CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Wren
At nine that night I go and stand in the doorway of the cold room, and Cassius looks up from the green book, and I say:
"I want to tell you something and I want you to let me finish."
He closes the book.
"I've spent a month trying to work out whether this is real," I say.
"You know that. You know that, because it's the obvious question, and you've been so careful with me that it's driven me up the wall — the corn and the cardamom and standing at the end of Ilana Street at four in the morning texting me instead of knocking. "
"Wren—"
"Finish. Right." I take a breath. "So here's where I've got to. It doesn't matter."
He goes very still.
"Not — I don't mean it doesn't matter, I mean I've been asking the wrong question.
" I come down the last step. "I was asking does he love me or does he love what I do to him, and that's a stupid question, because that's the question everybody's asking.
That's every marriage. Nobody knows. Nobody has ever known.
You love the person and the thing they do to you and you can't get them apart with a chisel, and I've been sat in a box room for a month demanding a purity from this that no relationship in the history of the world has ever had. "
"That isn't the same—"
"It's slightly not the same."
"Wren, I could smell you from a roof—"
"And Mari's mother married a man because he had a car." I shrug. "It's all chemistry, mate. Yours is just louder."
He puts his hand over his face and I hear the sound he makes, which is a laugh with something broken in it.
"So I've got a different question," I say. "Do you want me to be free?"
Cassius takes his hand down.
"Because that's the one I can actually check," I say.
"And you've had thirty days of a locked door, and a court ruling you could've bent in about nine directions, and a woman who'd have said yes to you at basically any point in week two, and instead you sat on the wrong side of a gate and told me not to do it. "
"Wren."
"Do you want me to be free?"
"Yes," he says.
It comes out of him like something breaking, and it comes down the string a half-second later and nearly takes my legs.
"Yes. I want you out of that city, I want you on a road going south with money and a name that isn't yours, I want you sixty years old somewhere hot with a business and a person and a dog and no idea what a Friday court is—" He's on his feet.
"And I want it so much that it is the only thing standing between you and the thing that I actually want, which is all of you, forever, in a house on a cliff, mine, and I have wanted that since a roof in the rain and it makes me exactly what he was. "
"No," I say, "it doesn't."
"You don't know what he—"
"He took," I say. "You keep offering."
And I cross the cold room and put my hands on him.
◆ ◆ ◆
He goes down like a wall coming in.
It's not gentle and it's not careful and it's nothing like the man who's spent a month holding doorframes.
His hands come up into my hair, and he lifts me clean off the floor, and my back's against the stone and his mouth is on mine and he's saying something into it in a language I don't speak that I'd bet the house is Flemish.
"Upstairs," I manage.
"Wren—"
"Upstairs, because I'm not doing this on a slate shelf, I've got standards and bones—"
He gets us upstairs.
And here's what I remember about the rest of that night, in a white house at the end of a lake road with eleven wards on the windows.
That he's cold, and I stop noticing after about four minutes, and afterward I can't get warm and he wraps the whole quilt round me and holds it there.
That I can feel him. All of it. That's the part nobody could have prepared me for — the string doesn't switch off for this, it gets louder, and what comes down it is not one thing but two, braided, inseparable: a man who has wanted to put his hands on me since a car park in October, and a starving thing that has been standing four metres back in every room for a month.
Both. At once. In the same body, with the same hands.
I should be frightened of that. I've thought about it a great deal since and I still can't work out why I wasn't.
That he goes slowly not because he's careful but because he's counting — I catch him at it, twice, his lips moving, and when I ask he says "if I stop counting I stop thinking," and I say "then don't stop," and he says "I'm not going to," and neither of us laughs, and both of us mean it.
That he shakes. The entire time. Four hundred years old and forty-one kills and Cassius Rook cannot keep his hands steady, and when I put mine over them they go still.
That at some point I say "look at me" and he says "I can't," and I say "why," and he says "because if I look at you I'll ask you for it," and I say "then ask," and he doesn't.
He doesn't ask.
He could have had my throat in that bed at any second of that night and he did not put his mouth anywhere near it, and I lie awake at three in the morning with a dead man's arm across me, understanding perfectly clearly that this — this, not the cliff house, not the court, not the green book — is the thing I actually said yes to in that vault, and that I did not know it at the time, and that I'd do it again.
"Cassius."
"Mm."
"I'd do it again."
His arm tightens about a millimetre.
"Don't decide that here," he says, into my hair.
"I'm not deciding it. I'm reporting it." I put my hand over his. "That's the other thing about your bloody string. You'd know if I was lying."
There's a long pause.
"Yes," he says. "That's what's frightening me."
◆ ◆ ◆
At five twenty in the morning he wakes me, which should not be possible, because he doesn't sleep.
Except he does, for about an hour, and neither of us says anything about it, and I watch him come up out of it with an expression I have never seen on him and will never see again.
"Sun's in twenty minutes," I say. "Cold room."
"Yes."
"Cassius." My voice changes. "Come to the window first."
"Wren—"
"Just the window. Not the glass, I'm not an idiot. Come stand by it."
The bedroom faces east over the lake. The blind's down. I lift the corner of it about four inches and there's a band of grey out there over the water going the faintest possible colour at the bottom.
He stands well back in the dark of the room.
The band goes from grey to a sort of dirty rose. Then, very slowly, to gold.
"You're too far," I say.
"That's the correct distance."
"Cassius, you're four metres back—"
"And in eleven minutes there will be direct light in this room and it will kill me in ninety seconds," he says, "and I would like to be somewhere else by then, and I would like to look at it for another eight minutes first, and you are going to have to let me have both."
I go quiet.
I stand there holding the blind up for him, four metres away, for eight minutes, and don't say another word.
The lake comes up out of the dark. There's mist on it.
A heron goes across at about six and he watches it the entire way, and through the string I can feel his chest doing something that has no word attached to it in any language either of us has, and at six-eleven I say, "That's it, that's your time," and drop the blind.
He goes down the stairs into the dark under the kitchen.
And I sit on the edge of a bed in my grandmother's house and put my hands over my mouth, because what came off him in those eight minutes was not about the sunrise.
It was that somebody held the blind up.