25. Maren
MAREN
Ihad, in my room, forgotten the chain.
Not the chain on my wrist. The other one.
The thin gold one with the small flat charm — M.D.
in a font I have not seen anywhere else — that he had Sebastian leave on the desk in his office on Wednesday morning, with a note that said only for the dinner Thursday, if you'd like.
I had worn it Thursday night to the Vance dinner.
I had, after the dinner, taken it off and laid it in the small lacquered tray on the corner of his desk, because the chain had a clasp I could not, in the close back-and-forth of my own bedroom mirror, undo with one hand.
I had forgotten it because, until tonight, I had not, in two weeks, taken anything off in his office that I had cared about getting back.
I honestly don’t know why I’m going back for it.
I tell myself that I do know. That I am going back for it because it is mine, and because in a year I will be glad to have a small, ugly, perfect thing in a drawer to remind myself that I survived this, and that if I leave it on his desk he will, in some clinical chamber of his head, file it.
He will file it. He will note that I left a thing.
He will, in his way, decide what the leaving of a thing means.
He will be wrong, and I am not giving him the chance to be wrong about this in private.
So I go.
It is one thirty in the morning. The villa is, except for the staff lights along the lower hall, dark.
My suitcase is in my room. The taxi is at four forty-five.
I am in the cream slip and a soft black robe over it, and I am barefoot on the cool tile, and I take the corridor down to the office wing by the long way, past the conservatory I am, currently, never going to think about again.
The light is on under his office door.
Of course it is.
I stand in front of the door for a count of three. I lift my hand. I do not knock. I open it.
He is at the desk. His shirtsleeves are rolled.
There is a stack of paper at his right hand and a tumbler at his left and a single bare lamp set near the front of the desk, and he is reading—actually reading, with his finger, slowly, line by line, the way a person reads a thing he is, currently, looking for a flaw in.
The Vance contract, I will assume. The signing is at eleven Monday morning.
He is, evidently, going to sign in eight and a half hours, with or without me in the room.
He looks up. He does not stand.
"Maren."
"I forgot a thing."
"Mm."
I cross the rug, keeping my attention on the desk instead of him. The lacquered tray is waiting; the chain lies inside it. I take it, curl my fingers around it, and walk out.
He stands.
He doesn’t come closer. He drifts only to the door behind me, moving with that quiet, measured pace he’s kept since I stepped inside, weighing the room, choosing his ground.
And the ground he chooses is the frame of the door I entered through, his shoulder set there, his foot laid across the line of the threshold like it belongs to him.
"Cassian."
"Maren."
"Move."
"In a minute."
"Cassian."
"Maren. One question."
"No."
"One. Then I move."
I turn to him. The lamp catches him the way it did that morning in the kitchen—shoes without socks, shirt creased, his lashes drawn low in a way I haven’t seen once in the past two weeks. He hasn’t slept. Not in a day.
"What."
"What did you forget?"
"This." I open my hand. The chain.
"Mm."
"That's the question?"
"No."
"Cassian."
"The question is — Maren. The question is, will you let me, in the next ten minutes, tell you the full version.
Not the version with three quarters in it.
The full one. With the August call. With the September 4 call.
With Henri. With Becca. With the term sheet at seven a.m. Saturday morning.
The full one. Once. Tonight. Before you go. Just — once."
"Why."
"Because I have not, yet. Said it out loud.
To anyone. To Sebastian I have only told him pieces.
To Owen I told him yes. To Becca I have not, technically, told her anything.
To you I have, in fragments, told you most of it, but I have not, Maren — I have not, in this house, said the entire sentence in one breath.
I would like to do it once. I would like to do it before you go. "
"Cassian."
"Please."
"You don't get to use please, Cassian. Not tonight."
"All right."
"All right?"
"All right, Maren. Then, may I."
I look at him.
"One sentence."
"One sentence."
"Make it count."
He does.
"Four hundred jobs. The cliff annex. The terrace. The chair. The navy dress. That is the sentence. The one you would say in any room I’m standing in.
I can’t tell if it’s true. I can’t tell if it’s one of the ones that actually are.
I am — Maren — going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that it is. And I am, regardless, not coming."
I look at him.
"And after.
"After it became real. The kitchen. The conservatory. Your bed Friday night. Your hand on my chest. Those were real. I let them be real, and I didn’t tell you about September 4.
I didn’t tell you because by then I knew that telling you would cost me you, and I chose — deliberately — to let you keep choosing me without that knowledge.
That is the manipulation, and that is the one I live with at night. "
"Cassian."
"Maren."
"That is — that is two sentences."
"Yes."
"Three, technically."
"Yes."
I stand in the middle of the rug in the cream slip and the black robe and the chain in my hand, and I look at him, and the small honest chamber of my head says, he is telling you the truth.
He is, finally, telling you the truth, and the other chamber, the one that has, in the last forty hours, learned what to look for, says, he is also a man who knows that telling you the truth, in this particular shape, in this particular hour, is, currently, the only thing left in his playbook.
Both can, I am realizing, be true.
He pushes off the door.
He crosses the rug. He stops a foot from me. The lamp pulled close on the desk catches the silver at his temple and the faint line at the bridge of his nose where my thumb was on Wednesday, and his eyes—gray in the way they get when he hasn’t slept—are fixed on my face.
"Maren."
"Don't."
"Look at me."
"Cassian, I am — looking at you?—"
"You are looking at the side of my face."
"Then move your face."
He moves his face. He bends his knee, slow, and he is, suddenly, level with me, and he is half a foot from my mouth.
"Cassian."
"Tell me to leave."
"I am leaving you."
"Tell me to leave, Maren."
"That is a trick, Cassian. That is the same trick. The conservatory."
"I know."
"Then don't."
"All right."
"All right."
"All right, Maren."
He does not move.
I do.
I do because — I will admit this, to no one, ever, except, possibly, Livian, in approximately eight years — because I am, currently, four hours from a taxi, and I am, currently, looking at the man I am, currently, in love with, and the small chamber under my breastbone has decided, without asking the rest of me, that it is going to take, on the way out, one last thing to hold against the cold.
I close the distance.
I close it with my hand on the back of his neck, and the chain, in my fist, presses cold against his nape, and his mouth opens under mine before I have finished moving, and he makes a sound at the back of his throat — small, helpless, the sound he made on the bed on Friday night when I sat down on him — and his hands come up and find the lapels of the robe.
"Maren."
"I am still leaving."
"I know."
"This is not — Cassian — this is not?—"
"I know, Maren."
"Say you know."
"I know. I know. I know."
He walks me backward into the desk. The desk is, at the back of my thighs, the same desk I sat at to read his timeline on Friday.
The papers slide. The tumbler does not — he catches it, in passing, with the back of his wrist and lifts it out of harm's way without looking — and his hands are at the tie of the robe and the robe opens and the cream slip is, against his palm, the only thing between his hand and me.
"Cassian."
"Look at me."
"I am."
"Tell me to stop."
"Don't make me, Cassian."
"Tell me, Maren."
"I am not telling you, Cassian. That is the answer."
He lifts me. He lifts me by the backs of my thighs and sets me on the edge of the desk, and he pushes the slip up around my hips, and he kneels — fully, on the rug, between my knees — and his mouth is at the inside of my thigh and his hand is at the small of my back to pull me to the edge of the desk, and I am, currently, the woman I was, fifteen days ago, on the leather couch in the room next door, and it is the same hand on my back, and the same mouth, and I have, currently, the entire two weeks in my chest at once — Tuesday, the kitchen, the conservatory, the bed, the lemon tree this afternoon — and I close my eyes.
"Cassian."
"Mm."
"I am angry with you."
"I know."
"Don't — don't be tender."
"All right."
"I am — I am not — Cassian?—"
"Sit up, sweetheart."
"Don't sweetheart me?—"
"All right. All right, Maren. Sit up."
I sit up. He stands. He works his belt one-handed because his other hand is, currently, at the chain in my fist, prying my fingers open one at a time and laying the chain — gently — on the desk beside the contracts, and the small ridiculous tenderness of him moving the chain out of the way is the thing that almost, almost, breaks me.
"Maren."
"Mm."
"Look at me."
I look at him. He gathers himself with a calm, deliberate certainty. And his eyes — focused, unguarded — are nothing like the ones he uses when he’s telling me what comes next. That difference is the thing I hadn’t recognized, not in three encounters, not until now.
"Tell me."
"I want — Cassian. I want you to. Now."
"Maren — sweetheart, I do not have?—"
"I am on it. I have been on it since Tuesday. I am on it. Now, Cassian, before I — before I?—"
He pushes in.
He pushes in slow. He pushes in with one hand at my hip and the other braced flat on the desk beside me, and I drop my forehead to his collarbone and my hand finds, of its own accord, the place over his heart it has, in two weeks, found four times, and his pussy — my pussy — closes around him and he is, fully, in me, and we both, at the same time, stop breathing.
"Maren."
"Don't — don't say anything, Cassian, just?—"
"Maren."
"What."
"I love you."
"Cassian—"
"I am not saying it to keep you. I am saying it because if I do not say it tonight I will not, ever, have said it. I am saying it because the sentence is, in this room, currently true. I am — I am not asking you to say it back. I am only saying it. Once."
I keep the words to myself. Because the truest part of me knows that if I say them now, I won’t get on that plane in four hours. And I refuse to be the woman who cancels a flight at one-forty a.m. because a man managed the perfect tense, the perfect line.
I move into him, my forehead against his collarbone, my hand resting over his pulse.
He follows my pace—slower than the kitchen, slower than Friday, slower than anything I’ve seen from him—and when I lift my head, his face is the face of a man about to speak the truest thing he’ll say for the next forty years.
I come with my hand at his pulse and my mouth at his throat and the small word Cassian against his pulse, and he follows me with his forehead at mine and his hand still at my hip and the chain, on the desk beside us, untouched.
He does not move.
Neither do I.
After a long count, I sit up. I do not let him hold my face. I do not let him kiss the place at my temple where, on Friday, he kissed it. I push, gently, at his chest. He steps back.
I dress.
I dress without looking at him. I find the tie of the robe. I find the slipper I had kicked off when he lifted me. I find, on the desk, the chain, and I close my hand around it. I do not, when I close my hand, look at the contracts under it.
I cross to the door. He does not, this time, block it.
I open it.
"Maren."
"Don't."
"Maren, I — "
"Cassian. Don't."
I close the door behind me.
I walk down the corridor. I walk it with my hand around the chain, and the chain is warm from his neck, and I do not, until I am in my room with my own door locked behind me, allow myself any sound at all.
The taxi is at four forty-five.
I have, currently, three hours and four minutes.