, and tilted his head toward Sienna's empty seat the way he tilts it when he's giving me an exit.
He is the man who, when I came down the stairs in the wrong shoes for the path to the cliff garden, knelt at the bottom step without saying a word and held out a pair of espadrilles I didn't know he'd had brought up.
He has not said another word about the kiss on the beach. Not one. We have not been alone together since.
I am aware that this is a strategy, and I am also aware that I am thinking about it more than I would like to.
The storm rolls in around four. I'm in the library, which is what Sebastian calls the room with the books even though it's more a sitting room with a few shelves.
The wind has been picking up since lunch, and the sky over the water has gone the color of an old bruise, and I'm halfway through a paperback I found on a shelf — a yellowed mystery from someone's beach house decades ago — when the lamp at my elbow flickers and dies.
The whole villa hushes. Even the ambient noise I didn't know I'd been hearing — the hum of the refrigeration, the low push of the air system, the distant tick of a clock in the foyer — all of it gone at once.
"Oh," I say to the empty room. "Cool."
A door opens somewhere down the hall. Footsteps. Not staff footsteps — staff move quietly. These are unhurried and deliberate, and I know whose they are before he reaches the doorway.
"Power's out," Cassian says.
"I noticed."
"The generator should kick in. It's not."
"That seems bad."
"Mm." He steps inside. He has a candle in a small brass holder — actually a candle, in actually a holder, and the small absurdity of him producing one from somewhere makes me laugh before I mean to. He looks at me. "What."
"Nothing."
"Maren."
"You look like a butler."
"I'll take that under advisement."
He crosses to me and sets the candle on the low table by the couch.
The light catches on the cut of his jaw, the soft lines around his eyes that I haven't paid attention to before, the gray streak at his temple that I keep telling myself is a trick of the light and is, in fact, a streak at his temple.
He is in shirtsleeves. He has been working.
There's a small ink mark on the heel of his left hand.
"My family?"
"Sebastian moved them to the lower terrace. There's a generator on that side of the property. He's pouring drinks. They'll be occupied."
"And we're?—"
"We are here."
"Why."
"Because I would prefer not to perform tonight. And because the storm will pass faster if I am not in the room with your sister."
I laugh again. He almost smiles.
He goes to the sideboard along the wall and pours, by candlelight, two glasses of something dark from a decanter. He brings one to me and sits down on the opposite end of the couch — not close, but not as far as he could be. The rain has started. It hits the long windows in waves.
"What is this?" I sniff the glass.
"Whiskey."
"Whiskey what."
"Whiskey enough. Drink it slowly."
I drink it slowly. It burns in a friendly sort of way down my throat, and we sit like that — him at one end, me at the other, the candle between us, the storm doing its thing outside — for the kind of stretch that should feel uncomfortable and somehow does not.
"I owe you an apology," he says eventually.
"For what."
"The bonfire."
"Oh."
"It was — strategically warranted. The duration was not."
"You're apologizing for the duration."
"I'm acknowledging it."
"That's not the same thing as apologizing, Cassian."
"No. It isn't."
I take another sip. The rain is loud. He shifts, sets his glass down, and rests his elbows on his knees, looking at the floor instead of at me. The candlelight makes his profile something out of an old painting.
"My father left when I was nine," he says.
I do not say anything. I have learned, in three days, that this is the way to keep him talking.
"My mother handled it badly. She handled most things badly.
There were — periods, when I was young, when I did not know which house we were going to be living in.
There was a year I changed schools four times.
By the time I was twelve, I had decided that if a thing could be controlled, it ought to be. I have, mostly, lived by that."
"Cassian—"
"I am telling you because you asked, last night, what happened with my mother. You asked it in front of your brother, and I gave you the version with the edges sanded down. I owe you a less edited one. If you are going to keep telling people, you should know what you're saying."
"I didn't ask."
"You did. With your face."
I flush. He sees it. He pretends he doesn't.
“Helene is—alive. We do not speak. She made a choice when I was nineteen that I have not, since, been able to make peace with. The version I tell strangers is that we are estranged. The version I am telling you is that I don’t know how to be a person who is not on guard.
I have been told, by women who liked me less than they wanted to, that this makes me cold. They were not wrong.”
"You're not cold."
"Maren."
"You're not. You have been cold, but that's — that's a thing you do, not a thing you are."
He looks up at that. The candle is between us, and his face — there is something open in it I have not seen before. Not unguarded, exactly. He is too well-built for unguarded. But the door, for once, is not bolted.
"That is generous," he says.
"It's accurate."
"Mm."
The rain. The wind. A long roll of thunder that rattles something glass in the kitchen.
"My turn?" I ask.
"If you'd like."
I take another sip. Smaller, this time. I look at the carpet between us because I cannot, currently, look at him.
"I have been afraid, my whole life, that I am not enough of anything to anyone.
Not smart enough for my brother. Not interesting enough for my sister.
Not — successful enough for my mother. Not — I don't know.
Not bright enough. Not sharp enough. Not anything enough.
I picked hospitality because it was the one thing I knew I was good at, and I have spent ten years waiting for someone in my family to notice, and they did not notice. They noticed you."
"Maren—"
"Let me finish."
He stops.
"They noticed you, and they have been kind to me for a week, Cassian, and I — I know it isn't real.
I know it's the ring. I know they are kind to the ring and not to me.
But I don't want it to stop. That is the thing I am most afraid to say out loud, and I am saying it to you because the lights are off and you cannot see my face. "
"I can see your face."
"Don't."
"All right."
He doesn't speak. He does, however, slide along the couch until our knees almost touch. He sets his glass down on the floor by his foot. He turns his body toward me, and he reaches across the small space between us, and he takes the glass out of my hand and sets it next to his.
"You are enough," he says quietly. "It is not — that is not a thing I tell people. I am telling you."
"Cassian."
"Look at me."
I look at him.
He is closer than he was a minute ago. The candlelight is catching in his eyes the way fire catches in dark water, and his hand, when it lifts, is slow enough that I could pull back.
I do not pull back. His thumb finds my jaw, and his fingers slide along the line of my throat, and his head dips, and I feel his breath against my mouth before I feel anything else.
The hallway door bangs open.
"Mr. Rourke." Sebastian's voice, brisk, professional, almost loud enough to be a knock. "Apologies, sir. The generator's kicked. Mrs. Castellan is asking for her daughter."
Cassian does not move for one beat. Two.
Then he sits back. Smoothly. He picks up his whiskey from the floor and stands. By the time Sebastian rounds the doorframe, he is at the sideboard, pouring himself a fresh glass, and I am — somehow — already on my feet, smoothing the front of my dress.
"I'll come down," I say. My voice is steadier than I deserve.
I move past him without offering him so much as a glance. His eyes stay on me. My jaw still remembers his thumb, and the memory is going to sit with me for the rest of the night.