Chapter 31 Wren #2
Plates and bottles and dishes and bags of chips are placed on the counter.
“What are you all doing here?” I ask.
Greer places her hand on my shoulder. “Support.”
“Book club,” Raven says, waving a book that looks like it’s some Persephone retelling, given the sexy couple and pomegranates on the cover.
“And the alternate book club,” Lucy says, holding a copy of Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities.
“You really don’t read the same books?”
All the women shake their head and say some version of the word no while laughing.
Jackal backs away to the door. “I’m gonna leave you all to it.”
“Coward,” I say.
He winks. “I’ll be doing a lap of the property. I got some prospects to yell at for letting them get up here without thinking to call us and let us know.”
Shade huffs. “Don’t leave me in here with all”—he circles his finger at the women—“this.”
“You snooze, you lose. I’ll be back soon.”
“Fuck my life,” Shade mutters. “I’ll be in the hallway.”
Twenty minutes later, after wine has been poured and food plated, Greer sits primly with her copy of Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities open, and a pencil tucked behind her ear. Across from her, Raven’s romance paperback is perched over her knee while she grabs a handful of chips.
“That’s the difference, though,” Ember says. “Sydney Carton makes this huge dramatic sacrifice, dying in place of Charles Darnay, the man Lucie Manette loves. So, he doesn’t even get the girl. That’s not love. Well, I mean, it is. But she never even knows.”
Greer’s lip twitches. “Yes. But we do. We feel the agony that life is rarely tied up in a bow. We feel the weight of his sacrifice.”
Quinn runs her finger over the rim of her wineglass. “I think dying for someone who will never know how much you loved them until you are dead is a waste of a perfectly good life.”
Lucy rolls her eyes. “But it’s about redemption. In finding purpose in a life half-lived. He believes his life now has meaning because he can use it to make her happy. That’s selflessness, not waste.”
“Selflessness is overrated,” Raven chimes in from the other end of the table.
“If I’m in love, I want the guy who chooses to live for me, not die dramatically for me.
” She taps her paperback. “Think about it. Ethan thought Evangeline would be better off without him, but he stayed close anyway—so when she figured it out, he was still there for her.”
“Strategic patience,” Quinn says. “And all those pages of him yearning for her, so when they finally got together, it happened with a big bang.”
“And, boy, did they bang,” Raven says, causing everyone to laugh.
So far, I’ve been sitting quietly, listening to the conversation, trying to decide if I even want to be here. I feel like, while the individuals are not inherently into labels, their worlds fall that way. The men out doing the dangerous thing, the women home reading books.
Something about it makes me itch.
Yet, if I ask myself a simple question, am I having a good time, the easy answer is that I am.
“I have a thought,” I say. “I mean, admittedly, I haven’t read either book, but I’ve got the general idea from what you’ve been saying. They’re both versions of the same idea.”
All eyes turn to me. “In what way?” Greer asks.
“Sydney sacrifices himself because he believes love is about giving, not taking. Ethan’s sacrifice isn’t death, it’s restraint. He loves her enough to let her choose someone else, even though it kills him on the inside, if not the outside. They’re both acts of surrender.”
Lucy nods enthusiastically. “Yes. That’s beautifully put. They both surrendered.”
Quinn nods too. “I’ll give you that observation. But one of those endings is a wedding with a happily ever after. The other ends with a decapitation beneath a guillotine.”
Ember swirls her glass of alcohol-free wine. “Meh. That’s details.”
The room fills with laughter again.
Greer reaches for her tea. “Maybe some of us are just showing our age. The classics ask you to find beauty in sacrifice. The modern ones let you believe love can survive anything.”
“Or maybe because of who we’re in relationships with, we can see that both things can be true at once,” Lucy says. “There’s a duality to the men we love.”
Silence settles for a moment as we all consider what Lucy just said. It’s not lost on me that we’re having this conversation now, safely ensconced and protected, while River is out doing something dangerous.
“Well, Dickens can keep his guillotine. I’ll take my swoony carpenter, Ethan, and his happy endings, any day,” Quinn says. “And we can all agree that while love can appear as a theme in many different genres of books, it has to end happily to be considered a romance.”
“I feel like we should reintroduce the guillotine,” I say. “We need a revolution right now.”
Greer raises her cup of tea to that.
Raven rubs a finger over her lip. “You know, I think Sydney’s story hits harder because he never really gets the acknowledgement. He does it alone. Most people wouldn’t understand that kind of love. Makes me think of how Wraith suffered.”
Ember leans over to me and says quietly, “His first wife and their baby daughter were murdered.”
The words are like a lead weight in my stomach. “Oh, God. I’m so sorry.” I’m not sure who I’m saying that to.
Greer’s eyes softened. “There was something quite Butcher-like in the story. Only, in some ways, he became the other man, for me.”
“He so did,” Quinn says.
I want to ask how and why, but now isn’t the time. But there’s obviously a depth I don’t understand to all their stories. And yet, there’s also something that I can’t quite put into words. Something noble, maybe. Poignant. Deeply entrenched in themes of love and change and sacrifice.
I think about the words I said to Calista earlier, and what she said in return. That I should fall hard.
I raise my glass of wine. “To happy endings.”
Everyone raises whatever they’re drinking in a toast.
“So, what are we reading next month?” Quinn asks.
“I’m suggesting Bleak House,” Greer says.
Quinn laughs. “You can keep that misery. I suggest we read the first book in Vi Graydon’s new billionaire series.”
“Is there one in the middle?” I ask. “Bleak Billionaires?”
“Wuthering Heights,” Raven says. “It’s bleak, and Heathcliff ends up wealthy in the end.”
Everyone chuckles at that.
And I realize, for all I felt a little lost, earlier, I’m glad I spent time with these women.