CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
DAVID
David and Moira walked around the corner to the nearest Dunkin’ and ordered an unsweetened coffee with cream and a mocha, respectively. Then they wandered over to the parked Lincoln, and Moira pushed herself up onto the sun-warmed hood of the car.
She leaned back on her palms on the metal, one leg stuck out, one knee bent. “Come over here and sit with me, indigo child,” she said.
It wasn’t an order, but defying her was impossible. She would just wait him out. Whatever she wanted to talk about, it was best to get it out of the way now.
David pushed himself up onto the hood. He hadn’t sat on a car since he was sixteen, trying to impress the older boys who drove themselves to school.
“Is this a diplomatic meeting?” he asked, feeling wary. He still wasn’t sure if Rhys had told her about the kiss. Probably. Rhys couldn’t keep a secret from her to save his life. Maybe she had called him over closer so she could slap him. She would be well within her rights.
“Not necessarily,” Moira said, lolling her head from side to side to catch the sun from every angle. Just like one of her flowers. “Although it is pretty rude to kiss somebody else’s husband without asking first.”
There it was. This had been coming for a week. Maybe she wanted him alone so she could scream at him without worrying about Rhys trying to pull them apart. That, too, would be fair.
“Have you got anything to say about it?” she asked in a measured voice.
David found, to his great dismay, that he didn’t want her to be angry with him. Guilt over his actions was undeniable, as sour and persistent as the aftertaste of a hangover. But there was another twist of pain here, much sharper than the general shame that tailed him for weeks after he did something stupid under the influence. He was sickened by the thought of who he had betrayed. Not just Rhys. Moira.
He had grown attached to Moira quietly, without really noticing it and despite all of his best efforts to the contrary. Rhys felt the same way magic did: a dark rush of pure thrill straight into his veins. But Moira was like sunlight after a long, gray Boston winter: he didn’t realize how much he craved her until she was gone.
“I fucked up tremendously,” he said, shocked at his own earnestness. She made lies evaporate on his lips. “Just, catastrophically. I’ve been torn up about it ever since, and I know that doesn’t excuse my actions, but… God, Moira, I cannot believe I did that to you. Please believe me when I say I’m not trying to come between the two of you. What you have is so special and you deserve each other, truly. I know you and I didn’t start out on good terms, but I have the utmost respect for you. You’re one of the finest women I’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing, and I don’t…”
He grimaced, searching for the right words. He had no idea whether he was passing her test, or if she was simply biding her time before telling him never to speak to her again.
“Listen, I don’t have very many friends,” he pressed on. “I’m not good at making them or keeping them. But you make me want to try harder. Rhys and I… We’ve never been good at keeping our distance, or treating each other well, but I want to try harder at that, too. But I’m not going to go behind your back and I’m not going to do anything to disrespect you ever again, I swear.”
Moira extended her hand daintily. David looked at it for a moment, baffled, and then he awkwardly took it in his own.
Moira looked at him over the rim of her sunglasses. “I wasn’t mad at you, you know. I just wanted to hear you grovel. Well… okay, I was a little mad, but I mostly wanted the speech.”
The tension left David’s body like air from a burst balloon. “God,” he groaned. “Don’t do that to me ever again.”
“No promises.”
“Be honest. Did Rhys send you to check up on me?”
Moira shook her head. “Rhys doesn’t know I’m here. He barely knows what day it is, he’s been so busy. I came of my own accord.”
“Oh,” David said softly. It was easier to fathom Rhys making some kind of political move by sending in Moira than accepting that Moira was here because she wanted to be. He was used to people wanting things from him, not wanting to spend time with him.
Moira fixed him with a hard, perceptive look. “I need to ask you something, David Aristarkhov, and I need you to be honest with me too. You like me on my own merit? I thought maybe I made it up, after you disappeared on me.”
David brought her hand up to his mouth and kissed her knuckles, like he was pressing his signet seal onto a legal document. The gesture was entirely thoughtless and uncalculated, which appalled him. But he loved the pulse of earnest hope under her skin, the way the emotion crept into his body through his lips until his stomach was fluttering with it.
“I like you a lot, and that scares the hell out of me. In a different way than I like Rhys, but you’re smart enough to have figured that out by now. If we’re being honest.”
There it was, all out on the floor. A damning confession, if David had ever heard one. But there was no use dancing around the subject of his lingering feelings for Rhys when she had been bold enough to confront him about the kiss. And she deserved to know that he cared about her, against all reason and better judgement. Caring for people was a miserable, bloody business, and it hadn’t gotten him very far in life, but it had a way of sneaking up on you.
“Oh, I’ve had you figured for a while,” Moira said.
“Is this the part where you tell me to stay away from your husband? Because I have every intention of doing just that.”
Moira shrugged, picking at the sticker on her coffee with her nail. “I told you at the gala, you can be as close as you want to be.”
“Are you saying I could rekindle some kind of relationship with Rhys, if I wanted to? Even though you’re married?”
“It’s a modern age; people have all kinds of relationship structures. But I know things aren’t that simple.”
“No,” David said bitterly. “They’re not.”
“Just promise me you’re taking care of yourself. I don’t want to wake up to a phone call saying you’ve collapsed in a gutter somewhere. I couldn’t take it.”
“I’ve got everything under control.”
“Rhys and I made a promise to help you figure out what’s making you sick. If he won’t hold up his end of the bargain, I will.”
“You’re a good woman. Better than I deserve. But I don’t want you getting any more tied up in this than you already are. People that get too involved with me usually end up regretting it.”
Moira wrinkled her nose. “I’ll get involved with whoever I like. And you forget that you got involved with me too, David. You’re stuck with me now.”
David couldn’t help the smile that spread across his face. So, this was what real friendship was: an immovable object staring you down saying they weren’t going anywhere, thank you very much.
“Alright. Stuck together it is.”
Moira nodded in satisfaction and then settled closer to him on the hood, tucking her legs up under her and leaning her shoulder against his. David let her, not caring how it looked, and enjoyed the warm press of solidness against him. It reminded him of tight hugs from Lorena or the companionable sling of Leda’s arm around his shoulders, the kind of familial closeness he hadn’t enjoyed since he was a boy.
They stayed like this for some time, enjoying their coffee and watching the people bustle past. David let himself pretend, if only for a moment, that this was normal. He pretended that he wasn’t sick, that he wasn’t heir to a family legacy of demons and blood, and that Moira wasn’t the wife of a man who probably hated his guts.
He found, to his quiet surprise, that he liked it very much.