13. Elise
— ? —
Elise
His expression shifts from relief to wariness in the space of a heartbeat.
“That sounds serious.”
“It is.” I step out of his arms, needing the distance to think clearly. “The pregnancy scare made me realize how much we haven’t talked about. How much I don’t actually know.”
“Ask me anything.”
“Okay.” I take a breath. “The other day I told you I wanted you back then. When I worked for you. And you kissed me, and you never said one word back.”
He goes still.
“So I’ve been standing in that ever since,” I say.
“Waiting. Through everything else we had to be scared about. And you haven’t said it, and I need to know why.
Because either it wasn’t the same for you, which is fine, I’m a grown woman and I’ll survive it.
Or it was, and you watched me marry your brother anyway, and I need to understand how a person does that. ”
“Elise.”
“Which one is it?”
He crosses to the window and stands there with his back to me, looking out at the rain.
“When you started working for me, I was a disaster,” he says. “Different woman every weekend. I’d never been in anything that lasted longer than a few months, because the second it got serious I ran.”
“I knew that. Everyone knew that.”
“What you don’t know is that Simon came to me.” He turns around. “Before he asked you out. He wanted to know if pursuing you would cause problems between us.”
My stomach drops. “He asked your permission.”
“Not permission exactly. He’d noticed how I looked at you.” Rowan’s laugh has nothing in it. “Everyone had, apparently, except you. He asked if I was interested. Whether he’d be stepping on my toes.”
“And what did you say?”
“I lied.” The word comes out flat. “I told him you were just my assistant. That I barely noticed you that way. That he should go for it.”
The air leaves my lungs.
“You told him to go for it.”
“I told him to go for it because I was terrified of what happened if I didn’t.” He runs a hand through his hair. “If I admitted it, to him or to myself, I’d have to do something about it. I’d have to take the risk. And I wasn’t brave enough.”
“So you handed me over.” My voice sounds strange to my own ears. “Like I was a parking space you didn’t want to fight for.”
“That’s not…” He stops. “No. That’s fair. That’s exactly what I did.”
“And then you watched.” The anger is building now, hot and unexpected and enormous. “You watched me date him. You watched me fall for him. You stood at my wedding, Rowan. Five years of watching me disappear into a marriage you knew was wrong, and you said nothing.”
“You were married.”
“You could have said something before the wedding.”
“And told you what?” His voice cracks. “That your fiancé’s brother thought he’d made a mistake? You’d have thought I was trying to blow up your life out of jealousy. You’d have been right.”
“Maybe.”
“Would you have believed me?”
I want to say yes. I want to say I’d have listened, weighed it fairly, given it the consideration it deserved.
I’m honestly not sure.
“I don’t know,” I admit. “But you didn’t even try.”
“No. I didn’t.” He sits down heavily on the edge of the bed. “And I’ve hated myself for it every day since. Watching you get dimmer. Watching him take you for granted. Wanting to grab him and tell him what he had. And I couldn’t, because I was the one who handed you over in the first place.”
The anger is still there. But something else is coming in alongside it, and I don’t like it, because it feels a great deal like understanding.
“So say it now,” I say.
He looks up.
“You didn’t say it that day in the bedroom, and you haven’t said it since, and I’ve been walking around this house waiting.” My voice isn’t as steady as I want. “So say it now, out loud, or tell me I’ve got it wrong and we’ll drop it and never mention it again.”
“I’ve been in love with you for five years.”
The room goes very quiet.
“It wasn’t a crush and it wasn’t a phase and it didn’t go away when you married him,” he says.
“It got worse. I sat across a table from you at Christmas for five years and it got worse every single time. And then he did what he did, and I was so angry I could barely see, and underneath the anger there was this other thing I’m not proud of, which was relief.
Because it meant I might get another chance. ”
I don’t say anything. I can’t.
“That’s who I am,” he says. “That’s the whole thing. You wanted to know.”
The rain is coming down on the roof and somewhere below us a shutter is banging in the wind and I am standing in a dead woman’s bedroom with all of it laid out in front of me.
“Pretty words,” I say.
“I know.”
“I’ve heard pretty words before. Simon was very good at pretty words.”
“I know that too.”
“So how do I know?” I start pacing because I can’t stand still. “You had years. Years to do the right thing, and you stood on the sidelines and did nothing. Now you’re telling me you love me and I’m supposed to what, take your word for it? Your track record doesn’t inspire confidence, Rowan.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“I don’t know.” The admission comes out ragged. “That’s the problem. I don’t trust my own instincts anymore. I trusted them for years and look where it got me.”
“Then let me earn it.” He stands. “I’m not asking you to trust me blindly. I’m asking for a chance.”
“And if you can’t? If it turns out the playboy who let me marry his brother is exactly who you are underneath?”
“Then you walk away.” His voice is level, but I can see what it’s costing him. “No arguments. No grand gestures. That’s the deal.”
I look at him for a long time.
“Okay,” I say finally.
“Okay?”
“You want a chance? You have it.” I hold up a hand before he can move. “But I’m not making promises. I’m not declaring anything. And if I decide this isn’t working, I’m gone, and you don’t get to talk me out of it.”
“Fair enough.”
“I mean it.”
“I know you do.” He reaches out and takes my hand, and I let him. “That’s part of why.”
It isn’t forgiveness. It isn’t trust.
It’s a start.
“We should go downstairs,” I say. “Before Simon assumes we’re…”
Below us, something hits a wall.
Not a door. Something thrown, and thrown hard, and then Simon’s voice saying one word I can’t make out, and then his feet on the stairs, fast and uneven.
He doesn’t knock.
The door bangs off the wall and he’s standing in it with a bottle of whiskey in one hand and his other hand closed around something small.
He opens the fist and throws it.
It hits Rowan’s chest and drops, and I watch it fall, and it’s a condom wrapper. Torn open. Flattened out. The foil catching the lamplight as it lands on the floorboards between the three of us.
“Under the couch,” Simon says. “I was looking for the remote.”
Nobody says anything at all.
“Under my grandmother’s couch.” His voice is doing something unsteady at the edges. “In a house that’s been shut for ten years. So it isn’t mine. And it isn’t hers, because my wife has been extremely clear with me for four months about exactly how finished we are.”
“Simon…” Rowan starts.
“Don’t.” He comes into the room. “Don’t say my name like you haven’t been standing in my grandmother’s house all week lying to my face.”
“You’re drunk.”
“I’m lucid enough to do arithmetic.” He turns to me and the contempt in his eyes makes me flinch. “You know what the best part is? I felt guilty. The whole time I was with Lilia I actually felt guilty, because I thought you deserved better.”
“I did deserve better. That isn’t the point.”
“The point is you’re a hypocrite.” He takes another pull from the bottle. “Standing there lecturing me about betrayal with my brother’s hands all over you.”
“Watch your mouth,” Rowan says.
“Or what?” Simon squares up to him. “You going to hit me? Going to defend her honor?”
“If I have to.”
“Guys…”
“Stay out of this, Elise.” He doesn’t take his eyes off Rowan. “This is between me and him. The way it should have been from the start.”
“There’s nothing between us,” Rowan says. “You made sure of that years ago.”
“I made sure? You’re the one with your hands on somebody else’s wife.”
“You can’t steal what you threw away.” Rowan’s hands are closed at his sides. “You had her, Simon. You had something extraordinary and you set fire to it. That’s not on me.”
“Bullshit.” Simon shoves him and Rowan goes back a step. “You’ve wanted her since the beginning. Don’t pretend this is noble.”
“I never said it was noble. I said it was your fault.”
Simon swings.
The punch catches Rowan’s jaw and snaps his head sideways, and I hear myself scream, and then Rowan comes back off the wall and hits him.
They go into the dresser. Picture frames come off it and hit the floor and something glass breaks and Simon is sloppy and drunk but he’s angry enough that it doesn’t matter much, and Rowan is mostly containing him, and there’s blood on Rowan’s mouth already.
“Stop it!” I get hold of Simon’s arm. “Both of you, stop!”
Simon shoves me off. Not hard. Hard enough that I go back into the doorframe.
Rowan sees it happen.
Something goes out of his face entirely.
“Don’t touch her.”
The next punch puts Simon on the floor.
He stays there, breathing hard, blood coming from his nose onto his shirt. Rowan stands over him with his fists still closed and his chest going.
“We’re done,” Rowan says. “You don’t talk to her. You don’t touch her. You don’t look at her unless she speaks to you first.”
Simon spits blood onto his grandmother’s floorboards.
“Fuck you.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“Fine.” He gets himself up onto one elbow, then onto his feet, swaying. “Fine. Take her. You two deserve each other.”
He lurches out of the room and down the hall, and there’s blood dripping off his chin onto the boards as he goes, small dark spots the whole way.
His door slams hard enough to rattle the window frame.