Evocation

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

MOIRA

Moira was deep into conversation about the precise week in November one should plant tulips when she felt her husband’s presence behind her. He smiled politely at Kitty as he settled his hand over his wife’s shoulder, but Moira knew right away that something was wrong. There was a tightness in his jaw and a dark cast to his features that spelled trouble.

“What’s up?” she asked quietly, swiveling to look at Rhys. David was standing a few feet away acting like he wasn’t eavesdropping. He couldn’t have looked more miserable if he had swallowed a frog. Something was definitely wrong.

“Nothing,” Rhys said, too lightly. He leaned down near her ear and added in a low voice, “I’m going to drive David home. I’ll be right back for you. Forty-five minutes, tops.”

“Why?” Moira demanded, swiveling even more to try and get a good look at David. “What’s happened?”

Rhys gave Kitty a tight smile. Ever perceptive, Kitty gathered up her clutch and excused herself.

Once she was out of earshot, Rhys added, “David’s drunk. I’m going to make sure he gets home safely.”

Moira moved to push up from her chair, head swimming with awful possibilities. She had been lucky enough to be raised in an environment free of the specter of addiction, but she knew people in David’s position didn’t relapse for no good reason. They had to be pushed.

“David, honey, what happened?”

David covered his face with a hand, unable to look at her, and Rhys blocked her path before she could go to him.

“I don’t want a scene. Please, just let me take care of this. I know how to handle him.”

“Don’t be cow-headed,” Moira said, snagging up her purse. “What, are you supposed to drive and talk him down at the same time?”

“You don’t have to take care of him–”

Moira shot her husband a hard look. “I want to, Rhys. When will you learn I don’t do a damn thing in this life unless I want to?”

“Jesus Christ,” David groaned when he saw her coming towards him. “Just don’t, please. I’m not in the mood for a lecture.”

“I’m not gonna lecture you,” Moira muttered, threading her arm through his and leading him discreetly towards the ballroom doors. Rhys followed close behind, shooting Antoni a pointed look as they passed. “Do you want me to wait with you for a cab?”

“If we call him a cab, he’ll just go to a bar,” Rhys muttered. There was a bitter, dark cloud around him that only got more pronounced as they got further from the noise of the ballroom. He was absolutely livid, angrier than she had ever seen him, angrier than she knew he was capable of getting. But it was a quiet, cold kind of anger, and that scared her the most.

“Get in the car, David,” Rhys said, unlocking the Lincoln as they approached.

David slid sullenly into the backseat as Rhys held open the passenger side door for his wife. She opted to duck in after David into the backseat.

“Scooch,” she ordered. David looked at her with bleary bafflement but duly scooted to the other side of the car. His eyes had a wet, red look in the streetlights.

Rhys gave her a skeptical glance through the rearview mirror as he revved the engine. I know what I’m doing, her eyes responded.

David’s apartment building looked like any of the other glass and metal structures that jutted out of the overdeveloped modern parts of the city. They were indistinguishable from banks and coworking spaces, and Rhys hated them precisely for their clinical sheen. But he seemed to know his way to this one perfectly well, not even having to glance at the GPS.

There was barely a stick of furniture in the gleaming, anonymous lobby, and what seating there was looked futuristic and pointedly decorative. Moira felt sure that security would get called if she actually sat on anything.

“Night, Robby,” David said to the concierge, doing a bad job of trying to sound upbeat. The suited man behind the counter swept a watchful eye over Rhys and Moira but said nothing as they waited awkwardly with David for the elevator.

Moira had assumed her husband would drop David off in front of his building, but now she saw that he really intended to deposit David at his condominium. It felt extreme to her, a little invasive. But maybe Rhys had reason to believe it was absolutely necessary.

She didn’t expect him to follow David into his house. But when David swiped the card to get into his apartment unit, Rhys stood by expectantly, glowering with his hands shoved in his pockets. This was an old routine, she realized. One only they knew the steps to.

The condo felt awful, but a different kind of awful than the house on Beacon Hill. This house didn’t feel haunted. It didn’t feel lived in at all. Moira got the impression she was walking through a beautiful morgue. Clean, soulless lines accentuated a kitchen that seemed more showroom than dinner-party ready. Everything was rendered in cool tones of white, gray, black, and dark blue.

David shrugged off his jacket and tossed it onto the ground near the couch.

“Are you happy now?” he demanded, unfastening his cuffs.

Rhys said nothing, only clinically swung open kitchen cupboards and drawers. He even went so far as to rummage through the freezer.

“There’s nothing there,” David snapped. He looked unsteady on his feet, like he needed an IV drip and a twelve-hour nap to feel anywhere close to human again. “I don’t keep any liquor in the house.”

“Go to bed, David,” Rhys said, deathly quiet.

“This is my house; I’ll do what I want,” David shot back, speech ever so slightly slurred. If Moira hadn’t been around him when he was sober, when every single gesture and word was carefully weighed against optics and the politics of power, she might not have even been able to tell he was drunk. “Give me my keys.”

“I’ll leave them out for you to find in the morning. Is your therapist’s number still the same?”

David’s face was a mask of hatred and misery, so contorted Moira could barely recognize him. “Your world’s perfect now, huh? Everything just like you designed. But I don’t fit anywhere, so I’ve got to go.”

“You’re being dramatic,” Rhys said, voice frighteningly emotionless. He had entirely shut off. “You’re embarrassing yourself.”

“Then why don’t you just leave me alone to fuck my own life up? I didn’t ask you to get involved.”

Rhys’s temper snapped like a dry twig. “You involved me!” he yelled. “You pulled me into your life, and you asked for my help and then you fucked with my head! What else do you call the stunt you pulled back there?”

“I wasn’t trying to fuck with your head!” David shot back, matching his volume. “The one time I’m honest with you, and you think that I’m–”

“That’s enough!” Moira shouted. Her voice bounced off the blank walls and echoed back at her. She was surprised at herself, and so was David, who jumped in his skin. Rhys stared at his wife, cheeks gaunt.

Moira pressed a hand to her fluttering heart, forcing a deep breath into her lungs.

“You two will not raise your voices around me, do you understand? I can’t abide the sound of men shouting and I’ll not tolerate it from either of y’all.”

“Sorry,” David breathed, wiping his mouth with the back of his hands. Rhys just kept staring.

“David, you’re coming with me,” Moira said, crossing the room with a few determined strides. “It’s time for bed.”

He left in the direction of the bedroom without argument. Moira following, slowing only to stop beside her husband and hiss, “You had better pull yourself together, Rhys McGowan. Fast.”

The master bedroom was, in her mind, a travesty. Barely a scrap of decoration or personal detail to be seen. The unadorned black wood headboard and deep blue comforter looked forbidding rather than welcoming, and the storage space in the room had been designed to keep as low a profile as possible, hiding away suits and undershirts like they were trade secrets. If it wasn’t for the few pairs of shoes scattered across the floor and the nest of sheets in one corner of the bed, around which folders and papers were laid out, the room would look entirely abandoned.

David kicked off his shoes and began clumsily unfastening the buttons of his shirt, missing a couple on his way down. Just about the time Moira was starting to wonder if it would be improper for her to offer to help, he managed to wrench his shirt off. Now wearing just a white T-shirt, slacks, and socks, he clambered onto the bed and curled up on top of the covers.

In the kitchen, Moira could distantly make out Rhys talking in low, urgent tones with someone over the phone. The therapist, she assumed.

Moira eased herself down on the edge of the bed, hands in her lap, staring straight ahead. David didn’t move from his position, and the two of them sat like that for a few long, silent minutes. Then Moira reached out to lightly sweep her hand over the hair falling into his eyes.

David recoiled from her touch, curling tighter in on himself. Moira recognized the defensive body language from the kids she had volunteered playing basketball with in high school, the ones who came from broken or battered homes.

“Please don’t,” David muttered, voice half muffled by the comforter. “I don’t want you to read me when I’m like this.”

“I’m not going to,” Moira said.

David stayed where he was for a moment. Then, he pulled his head out of its tucked position by a few inches.

Moira threaded her fingers through his hair, running her hand along the curve of his skull. Immediately, David edged closer until his head was resting in her lap, facing away from her so he wouldn’t have to look in her eyes. Moira kept her word. She didn’t try to read him, just smoothed her hand over the forehead of a miserable overgrown boy she had no idea how to help, feeling very tired and very useless. She didn’t have anything to say to him, so she hoped her touch was soothing enough.

“What if,” David began, his voice hoarse. “I’m not really good at anything at all. Law or mediumship. What if it’s this goddamn demon deal, and once that’s gone, there’s nothing left.”

“Don’t say that,” Moira said. “There’s plenty of you that isn’t tied up in that deal.”

“That’s all I’m good for,” he muttered, losing himself in some inconsolable spiral. “If I can’t work anymore, if I’m not at the top of my game… There’s no point. There’s nothing left. It’s all I’m good for. It’s all I know how to do.”

“There’s plenty left, but nothing you can see when you’ve got yourself in this state. I need you to sleep, David. Will you try?”

“I’m sorry,” he muttered, putting his hand on top of hers to stop the petting. “It was a shitty thing of me to do. I don’t know why I did that. You don’t deserve that. You deserve so much better than my bullshit.”

“What are you talking about, David?”

There was a soft sound near the door, and Moira looked up to see Rhys in the doorway, watching them from a safe distance. He seemed afraid to step foot in the bedroom.

“Time to go,” he said quietly.

David shrank away from her at the sound of Rhys’s voice, rolling over so his head was on the pillow.

Moira stood, beating the wrinkles out of her evening dress, and slipped out of the room. Rhys flicked off the light and closed the door on David with a soft, final click.

They didn’t linger long at the loud, dimly lit gastropub Antoni had chosen to celebrate in. Rhys accepted everyone’s congratulations with attentive smiles, but the exhaustion was evident in his eyes. Moira rescued him with apologetic complaints of an early morning and drove them back to Jamaica Plain as soon the well-wishers released them. Once home, the exhaustion hit her too.

“Help me with my zipper, baby,” she murmured, one hand braced on the papered wall of their bedroom.

Rhys opened her dress with deft fingers, careful not to let the zipper bite her skin, and smoothed his palm up the bare curve of her back. He kissed the nape of her neck, leaning on her with the weariness of a man freshly home from war.

Moira turned and slid her arms around her husband’s neck, looking into his face.

“You’ve got to let it go,” she said, pressing a light kiss to his cheek, the corner of his mouth. “His choices are his own.”

“No matter what I do, I keep ending up back here,” Rhys said, voice hoarse. “Cleaning up after him.”

Moira made a knowing humming noise. “I think part of you likes it. I think even though it causes you pain, you keep chasing that high of feeling needed. But David will be just fine without you playing taskmaster. You can’t force somebody to take care of themselves, baby. The only person you can control is yourself.”

Rhys gave her a faux disapproving expression. “It’s awful late at night to be talking sense to me like I’m a client.”

Moira grinned, nudging his nose with her own. “I’ll go easy on you, I promise. Come here.”

Rhys cradled her face in his hands, and she tipped her head back obligingly for his kiss. Moira’s dress slipped off her shoulders and caught around her waist, and she gingerly pulled off his jacket, careful not to crumple the velvet. Her fingers trailed up the curve of his spine through the fabric of his shirt, and Rhys made a soft pleasured sound, deepening their kiss.

Then suddenly, he pulled away.

“I have to tell you something,” he said. There wasn’t a drop of color in his face.

“What is it?”

“I…” He was frozen, voice stuck in his throat.

Moira raised her eyebrows at him. “Well?”

“David kissed me. I let him.”

She pushed back from him a few inches, blinking in a daze. That put a couple of things about their screaming match in the condo into perspective.

“When?”

“At the gala. Before I realized he had been drinking. I’m sorry, Moira, I’m so sorry. I love you so much, you’re my entire world, I–”

Moira pressed light fingers over her husband’s mouth before he could work himself up any further. He excelled at self-flagellation.

She took a deep breath, willing her pounding heart to slow. A maelstrom of emotions whirled inside her, threatening to consume her. Dismay, anxiety, the butterflies of pure adrenaline. She tried to push them all aside and follow her heart down to her root feelings on the matter. There, in the quiet part of herself she found concern. But also a sense of inevitability. Or puzzle pieces slotting correctly into place.

“It’s been a weird night,” she said with a soft laugh. She felt strangely light, delirious maybe. “Let’s not be too hard on ourselves for one little indiscretion, okay? Anyway, the kiss doesn’t surprise me.”

Moira shimmied out of her dress and draped it over the back of a chair as she went to the closet to find her nightclothes. She still felt shaky, like she had drunk too much champagne at the party even though she had only indulged in two glasses, and she couldn’t breathe quite right. Was she angry? She couldn’t tell. Mostly she just felt very upside-down about everything.

Rhys stayed rooted to the spot, staring at her like she had been body-snatched and replaced with a clone. “You’re not jealous?” His eyes were wide, waiting for her to burst into tears or start shouting at him.

Moira took off her earrings and heavy necklace, dropping them in a ceramic dish. “Now, I didn’t say that. But it’s easy to be jealous of a man you don’t know from Adam. But I know David now, and he’s…” Moira didn’t have a word for it. The pang of sweetness that went through her when Rhys leaned over to David to say something soft. The rush of protective affection that had coursed through her when David hugged her tightly in the shadow of his father’s bedroom. The sense of power she felt walking flanked by both of them down the sidewalk. “He’s just David. I’m no more threatened by your love for him than I am by your love for your mother. Neither stopped you from making me your wife.”

Rhys paled. “Love is a strong word.”

“Call it what you like. I know it when I see it. And I could see it clear as day between you two from the moment I read your palm at the Beacon Hill house.”

“You what?”

Moira tangled her fingers together, scrambling for an explanation. Maybe she should have been more straightforward. But she had no way of being sure if she was making the glimmering threads of unspoken connection between all three of them up. It was hard to tell with David. He was close to her one moment and then gone the next. “I should have said something, but I didn’t want to… I don’t know. I was worried I was making it up. Or that saying it out loud would ruin something.”

“You care about him too,” Rhys said, with a strange finality in his voice.

“I do,” Moira admitted. “More than I thought I would. Maybe that’s why it’s hard to be angry at either of you.”

“Are you in love with David?”

“I think that’s a question better posed by me to you.”

He stood there in the middle of the room, flexing and unflexing his right hand and staring at the ground. Thinking intently. For a moment, Moira wondered if she had broken them. They should have had this conversation from the start, from the first time the three of them had been in that house together. She just never dreamed it would go this far.

“How?” Rhys asked finally. His face was positively anguished. “How could you have known when I didn’t?”

“Oh, baby,” Moira sighed. She went to him and put her hand on his cheek. “For somebody so smart sometimes you really are a little stupid.”

Rhys caught her hand and kissed her palm. “David doesn’t mean anything to me.”

Moira latticed her fingers through Rhys’s and squeezed. Hard. “Don’t lie. You can have whatever and whoever you want in this life, Rhys. Just don’t ever lie to me. Do you hear what I’m telling you? Do you hear how much I trust you?”

Rhys took a deep breath and tried again.

“David means a lot to me. But you’re my wife.” He kissed her with newfound urgency, punctuating each word with a worshipful press of his lips to her mouth, her throat. “My north star.”

“Keep going,” Moira said, wrapping her arms around him.

“Goddess incarnate. Witch of my heart.”

“Are you gonna take me to bed, Rhys McGowan, or are you just gonna keep talking about it?”

Rhys deftly unfastened Moira’s bra and discarded it on the floor. He cupped her breasts in his hands, running his thumbs over her taut nipples. A pleasant shudder went up Moira’s spine and she pressed their bodies closer together. She tugged at the hem of his shirt, freeing it from the waistband of his trousers.

“My home and final resting place,” Rhys said, voice rough with want and desperation.

Moira tugged his shirt up over his head, not bothering with the buttons, and ran her fingers up the familiar lines of his pale chest. She dropped a kiss to the spot right over his heart.

“The important people in our lives might change,” Moira said, feeling the kick of his heartbeat against her lips. “But my love for you never will.”

“Neither will mine for you,” Rhys said, pushing her lightly back towards the bed. He was never rough with her; those weren’t the kind of bedroom games she enjoyed. But there was a certain pleasure at being stared at like a treasured possession, like the crown jewels in Rhys’s collection. The whisper of objectification made the heat rise in her cheeks.

Moira sank into the sheets, stretching out to offer him the best possible view. “Then we shouldn’t keep each other from anything or anyone that we want,” she said.

Rhys tugged her stockings down over her knees and then plucked them from her ankles. He circled one of her small feet with his fingers, pressing a thumb against one of the acupressure points in the arch.

“What you’re talking about is dangerous,” he said darkly.

“I’m not afraid. Are you?”

Rhys’s response was to hook his thumbs under her panties and relieve her of them. She watched, comfortable in her nakedness, as Rhys stepped out of his pants and knelt on the bed in front of her.

“I’m cautious,” he said, kissing her bare knee. “That’s different.”

“Then we proceed with caution. Look, we’ve come to an agreement.”

“You’re going to make an excellent High Priest’s wife,” Rhys said with a crooked smile. Moira’s heart skipped a beat at the flash of his teeth in the dark. “I love it when you get devious.”

“Oh yeah?” Moira shot back with a smirk of her own. “Show me how much.”

Rhys lowered his head between her thighs and lapped at the heat he found there. Moira let out a gasp, arching her back off the bed. Rhys made a pleased hum and dug his fingernails into her ample hips to hold her still. She knew his tricks well enough to know that he was spelling his full name with his tongue, marking her as his own in the most intimate of ways.

“Rhys,” Moira sighed, tangling her fingers in his hair. She could feel the lust radiating off him like body heat, and it made her stomach do a somersault. Rhys always made Moira feel wanted, but she had not been wanted like this in some time. The stalwart tealight of Rhys’s desire felt more like a bonfire beneath her fingers, wild and hungry.

Rhys devoted himself to his task with a scholar’s single-minded focus, and it wasn’t long before her thighs were trembling. Moira gave a little cry as her pleasure crested, once and then twice as Rhys brought her over the edge.

Moira melted back into her bedsheets and held her arms out to her husband, who was over her in an instant. Moira pulled him into a hot, hard kiss. She wanted Rhys closer, she wanted nothing between them but darkness and devotion.

She wrapped her fingers around the length of him and savored the way his breath caught in his throat. She never got tired to this, of peeling back the layers of academic focus and propriety to find the man underneath. Rhys nipped a half-moon on her shoulder, eliciting a breathy giggle from his wife.

Moira rolled over so she was on top of him, his hipbones digging into her soft inner thighs. The warm summer air drifted in through the window and ghosted across her bare skin as she guided him towards her entrance. Rhys dug his fingers securely into her back as their bodies slotted together and found an old, familiar rhythm. Moira let out a shaky sigh as warmth swept through her.

“I’d move heaven and hell for you,” Rhys said, pulling her in tighter. “Tell me you know that.”

“I don’t want heaven and I don’t want hell,” Moira said, breath coming fast and hot as she rolled her hips. “I just want you.”

Rhys thrust into her, his grip on her body merciless. Moira could have purred, it felt so perfect.

“You’re going to be a queen, Moira,” he said, dragging his mouth across her own as he spoke. His pace quickened, driving her towards another orgasm. He knew exactly the angle to take to pleasure her while pursuing his own gratification. “My Queen. Mine.”

Moira shuddered with delight, an irrepressible smile spreading across her lips. She knew exactly what Rhys was when she married him, down to the darkest corners of his insatiable heart. She adored him like this, selfish ambition laid bare by his love for her. Truth be told, Rhys could be a bit of a monster when it came to getting what he wanted. But he was her monster, and what he wanted was her happiness.

She wouldn’t change a single thing about him.

“Don’t stop,” she said. “Keep talking.”

“I’m going to give you everything you ever wanted. I’ll summon a whole host of spirits to wait on you. I’ll buy you diamonds with Society endowment money, I don’t fucking care,” he rasped. He was approaching his own climax; Moira could feel it in the tightness in his muscles, in the relentless way he drove into her. “I’ll make every magician in Boston come to the house and pay their respects to you. God, Moira, I’ll do anything. I’ll… God.”

Moira held him fast as he broke into pieces, filling her with heat and light.

Afterwards, they held each other in the dim, their legs tangled together, sweat cooling on their skin. Moira trailed a lazy line of kisses down her husband’s chest, then broke the silence.

“It’s not going to be easy, you know,” she said in her soft Southern drawl. “Heavy is the head that wears the crown, and all that. The High Priesthood is gonna try to take everything from you. You can’t let it.”

Rhys circled an arm around her shoulder and kissed the top of her head. She could sense him slipping into introspection, drifting a little further away from her despite how close they were in bed.

“As long as I have you by my side, I’ll be fine,” he said eventually.

“And David?” she asked, quiet in the dark.

Rhys nudged his nose against her own.

“We’ll figure it out together, you and me. That’s always how it’s going to be, Moira. You and me.”