Chapter Twenty-Three
“Give me a few minutes, will you?” Rose called from the bathroom.
“Take your time!” he called back. He wondered whether she’d omitted the obligatory “make yourself at home” because she knew the sentiment was far too aspirational for the space.
Despite being hardwired for it, Landon tried not to be too judgmental.
The flat was sparse, and the furniture functional.
Sparse and functional—he held on to those two words like a lifeline as he wandered.
Not abandoned, he scolded the hypercritical side of his brain, just not lived in.
It was small, with large windows, and had good bones, but Rose had done almost nothing to improve on what was already there.
She hadn’t hung curtains or even put in plastic shades, so there were no decisions to make about whether to let the light in or keep it out.
The furniture didn’t match, nor did it look all that comfortable.
The blush-pink couch had what looked like cigarette burns on the arms, which Landon didn’t imagine was a feature anyone would actively seek out.
Her bookshelf held only three worn textbooks and, despite the nature of her part-time job, not a single work of fiction.
It reminded him of Rose’s basement apartment in New York.
She’d outright refused to decorate until she’d become the kind of person that she felt the city demanded of her.
But in the Brooklyn apartment, despite its intentional minimalism, Rose had brought with her the kinds of objects people slowly accumulate over a lifetime: her dad’s old college sweatshirt, the journal in which she’d recorded thoughts from her middle school self, her scrapbook full of programs from roles that had forever altered her.
Their presence here was sorely missed. And for the first time without Conor or Poppy’s prompting, he wondered whether what he was doing here was wrong.
The floor creaked behind him. “I’m not here very much,” Rose said. Her skin was clear again, with no trace of the blood that had clung to it. She looked up at him with hungry eyes, and he knew that if he stood there a moment longer, he’d be at risk of crossing the line they’d both been toeing.
“I’m really glad you’re feeling better.” He wanted to run his thumb down her pale cheeks. “I should go.”
“Do you have to?” She stepped closer.
Landon didn’t trust himself. This place felt as timeless as World’s End but lacked all of the warmth and weight. He wasn’t sure he had ever felt so out of sorts. “It’s late,” he said, intentionally giving the thinnest excuse he could think of.
“Stay.” It was both a suggestion and a request, and Landon was weakened by it. He swallowed hard, searching her face for the hesitation that would help him do what he needed to do.
But there was none.
“You don’t really want me to,” he said, testing her.
“I do.” She stepped close enough that the streetlights lit her face.
“Why the hell don’t you have curtains?” he asked, desperate for anything to draw him out of her thrall.
Rose laughed and the sound rattled her throat. “Why on earth would I need curtains?” She took a step closer.
“To keep the light out.”
“What if I want to keep the light in?”
In, out, he breathed. He inhaled and she was his Rose. He exhaled and she was other.
“It’s late,” she murmured. “And I don’t want to be alone.”
He had dozens of half-formed thoughts, but one rose above the rest: This was not how he’d imagined it would happen. Landon exhaled. “Rose…”
“Just tonight,” she said, bridging the space between them completely. “Don’t think about tomorrow.”
“What about Graham?”
She looked confused. “What do you mean, ‘What about Graham?’”
“You’re with him.” Landon felt strange saying the obvious. “You’re together.”
“I could forget him tomorrow.” If she hadn’t said it with such a straight face, Landon would have laughed.
“Sure,” he said, all but throwing his hands up. “And I could forget you tomorrow.”
“You could.” At once she was as cold as her one-bedroom flat.
His mind raced. An image of his Rose came to him, a photograph he’d taken of her the day of their college graduation, reaching for Poppy like it would cause her physical pain to be parted.
A memory came to him—a silly, out of place memory—of his Rose, four months pregnant, getting out of the passenger seat and stopping traffic to help a large snapping turtle cross an overpass into the wetlands near their home.
It did not seem possible that his Rose had become someone who treated others so callously.
But then, his Rose had left him without a word, hadn’t she?
Rose mistook Landon’s contemplation for desire, but in lunging for him, ignited it anyway.
As they had when they were young and untouched by time, they moved so fast it would have been impossible to know who moved first. Her tongue swirled in his mouth, and Landon tried to blunt the memory of what it had felt like to kiss her under the covers of their king bed, the way they tangled mouths and limbs as though completing a jigsaw puzzle.
This was hungry and strange, though only one of them knew why.
Rose pulled him by the shirt toward her bed, an unmade mattress on a simple metal frame pushed up against the wall. “I want you,” she said in a whisper. “I think I’ve wanted you since I met you.”
They were the words he’d wanted to hear since he’d first hatched this plan.
Some version of them, anyway. Why did they ring so hollow?
And why, of all things, was Conor’s voice in his head?
His wedding toast had been rumbling through like a thunderstorm since Conor had called and tried to dissuade him from whatever it was he was doing: “She is gentle and wild, poised and undone, kind and exacting.” His Rose, no matter her intent, had always been two things at once.
She was never pure id, because hard as she fought it, the young girl who’d been through too much was forever her foundation.
But this Rose wanted something, so she reached out and grabbed it.
His throat tightened. The bare walls felt like they were closing in.
Then Rose’s hands tangled in his hair, pulling him down onto the duvet, undoing his belt buckle.
His hands pulled her T-shirt, heavy with moisture from the vaults and the rain, over her head, and unclipped her bra.
He reached out to touch her, surprised by how suddenly shy he felt.
Her body was no stranger to him, but the way they moved together was different enough that if he closed his eyes, she was unknowable.
Landon’s fingers traced her neckline, his breath shaky and uneven.
He inhaled and his Rose came to him, moaning with pleasure as his hands found her wetness and moved slowly and deliberately over it in a perfect rhythm.
He exhaled and this Rose arched into him, her hands steady as she slid his shirt up and over his shoulders.
“Stop thinking,” she said, pulling his hair and bringing his lips to hers.
He almost laughed, but choked instead. “Is it that obvious?”
“Just give in.”
It should have been simple. His hands skimmed over bare skin, arms pulled her closer, deeper, like if he just got close enough to her, he could undo everything.
Her fingers dug into his shoulders, pulling him down, down.
“Rose,” he whispered, forehead against hers.
His hands mapped the small of her waist and the sweep of her hips, and he told himself it felt like home to counter all of the ways that it didn’t.
The moment before he pressed inside her, their tongues tangled together, he put a name to what she tasted like: something that’s lost, and does not want to be found.
Landon stood in front of the large windows in Rose’s living room, a glass of water in his hands, wishing, more than anything, that she’d cared enough to put up curtains.
Just underneath the window sat a drafting table covered in unfinished sketches.
All portraits of the same face, only half-formed.
It upset Landon almost as much as the vaults had.
Rose came at him from behind, pressing her naked body into him and placing a comparatively tame kiss on his back at the highest point her mouth could reach. “What are you thinking about?” she asked.
Far too much. “I was just looking at your sketches.”
She peered around him, trailing kisses down his back. “I don’t know why I can’t seem to draw anything else, lately. I don’t have this problem in class. It’s just when I’m here. Alone.”
Landon reached for her hand to see if holding it would stop his own from shaking. “Who are they?”
Rose shrugged. “I’m not sure. Probably someone I’ve seen on the street.
My subconscious is working through something, and I just like to give her the space to do it.
” She stood on her tiptoes. “Would you kiss me good night? I’m exhausted.
” There was no lifetime in which he would not honor that request. He drew her close, the kiss stilted by the awkward angle.
“And you’ll come to bed soon?” she asked.
“Soon,” he said. “Minutes. Count sheep until I’m there.”
Rose giggled. “You’re sweet.” She slipped through his fingers and ambled off to bed, her head hitting the pillow with an audible thud. Landon was tired, too, but couldn’t imagine ever falling asleep like that, without a care in the world. The way children fall asleep.
The late fall darkness made the lights from the streetlamps seem even brighter, though Landon knew intellectually that could not be true.
He knew a lot of things intellectually. It was part of the reason he so often put his foot in his mouth: When your brain is overflowing with facts, you start looking for ways to unload them into the world.
But when he sat down at Rose’s drafting table, the bright light from the streetlamps illuminating the soft lines of a face rendered over and over, Landon felt he knew nothing at all.
He used a fingertip like a paintbrush and followed the lines she’d drawn to their conclusion. And for as many half faces as there were, there was only one. Landon wished that there weren’t. He wished so many things when he could not sleep, alone in the unforgiving dark.
Long months had passed since he’d let himself feel, but there was no stopping the emotion now.
Landon had been toeing lines all evening; he’d known it was only a matter of time before he tripped, or something knocked him to the ground.
It gathered in his chest, an angry swarm of bees that had never really left, only quieted—stilled by Rose’s presence over the past few days.
They ate at him from the inside, boring into the smooth lining of his stomach, venom in each pinprick.
Grief was vicious. It was the worst emotion in the world, and Landon raged against it hard as he had when the bite was fresh.
What was she doing here, in this timeless place where her mother and father were both not themselves?
His cries, loud or quiet as they may have been, did not wake Rose.
She slept soundly in the other room. Because Rose did not understand the meaning behind the lines she’d drawn, buried as they were in the recesses of a mind that no longer belonged to her: the half-forgotten, unmistakable likeness of their beloved daughter.