Chapter 36
36
JONATHAN
O n Saturday morning, Adam joins me for my usual walk up the hill to check in with Zane. It’s nice. The weather is crisp but clear. Wispy clouds dot the blue sky and a gentle breeze brushes the leaves overhead and the long grasses below.
Adam wraps an arm around me and tucks his other hand into his jacket pocket. We don’t talk much, but the silence doesn’t feel uncomfortable. It feels sort of like… we’re adjusting to the weight of this new thing between us.
We come to the lake and a lump forms in my throat as we pause on its banks. Adam squints out at the water, eyes narrowed against the glare bouncing off its mirror surface.
“I haven’t been here since…”
“I’m sorry. I should have realized. We can go back, if you want?”
He shakes his head, drawing a deep breath into his lungs. “Do you… never mind. It’s stupid. Let’s go on.”
He makes to continue up the path but I catch his arm, anchoring him in place. “Do I what?”
He shakes his head. “You’ll think I’m crazy.”
I smile at him, hoping that my expression conveys my fondness for him. “I highly doubt that.”
He looks back at the lake. “Do you believe what Lily-Iris says about him? That he’s still… here?”
I lace my fingers through his. What I don’t say is that I dreamt of Lloyd last night.
He was walking through the house, showing me the rooms. We were on the second floor and he led me into the West Wing with a wink. Instead of sheet plastic and concrete, the passageway had been decorated in warm, rich colors. There was a fireplace there—because, dream logic—and candles along the walls. When we entered the bedchamber, it was something out of a Seelie Court, decorated like a glade deep in the darkest heart of the forest. The king-sized bed sat between carved wooden posts that stretched up to the ceiling, where they broke into flowering branches, twisting around natural skylights that look up at the stars. The covers weren’t gray but iridescent, silky greens. The room was carpeted in plush tones of gold and brown like a forest floor and the walls were covered with that Blackthorn wallpaper.
I know it was nothing but the feeling I had in the greenhouse made manifest by my subconscious. Still, I want to believe that Lloyd was sharing some vision with me. I woke up feeling so peaceful and content.
What I say to Adam is, “In a sense, I feel like he’s very much here.”
His attention on me is absolute.
“You can’t walk through a single room in the house without feeling his presence, can you? You know, the artist Andy Warhol once said?—”
“I’d rather be remembered for what I created than for what I became.”
“—The idea is not to live forever but to create something that will.”
Our words overlap and Adam ducks his head with a small chuckle. “Damn, babe, you got it wrong.”
I know he’s not addressing me but it’s still so strange to hear an endearment fall from his lips. “Lloyd?”
“Yeah. Something he once said.”
The coincidence is more than a little spooky. “Well, there you have it. He lives on. Is he haunting his grand piano, rattling windows,” visiting me in my dreams , “watching over Ben and terrifying Geoff? That I don’t know. But I know that he lives on in his music, in the work he did on this house and in the impact he had on your life.”
I’m surprised, when Adam lifts his chin again, to see his eyes are glassy. “Thank you.”
At the top of the hill, Adam keeps his distance while I check in with Zane.
After giving the usual assurances about Dad’s health, he asks me how I’m doing. He says it in a sing-song way as if he knows .
My heart starts beating harder. “I hear you spoke to my employer?”
“Mmm hmm. Do you want to tell me what really happened? Because I’m not buying the tripped and fell during a storm angle.”
“That’s what happened.”
“And then he organized a new pair of specs for you? Totally normal thing for an employer to do for an employee. Especially an employer known as The Beast. Now, I’m putting you on speaker. This is gonna be good.”
“Hey, Jonathan,” Sebastian says a moment later.
I groan. “I did fall during a storm. He was being kind because that’s who he is.”
Adam doesn’t seem to overhear. He’s gazing out at the open landscape beyond his property.
“So, are you boning yet?” Zane asks, “I say you are, Sebastian says you’re not.”
“I’m so sorry,” Sebastian says. “We’ve been locked up in this house for weeks.”
“Entertainment is hard to come by,” Zane says.
“ Good entertainment,” Sebastian corrects. “We’ve taken to watching reality TV.”
“Shit, you don’t even know about Tiger King, do you?” Zane says.
“You’re not missing out,” Sebastian assures me.
“And you haven’t answered the question,” Zane says.
I growl in a not-bad Adam impression.
He whoops. “Fucking knew it! Tell me everything.”
“I can’t get into it right now.” Even though I’m sure that Adam isn’t eavesdropping.
“He’s there with you?” Zane guesses, somehow.
“Yeah.”
“And has he figured out you’re not the Belle he ordered?”
“Ah… he sort of knew all along.” I toe at the dirt. I hate admitting that Zane was right.
Zane laughs. “Babybel, I’m proud of you. And now you’ve got two full months of amazing sex to enjoy before you come home.”
My stomach twists sharply. Only two months. Half the time I’ve already been here.
The icy wind picks up as we head back to the house and a light drizzle starts to fall. I’m even more grateful for Adam and his warmth as I tuck into his side.
I expect him to pull away as we approach the house, but he doesn’t let go of me until we’re in the foyer, stripping off our jackets and scarves.
“You have plans for the rest of the afternoon?” he asks.
“Not really. I thought I might visit the library.”
He hums.“Thought I might take a long bath.”
I turn to him, surprised. He didn’t strike me as the long bath type. But then, I’m learning that The Beast contains multitudes.
The expression I find on his face is pure heat. The corner of his mouth quirks up. “What do you think?”
My insides quiver at the implication. “Are you…” I drop my voice. “Are you inviting me?”
He crowds in close. “I might be.”
Then his arms are around me again and he’s bending to kiss me. Just like that, in the foyer, where anyone might see. My mind fills with music as my fists tighten in the fabric of his shirt. I don’t know why I expected him to be ashamed of me, to want to hide us.
He tucks my hair behind my ears as he pulls away, brushing his warm hands over my cold cheeks. “You could bring a book?” he suggests.
There’s a big, claw-footed tub in Adam’s en suite that I noticed when I showered there the other night. Unlike the bedroom, the bathroom has been finished (for what I can only imagine are practical reasons). It’s stark and white, like the children’s bathroom. But today, when I find Adam there running our bath, it seems like a completely different room.
Diffused light pours in from the tall, frosted windows, catching swirling steam, and a multitude of candles line the tub. The steam smells like rosewater and something woodsy—cedar, perhaps.
He turns when I enter and smiles. “Hope you like the bath oil. It’s the only one I have.”
“I’m surprised you have bath oil at all.”
He closes the distance between us, resting his hands on my shoulders. “Helps me sleep. Well, it’s supposed to. I’ve had limited success.” He kisses my cheek, my ear, my neck. His hands slide down to start at the buttons of my shirt. I push down my self-consciousness as he undresses me. This is the first time he’ll see me completely naked and I’m fully aware of my knobby knees and skinny frame.
He’s seen my legs before, I remind myself. After the storm. And I had my shirt off on our date and he didn’t seem put off. He’s seen my cock. He’s seen every part of me, this is just the first time he’s seeing it all together.
I’ve never shared a bath with anyone before, and I’m not sure how we’ll possibly fit into the tub together. But I fit perfectly between his legs. The heat of the water is divine after the cold walk and I lean back against him with a happy sigh. He holds me to him and kisses the top of my head, before reaching for the soap.
“Lean forward,” he murmurs and I do.
He lathers soap across my shoulders and my back, then carefully rinses. My toes curl with pleasure at this attention. When he’s done, I turn in his arms to soap his chest and kiss him. He wraps his legs around me as my arms lock around his neck.
“If you turn around, I’ll do your back too.”
He pulls his knees up to his chest and manages to rotate, although some water sloshes over the side. I wash his back, but the muscles are tense and I find myself kneading them too. He drops his head back against my shoulder, groaning in pleasure. I kiss his neck. “May I wash your hair?”
“Sure. Shampoo’s on the shelf above you.”
I free his hair from the messy bun he had it in for our walk and slip back in the tub so he can rest against me while I pour warm water over it. I breathe in deeply as I lather in the shampoo that smells so strongly of him.
“I wanted to thank you,” he says, relaxed and boneless against me. “For not saying I was crazy earlier.”
“You didn’t say anything crazy.”
“I know he’s not here. I know… but sometimes I talk to him.” His eyes open and he looks up at me. “How’s that for crazy?”
How’s that for crazy? How’s the fact that I, a complete stranger, speak to him too.
“Sorry,” Adam says, before I can decide what to say. “We’re having this… amazing romantic moment and I’m talking about another guy. Fuck. Sorry.”
“I told you, you don’t need to apologize for that. You never have to.” I trail my fingers through his soapy hair and gently massage his scalp.
His eyes drop closed again.
“You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to. I know it hurts. But… I’m here. If you want to talk about it.”
He opens his eyes again to look up at me. “You know that book you gave me? There’s this one poem about words… uh, shit, how does it go? Something about it feeling like a sin to put in words how it feels. Because words are so… inadequate.”
“I know it. ‘For words, like nature, half reveal and half conceal the soul within.’”
“Yeah. I never spoke about it back then. Not to anyone. I didn’t know how. All I knew was that he wanted to be remembered a certain way. And in the end, I never had to say anything. People made up their minds what the truth was and I let them believe it. And, well, maybe you get so accustomed to kayfabe that the truth stops being important, only the narrative.”
My fingers pause in their work. “And the narrative was that you were a beast?” I guess.
He nods.
He let people think that it was his fault, that he drove his husband to it. He falls silent and I continue to stroke my fingers through his hair.
“Close. I’m going to rinse.”
He obeys, but I hold a hand over his eyes just in case, to keep any water from spilling in as I rinse out the shampoo. I reach for the conditioner and pour some into my palm.
“I didn’t care what they thought,” he says eventually. “But I care what you think.”
I work the conditioner through his hair. I love touching it. It’s so long and thick, and in the water it’s a mixture of chocolate brown and red.
“That note behind the picture,” I force myself to say. “I didn’t mean to read it, but I caught a few words.”
“His suicide note,” Adam confirms.
My stomach plummets. It’s a good thing that Adam’s head isn’t against my chest or he’d hear the way my heart is thundering. I wouldn’t blame him if he was still angry about that, but there’s no hint of it in his tone. The statement was matter of fact. I bite my lip and say carefully, “He said something about an illness.”
Adam looks up at me, eyes searching my face. Maybe he thinks I already suspect the truth. It’s not like I haven’t thought about it since. Assisted dying isn’t an option in Scotland.
He pulls away a little and dunks his head between his legs, rinsing out the conditioner himself. When he comes up, he’s got his back to me and I can’t see his expression as he rings out his hair and scrubs his hands over his face.
“First you should know that I was not a good husband,” he says. “I was selfish. I was wrapped up in my career and my growing fame. You should know that we fought. All the time. It was that passion that fueled us, he’d say. But to an outsider, I don’t know if you’d call what we had a happy marriage. We were both young, hot-tempered, driven… so it was nothing out of the ordinary when he called and demanded that I fly out here the day before a big fight. We argued and eventually we agreed I’d fly out after the fight. And I did.”
He’s addressing the wall. Perhaps he needs the distance to be able to get this out.
“Soon as I arrived here on Monday, I knew something was off. He didn’t nag, didn’t start on about my priorities, didn’t even make a comment about my black eye or my ‘blood sports’. He took me into the drawing room, poured us each a drink and said, ‘I have Parkinson’s’. Just like that. That’s how he broke the news.”
I suck in a breath. The hot bathwater isn’t enough to counter the ice that floods through me. I recall the scribbled notes in the shaky hand on the music stand. “But he was only 27.”
Adam doesn’t ask how I know that. It was in the first line of the note. “They call it ‘early-onset’. It’s more likely to show early when you inherit it. His father had it.” Adam swallows hard. “That Friday he asked me to fly in? He had an appointment with a neurologist. He wanted me to be there for it. That’s when he got confirmation. But in truth he’d suspected for years, since before we even met, and he’d hid the symptoms. By the time he actually saw someone, it was pretty far along.”
“I’m so sorry.” I don’t know what else to say.
Adam sighs again and ducks his head. “I… god, I was devastated. I wanted to quit, come here and care for him. He played the whole thing off like it was no big deal. People with Parkinson’s can live long, fulfilling lives, moving from treatment to treatment as symptoms progress, he assured me. He’d still be able to compose using dictation or whatever.”
“Like Beethoven.” Beethoven, who retreated to the country to compose when he started to lose his hearing.
A shaky breath shifts Adam’s shoulders. “Yeah. Like Beethoven. But it was all bullshit. He’d already made up his mind. So he spun the narrative for my benefit. The truth was, he couldn’t compose, he couldn’t complete the house, he couldn’t do a damned thing by the time he got checked out, by the time he told me. He was twenty fucking seven. He wanted to “join the twenty-seven club” and be remembered as a young, handsome, brilliant musician. He’d summoned me here to say goodbye .”
Adam’s voice breaks and he sits, hiding his face in his hands. “I didn’t even notice anything was wrong. I should have noticed. If I had spent more time here with him. If I hadn’t been so wrapped up in my own shit, enjoying my success, while he was here, all alone…”
“Adam—” I reach out and touch his shoulder.
“He thought I’d be able to go on with my life, my rise to stardom. He knew my number one priority was The Beast. He believed I’d rather keep The Beast and lose him. He thought he was getting out of my way.”
A dark well opens in my chest. There is nothing I can do to make this better. No comfort I can give to change the past. All I can do is hold him, even though my arms barely wrap around his broad shoulders.
I tuck my head against his neck, the wet hair cool against my cheek, the herbal scent of his conditioner filling my nostrils. In the ensuing silence, I think about Lloyd, about what I know of him from the home he built, the dreams he had, the music he composed and the books we both treasured.
“Maybe… maybe that’s not it.”
Adam turns his head a little to meet my gaze over his shoulder.
I trace the curve of his jaw. “Maybe he knew that you would give up everything and he didn’t want that. He didn’t want you to lose what you’d fought so hard to build.”
“I should have given it all up. I should have given him at least a little of the life he wanted. This life.”
My heart feels like it’s being cleaved open. This life, the house and the children. This life that I am getting just a little taste of. It’s a good life. The best life.