Chapter 11 #2
His fingers twitch forward, and for a second I’m dizzy with the thought that he’s about to take my hand.
But of course, he doesn’t. He merely lifts it in a gesture towards the gigantic marble staircase that leads from the house’s giant foyer up to the second level.
Suddenly, the thought of even climbing the stairs becomes too much.
I’m not even sure that I could crawl up them at this point.
With a groan, I let my knees buckle, sinking back onto the couch.
Curse is on his knees in an instant, his fingers firm at my jaw.
“What is it?” he asks, turning my head with his hands. I shiver as his touch ghosts over the bandage at my temple, shifting the strands of hair away. “Your head?”
“My everything,” I admit. I’m too exhausted for bravado now. Sickness roils in my belly. “You should move,” I tell him weakly, trying to bat his hands away. “I think I might puke on you.”
“Go ahead,” he says instantly. “I’m not moving. I’m not going anywhere.”
I blink at him, finding his beautiful face so close to mine.
Close enough to feel his breath, close enough to kiss.
His eyes, so black, so absorbing. But eyes that I know from experience, that I know from twenty-two years ago, have so much warmth in them, if only when the sun hits just right.
Along with the nausea comes the sudden agony of grief, rising on an unstoppable tide inside me.
I can feel it, a physical wave, expanding painfully, pushing higher and higher, past my ribs, right up into my throat.
I tip my head down and vomit. I’m too sick to even feel bad about the fact that I puke down the front of his shirt and onto his legs where he kneels.
At least I warned him. He doesn’t flinch, doesn’t even pull his hands away.
Instead, I’m distantly aware of him gathering my hair at the nape of my neck, holding it out of the way.
Like he doesn’t care if his own clothes get wrecked, but letting my hair get dirty is one step too far.
“Sorry,” I croak when I’m done. “I told you that you should have moved out of the way.”
“Don’t apologize,” he says. “I knew what I was in for.”
He knew what he was in for and he didn’t turn away. He knew what he was in for and he didn’t back down. He just stood there, holding me, even while being splattered in my filth.
It’s a reminder of what I’d quietly hoped for, a long time ago.
In my fantasies about marrying Curse, I sometimes timidly wondered if I might ever be able to tell him what had happened at Carlo Messina’s house in Taormina, in that terrible darkness, that little bed.
I’d tell him one day, and he wouldn’t flinch.
He would stand by me, hold me like I was just as whole and pristine as he always thought I was.
I suppose that’s the biggest fantasy of all, isn’t it?
That I could tell him what had happened to me, that I could tear myself open and show him just how ruined I was, and he would love me through it anyway.
Maybe I could tell him right now. He’s already covered in my literal vomit. And I already know that he will never love me. So really, what do I have to lose?
But I don’t have the strength. I can’t even string the words together inside my own head. Whenever I try, the little girl in there starts screaming behind the glass I’ve locked her into, slamming her fists against the walls until tiny hairline cracks begin to form. Her little hands are bleeding.
“I’m serious. Is it your head?” Curse asks me, still holding my hair, still so fucking close. “Maybe the injury is worse than Morelli thought. I’ll call him.”
“I don’t think it’s that. The pill…” I scanned the leaflet that came with the morning after pill and saw some side effects listed there.
I hadn’t paid them much attention, to be honest, because I had no choice in taking the pill.
I’d swallowed it down with my water and had taken a rather cavalier, come-what-may sort of attitude towards the outcome.
Curse’s jaw, and the muscles around his eyes, twitch with tension. He gives a grim nod, releases my hair, then stands.
I shake my throbbing head at the sight of him. Barely-digested lasagna and bile form a foul line down his front, from his chest to his knees. I’m already opening my mouth to apologize again when tells me, “Don’t.”
“Don’t what?” I hedge.
“Don’t fucking say sorry again. Not to me. Never to me.”
He pulls his shirt off in a swift movement, tossing it down on top of the puke on the floor.
His pants follow suit, until he’s standing before me in nothing but his tight black underwear.
I avert my gaze, swallowing. I desperately need to rinse my mouth out, or brush my teeth.
But first, I need to clean up this mess.
Take back all the poison I’ve poured out into the world. Scrub it, hide it, make it disappear.
“Don’t do that, either,” Curse says sharply when I reach for his dirty clothes. “Someone else will deal with it.”
“No one else should have to deal with it,” I cry. “That’s horrible!”
I slide forward on the couch, about to sink to my knees beside the messy pile, when two hands seize on me.
My breath catches as I’m suddenly lifted, swept easily up into Curse’s arms. It reminds me of the last time he did this.
Only then, I was crying hysterically, basically on the edge of a nervous breakdown.
This time, it’s post-puking. Lovely. Somehow I always seem to show myself to him when I am at my worst.
But he carries me in his arms anyway.
“Are you going to haul me into a cold shower again this time?” I ask him.
My lips unintentionally graze his neck as I speak.
Fascinated, I watch as goosebumps break out over his skin there.
What would he do, if I gave into the urge to touch his skin?
To trace the constellations formed from his flesh?
“No,” Curse says, taking the stairs two at a time. Even with the extra weight of me in his arms, it seems to be no real effort for him at all. “I’m going to put you to bed.”
“I need to brush my teeth first,” I say. I’m totally wiped-out now, but even so, I can’t imagine collapsing into bed with my mouth tasting and feeling this way.
Curse grunts his acknowledgement, taking me into the same bathroom I showered in earlier today.
My suitcase is still here. He sets me down on the counter, in the exact same place he had me earlier, when he was on his knees before me.
He pauses a moment, as if to make sure I’m not going to puke again, or pass out and fall off the counter, before he releases me to bend over the suitcase.
He retrieves my pink toothbrush and the toothpaste, passing them to me.
“Here,” he says. “I’m going to rinse off while you do this.” He tilts his head towards the bathtub and shower. “Do I need to remind you of the rule?”
“The rule about staying here while you shower?”
“Yes.” His gaze holds mine. Empty gravity I cannot pull away from. “You stay here. Or I will come for you. And find you.”
“I’ll stay,” I say. I don’t have the energy to fight with him or run from him. And we both know what happened on the train, the last time I was out of his sight for any significant period of time.
He seems satisfied with that, striding to the shower curtain and pulling it aside.
He removes his underwear, folding it and putting it neatly on the floor before stepping into the bathtub and turning on the water.
I don’t know why he bothered to warn me about not leaving the bathroom.
He takes less than a minute to wash the stink of my vomit off of his body.
I’m still running the foamy bristles over my teeth when he emerges, naked and dripping.
There’s no towel for him in here. The one I used earlier – the one I stained earlier – got dumped into what I assumed was a laundry basket after I put on my clothes this morning.
I’m not even sure he notices. Water drips into his eyes as he watches me, and he doesn’t even bother to blink it away.
I twist away from him, bending at the waist to spit into the sink I’m still seated beside.
I rinse my toothbrush, doing everything I can not to stare at the dark marvel of his naked body.
But when my gaze snags on him in the mirror, I can’t tear it away.
My breath stalls, my eyes stuck on the thick, long organ between his legs, the black hair surrounding it, the tattoos on his abdomen and thighs.
His is the only cock I’ve ever seen. I never saw Carlo’s – or if I did, I’ve buried the memory of it so deep that I don’t even know how I’d dig it up now.
Furtively, I allow myself this moment to study him in the mirror.
By only looking at his reflection, it feels just ever-so-slightly less real. Less…invasive.
But if Curse feels invaded, he certainly doesn’t show it. There’s no hint of modesty or embarrassment. He stands here, still and patient, letting me look at his bare body the same way he lets me look at his face.
He must know what I’m looking at. He must be able to tell, based on the angle of my eyes in the mirror, exactly what it is I’m focused on. And then, as if my gaze is a stroke along his skin, his cock gives a visible throb. Finally, I avert my gaze. It shoots upwards to meet his in the mirror.
“You,” he murmurs, “and those fucking eyes.” He gives his head a tiny shake, more a twitch than anything. Then, he fishes out a toothbrush from beneath the sink, a spare one wrapped in the original packaging. He tears it open, wets it, then squeezes the toothpaste on it.
Curse brushes his teeth the way he does most other mundane tasks, like eating or dressing or washing. Every movement defined by cold and meticulous efficiency. If he weren’t so strangely graceful, it would almost seem robotic.
As he finishes up, I slide unsteadily off the counter and return to my suitcase, closing it up so I can bring it with me into the bedroom for the night.
Curse takes it from me, leading me out of the bathroom and down the darkened hall.
His room is the last one. It’s a neat, bare-looking room, with its own bathroom attached.
“There’s barely anything in here. You’re quite the minimalist,” I say. There’s a bed, a bedside table, a lamp and…that’s it. Even in Montreal, Curse said that all the house’s cozy furnishings had come with the place, and that he hadn’t seen the point in changing any of it.
“Thought you liked empty places.”
“Pardon?” I turn to look at him where he’s setting the suitcase down beside the bed, but he’s still fucking naked, so I turn my attention to the ceiling instead.
“You told me that,” he replies. “In Montreal.”
Confusion pulls my brows together.
“I told you that I liked empty places?”
“Yes. Or, rather, your exact words were that you liked ‘abandoned places.’”
It takes me a moment to absorb what he’s saying, but then it hits me. He’s not talking about Montreal from a few days ago. He’s talking about Montreal from twelve years ago. When my sixteen-year-old-self in my fancy dress and shoes stumbled upon him in that warehouse.
I’ll never forget that first flash of Curse, after ten long years without him. The flawless, shadowy violence of his profile. The power of his hands wrapped around another man’s throat.
I knew it was him at once. I think that’s part of the reason I’ve had such trouble accepting that this Curse is not the Accursio I knew.
Because, before I even saw his whole face, before I heard his voice, before I could make sense of the murder I’d just witnessed, I knew him. Recognized him the way I’d recognize my own hand, if it were to somehow become separated from my arm.
Like a song whose notes are forever embedded in my bones, a dream that lives in vivid colour in my soul, I knew him. Immediately, and without doubt.
And yet didn’t I tell him today that I don’t know him?
Clearly, he still knows me.
“I can’t believe you remember that,” I say at length. I don’t know how else to respond. He’d seemed so angry with me that night. Like my showing up was nothing but a burden. Like he couldn’t wait to be rid of me.
He cracks his knuckles.
“I remember everything, Aurora. Everything that concerns you, that is.”
“Oh yeah?” I snort, wanting to run from that admission. “Then what was I wearing that night?”
“A pretty dress made out of some kind of clingy, shiny stuff,” he shoots back at once. “Spindly high heels.” A rasping edge comes into his voice. “My hoodie.”
He really does remember.
And isn’t it true that he recognized me at once? Just as quickly as I had recognized him?
“That was a long time ago,” I say, sitting down on the bed.
“So you don’t wander your way through abandoned buildings anymore?”
“No.” I don’t tell him that so many of those times – times spent picking through old, dark houses that seemed to have been forgotten by everything – I was looking for something.
It was only after seeing him in Montreal that I realized just what it was. I was wading through the abandoned rooms of other people’s pasts, searching for my own.
I was looking for Curse.
I stopped searching – for him, for all of it – after that night.
“What about poetry? Still write that?”
I cringe. Of course he remembers that, too.
“No,” I reply. I scoot backwards and get myself under the duvet, like I can use it to shield me from this entire conversation. “I’m pretty sure I told you that it wasn’t any good, anyway.”
“Is that even the point of poetry?” he asks. “To be good?”
“I…” I’m so stunned by the question that words fail me. Why the hell is Curse Titone, the coldest and most mercenary man I’ve ever met, asking me about the point of poetry right now?
“I don’t know,” I finally say. “But I wasn’t even close to good. Like, those poems were awful.”
I’m not being falsely modest. They really were bad. Riddled with teenage angst and mixed metaphors. There’s a reason I kept them in a little notebook and never showed them to anyone. The only reason I even kept that notebook into adulthood was because Curse had written his phone number in it.
The bed sinks down beside me as Curse lays his considerable weight down upon it.
“What do you even know about poetry, anyway?” I whisper into the duvet.
“I don’t know shit,” he replies.
My heavy eyelids fall shut as he rolls towards me. Cold metal kisses my wrist.
“I just think,” he says quietly, “that a bad poem that exists has to be better than a good one that doesn’t.”
The click of the handcuffs follows his words.
The echoing sound becomes a poem of its own.