14. Cassian
CASSIAN
She is at the far end of the lower terrace at half past nine, alone, with a glass of red wine and the small, contained stillness of a person who has chosen, for the evening, to be unreachable.
I have been watching her be unreachable since lunch.
It started after the rehearsal. Not on the couch — on the couch she was almost mine again, almost the woman in the kitchen, almost the woman who, three days ago, called me yours with her face in my collarbone.
She stood up after Sebastian came in. She thanked him for the brief.
She walked out of my study the way a guest walks out of a meeting room.
And she has, in the eleven hours since, said exactly fourteen words to me in private.
I have been counting. I do not enjoy counting.
I cross the terrace. The flagstones are warm under my soles even through the leather of my shoes.
The string of bulbs over the path catches in her hair from the side and makes it gold along one edge.
She does not turn when she hears me coming, although I know she has heard me — her shoulder gives the half-inch lift it gives when she is bracing.
"Maren."
"Cassian."
"Walk with me."
"I'm having my wine."
"Bring it."
"Cassian—"
"It wasn't a question, sweetheart."
She turns. She looks at me the same slow, level way she has since lunch—measured, deciding—and then she stands.
She brings the glass. I take her lightly by the elbow and guide her up the path toward the upper terrace, past the lit pool, into the long stone walk between the cypress trees that leads, eventually, to my wing.
I don’t take her into the wing.
I bring her to the glass room off the walk—the so-called garden conservatory I’ve spent seven years using as storage for boxes I never open. Tonight it’s empty. Someone has lit two sconces—I’ll ask Sebastian why tomorrow—and the south-facing panes scatter small squares of light across the stone.
I close the door behind us. I lock it.
"Cassian."
"Sit down."
"I don't want to sit down."
"All right. Stand."
I lean against the door. I cross my arms. I look at her — at the bare slope of her shoulder where the strap of her dress has slipped, at the wine catching in the bowl of her glass, at the line of her mouth, which is, currently, set.
"Talk to me."
"There's nothing to talk about."
"Maren."
"There isn't."
"You have not looked me in the eye since this morning.
You did not eat at dinner. You said fine eleven times today.
Eleven, Maren. I counted. Fine is what you say when you are, in fact, the opposite of fine.
I would like to know what is wrong, and I would like to know now, because we have, currently, a house full of your relations and an investor's deputy who is going to call me at seven am tomorrow, and I would like to walk into both of those conversations knowing what I am working with. "
"That's it."
"What is."
"That's why you want to know. The investor. The relations."
"Maren—"
"Don't Maren me, Cassian. I can hear you doing it. You did it at the table tonight — Maren, pass the salt — you did it in the hallway, you do it like — like you're using my name as a handle. As a thing to steer me with."
"That is not?—"
"It is. That is exactly what you do. You did it in the kitchen on Tuesday.
Eat, sweetheart. Sleep, sweetheart. Look at me.
You give me the words and you watch what they do, and you adjust the next words based on what the last words did, and I have been letting you do it because you were good at it, Cassian, you are so good at it, and at some point this afternoon I realized I do not know which of the things you have said to me this week you would say if there were no Vance dinner. "
I push off the door.
"Sit down, Maren."
"No."
"Sit down."
"No, Cassian."
"All right." I lift my hands. I take a step back from the door. "All right. I won't ask again. Tell me what you want me to say."
"That's the problem. You are asking me what to say. You are consulting me. I do not want a man who consults me on what would land. I want — I want?—"
"Say it, Maren."
"I want to know that if I disappeared tomorrow you would notice for a reason that was not on a spreadsheet."
I stop.
The little room is very still. I can hear, distantly, the surf below the cliff, and a moth at one of the sconces, and the small clean sound of her swallowing.
"Maren."
"What."
"Come here."
"Cassian."
"Come here, sweetheart."
She does not come. She does not move. She is breathing through her nose the way I told her to in the foyer a week ago, and her chin has lifted, and her hand on the wine glass has gone white at the knuckle.
I cross to her instead.
I cross to her in three slow strides, and I take the glass out of her hand and set it on the windowsill, and I put my hands on her shoulders and walk her — gently, but without asking — backward into the cool plaster of the wall behind her.
The wall is rough at her shoulder blades.
I feel her catch her breath at the cold.
"Cassian."
"You don't trust me."
"No."
"Say it."
"I don't trust you, Cassian. I don't trust your motives. I don't know which of them are real."
"All of them."
"Don't—"
“All of them, Maren. That is the answer. Everyone. The Vance dinner is real. The strategy is real. The grandmother and the orchard and the Tuesday–Friday—they’re real in the sense that I made them up to keep you out of trouble in front of your sister, and I’m not sorry I did.
And the rest of it. The kitchen. Wednesday's lunch.
Last night, when I sat outside your door at one in the morning because I needed to hear you breathing — that's also real, Maren.
They are all real. They are not separable.
I can't give you the half you want and not the half you don't. I am one man. "
"You sat outside my door."
"Yes."
"For how long."
"I don't know. I didn't time it."
"Cassian—"
"I am telling you, Maren. I am not consulting you. I am telling you. I am, currently, telling you the truth."
She is looking up at me. Her eyes are bright with something that is not quite tears and not quite not, and her hand has come up and is, of its own accord, fisted lightly in the front of my shirt the way it was at the bonfire, the way it was at the kitchen counter, and I bend, slow enough that she could push me, and I press my forehead to hers.
"Maren."
"Cassian."
"Tell me to leave."
"What."
"Tell me to leave, sweetheart. I will leave. I will go to my room and I will not come out tonight and I will not, tomorrow, behave any differently in front of your family. Tell me to leave and I will."
She does not tell me to leave.
She lifts her chin. She lifts her chin the way you lift your chin when you have stopped negotiating with yourself, and her mouth, when it finds mine, is not soft.
It is not the mouth of the woman in the kitchen, the one who laughed against my teeth.
It is the mouth of a woman who, ninety seconds ago, gave up on holding back, and her hand has gone from my shirtfront to the back of my neck, and her fingers are in my hair, and she is kissing me like she is, for once, the one with a point to make.
I let her make it.
I let her make it for as long as she needs to, with my hands flat on the plaster on either side of her head and my mouth open under hers, and when she breaks for air her mouth is at my jaw and her teeth are in the soft place just under my ear and she says, against my pulse, "I want all of it."
"All of what."
"All of you, Cassian. Even the spreadsheet parts. I want — I want to know which of them are which. I want you to tell me. No more — no more language. No more sweetheart. Just — say it."
"All right."
"All right?"
"All right, Maren."
I lift her. I lift her by the backs of her thighs and her legs come up around my waist and she gasps once into my mouth as the hem of her dress rides up and the cool plaster meets the bare skin of her back.
Her arms are around my neck. Her forehead is at my temple.
She is breathing fast and her chest is moving against mine in a way I am, currently, not equipped to think clearly about.
"Cassian."
"Mm."
"The door."
"Locked."
"You — when did you?—"
"Coming in."
"You—"
"I planned for the possibility, Maren."
"You — God, you are — you are the worst?—"
"Mm."
I lower my mouth to her neck. I kiss the soft line of her throat.
I kiss the place where her shoulder meets her collarbone, where the strap of her dress has slipped, and her head goes back against the wall and her hand fists tighter in my hair, and I let one of my hands slide between us, under the silk, and I find her warm and ready and bare under the dress and I make a sound that is not, I will admit, dignified.
"Maren."
"Mm."
"Where are your?—"
"In the drawer. Upstairs. I — it's hot, Cassian, I — don't laugh at me."
"I am not laughing."
"You are — you are smiling?—"
"That is not the same thing."
"Cassian—"
"Sweetheart."
"Don't."
"All right."
I touch her. I touch her slowly. I draw one finger along the seam of her, soft, and her breath catches and her thigh tightens around my hip, and I press in — just one finger, just the first joint — and she is so wet she has soaked the inside of her thigh and I drop my forehead to her shoulder and I breathe, once, hard, into the silk.
"Cassian."
"Tell me what you want."
"Don't make me?—"
"Tell me, Maren. No language, you said. Plain words. Tell me what you want."
"I want — I want your cock, Cassian, I want — I want you in me, I — I have wanted it since you locked the door, just?—"
"Good girl."
"Oh — oh, don't?—"
"Don't what."
"Don't — that thing you do, with the — Cassian, just — please?—"
I feel the moment I lose the argument with myself — the quiet, private admission I don’t say aloud.
It hits me the same way it did on the leather couch: that small, unmistakable shift in her expression, the one that undoes me every time.
I register it, try to brace against it, and know immediately I’m not going to win.
"Cassian. Please."
"Look at me."
"I'm looking, I'm looking?—"
"You are mine."
"Yes."
"Even the spreadsheet parts."
"Yes."
"Say it."
"I'm yours, Cassian — even the — oh?—"
I push in.
Slow. All of me. All the way. Her head tips back against the wall and her mouth opens, but no sound comes out — which is somehow worse than anything she could have said.
It’s the silence of someone who’s run out of language for what’s happening.
Her hand at my neck goes unexpectedly gentle, and her thumb makes a small, unconscious sweep behind my ear that I know I’ll try to remember later and won’t be able to.
"Maren."
"I'm — I'm here."
"Look at me."
She looks at me.
I move, but not the way I did in the kitchen.
That was urgency; this is deliberate, careful, something I’m not used to allowing myself.
She leans her forehead to mine, her breath warm and unsteady against my mouth, and her free hand comes to rest on my chest, right over my heart, which is doing something reckless she probably can’t feel.
"Cassian."
"What."
"This isn't the — this isn't the spreadsheet part, is it."
"No, sweetheart."
"Say it."
"This is not the spreadsheet part, Maren."
"Again."
"This is not the spreadsheet part."
She comes apart against me with my name in her mouth and her hand still flat on my chest, and I follow her — with my forehead to her temple, with both arms locked around her back, with the wall against my knuckles and her ankles crossed at the small of my spine — and I do not let her down for a long time after, and she does not, this time, ask me to.
In the morning, I will tell her about the powder room. I will tell her about Roland, and Becca, and the calls from the office. I will tell her the rest.
Tonight, I hold her against the plaster of an empty conservatory at the back of my house, and I count, in the quiet, the breaths she takes against my throat.