Chapter Six #2
She told herself that Pavlos was drunk, the way he often was.
She’d imagined that they would have a perfectly civilized marriage where he would tend to his pursuits, she would handle hers, and they would meet when it suited the both of them for some kind of communal event.
She had rather thought it would involve a nice walk. Perhaps a swim.
That night, she sat up late in her room and convinced herself that he’d simply forgotten. And she’d reminded him. And all was well.
Nothing had changed. She had made the right decision. He would respect it. Tonight was an anomaly, that was all.
“He has been nothing but kind to me,” she repeated, again and again.
Another week went by, with Selwen clinging on hard to these fantasies of hers, before reality came crashing in.
She had just about convinced herself she’d imagined the whole thing.
It was a normal morning. She woke up in her bed, smiled at the sun that poured in through the windows, and took her time with her breakfast. She liked her tea.
She liked a bit of toast and some proper jam.
When she set out for her walk, it occurred to her that she really ought to go and see Pavlos about another strange thing he’d said at dinner the night before—though she was sure she was mistaken.
He’d been obviously intoxicated and he’d slurred something at her about weddings and cathedrals and honeymoons in Paris, where everyone could see them.
Selwen had smiled and convinced herself it was the drink talking.
She picked her way through the maze of halls, quiet all around her in the early morning.
She knew her way all over the labyrinth that was his villa now, because she liked to walk until she got lost and then find her way back.
She had once asked her husband-to-be why he liked a house like this that so many people got lost in, disoriented, and bewildered.
Once you enter, I decide when you leave, he had replied, and then he’d laughed in that big, bold way of his and she’d assured herself that he was joking.
Because he had to be joking.
It was easy enough to find her way to Pavlos’s vast suite at the highest point overlooking the ocean, with all of the various wings twisting off in different directions. She expected him to be up and working in the office he kept here, as he always claimed he did.
I work all morning so that I might play all night, he liked to say.
But when she let herself in to the atrium that contained his private pool, a set of hot tubs, and various other luxuries arranged on a terrace with the sea in the distance, so blue through all the archways and windows, she stopped dead.
Because Pavlos was up and awake all right, but he wasn’t working.
And he wasn’t alone.
Selwen felt as if she was having some kind of out-of-body experience.
She was standing there, watching the scene unfold before her, and she was also seemingly standing somewhere else, witnessing all of it.
Herself, standing there. And then Pavlos and the woman she recognized as his massage therapist, neither one of them with a stitch of clothing on and a great deal of bucking and moaning and—
And she must have made some kind of noise. Selwen couldn’t understand how, even if she had, they could possibly have heard her over the ruckus they were making, but they both turned and looked at her.
A great many things became clear in that terrible moment.
The massage therapist did not look in the least bit surprised, or in any way worried about being caught with Pavlos by his fiancée. That was a critical bit of information, certainly.
But even more clarifying was the fact that Pavlos…sighed.
“My darling girl,” he said, making no attempt to… untangle himself, “if you do not knock, you cannot be surprised at the things you might find on the other side of a door.”
And then, as she stood there with her mouth actually open, the two of them simply…continued.
As if they hadn’t been interrupted in the first place.
It took Selwen much longer than it should have to realize that they weren’t going to stop. That they didn’t care that she was there. That, on the contrary, Pavlos might actually like the fact that she’d seen him. That she could no longer pretend he was someone else.
She staggered out of the villa and found herself wandering blindly about in the careless Greek sunshine with no idea how to process what she had just seen.
She felt sick.
And she felt something else that didn’t make any sense. It teetered a little too close to some kind of sharp-edged relief and she clung to that, because it felt better. If she could have, she would have scrubbed her eyes out so that she could get those images out of her head.
Down on that beach she definitely did not dream about, she considered it a little too intently.
Eventually she found herself standing outside Thanasis’s cottage and thought about the way she’d caught sight of him just sitting there, that morning. Just waiting, and watching. And how determined she’d been to find that predatory.
It occurred to her now that she’d been unpardonably na?ve for entirely too long.
Ffion would not have approved.
Selwen stared at that chair where Thanasis had sat, scowling at it as if she could make his apparition appear if she concentrated hard enough.
She thought about all the men she had danced with on various islands.
How she had somehow convinced herself, one dance at a time, that all anyone wanted from her was the dancing.
She’d convinced herself that this thing with Pavlos was the same.
A bit of a dance, that was all. That was all he wanted from her, she’d been sure of it.
“What a fool you are,” she told herself, though the breeze stole her words away.
Because it had always been about sex. All of it.
Those men who had danced with her had wanted more. Pavlos had not showed her olive groves because he thought she had a particular interest in olives, but because part of the dancing he liked to do was showing off his wealth.
And here she was, heedlessly tripping face-first into situations she not only didn’t understand, but had actively tried not to when the truth was really very simple, there at the bottom of it all.
She liked dancing. But she had absolutely no interest in all that bouncing and flopping around that Pavlos and his massage therapist had been doing.
Selwen couldn’t remember a single time she’d wanted anything like that, with any man, whether the men in the village back in Pembrokeshire or the men in the many island tavernas.
It was like she couldn’t remember that part of herself either.
There was only one man who had ever seemed to affect her body at all. Only one who had made her feel that if she didn’t have some part of him inside her, she might die.
She had wanted to die, and she had, right there on his hand.
Selwen stared at Thanasis’s cottage, and felt something like a shiver move through her, except it felt a good deal more like an earthquake. As if she was crisscrossed with fault lines and they were all tearing themselves apart, here and now.
When she stayed in one piece, somehow, she wheeled herself around and marched herself through the labyrinth of the house to her bedchamber so that she could start packing her things.
And that was where Pavlos found her, quite a long while later. He had certainly not rushed to come to her. To explain himself, or apologize—
Which was what Selwen thought he was going to do when he stood there in the doorway and regarded her, with eyes she suddenly couldn’t fail to see were cold. And not at all kind, as she’d convinced herself they were.
“Where do you think you’re going?” he asked, with what sounded like only the very mildest curiosity.
“Away,” she said, and was surprised that she didn’t sound particularly upset.
Surely she should have been crushed to a pulp.
But Pavlos laughed, and she found she felt even less upset. “I had no idea you were such a child,” he told her. “What did you think? That I would become a monk simply because you behave like a nun? What foolishness.”
If she cared about this man the way she should, surely she would have been more hurt than disgusted. Surely she ought to cry, throw things. Try to rip him apart, the way she had—
But she couldn’t think about that just yet. How fired up she’d been to rip Thanasis apart, and while she was at it, rip into his memories too, when all he’d done was kiss her on a beach. And when she’d melted all over him, like molten fire in his hands.
She felt absolutely no need to do that now.
It was another dose of clarity. She was beginning to wonder if it was possible to overdose on the stuff.
“It’s my fault,” she said, and perhaps her voice was too light, too easy. Because his eyes narrowed and, if possible, grew colder. “I should have made it clear from the beginning that I cannot tolerate disloyalty.”
“This is like a child trying to run away from home.” Pavlos laughed again, and she could admit, now, that she hated all the laughter in this villa.
It came with sharp-edged knives. “You cannot have been confused about who I am, Selwen. I have made no secret of it. You have been present at too many of my parties to imagine that I was a man who abstained from the pleasures of the flesh, or, indeed, any pleasures at all.”
“It is one thing to drink too much. It is another to flagrantly sleep with another woman in the house where I’m staying. I think you know that, Pavlos.”
She thought he would get angry. But he only sighed. Then shrugged. It was a great, theatrical sort of gesture.
“I wish you good luck with this tantrum of yours,” he told her in that same patronizing tone.
“You will not find it easy to get off this island, I am afraid. And when you are ready to have a conversation like adults, you can come and find me.” He laughed again, long and mean.
“Though I would suggest that in the future, you knock.”