4. Tempering #2
"Friends fall out," I said, and took another drink, and heard how thin it was before the glass touched the table.
"Do they?"
"You've never gotten into it with a friend?"
"I have…over a wedding I didn't want to be in.
Once over a man, when we were twenty-two and stupid.
" She set her fork down, and when she spoke again the words were chosen the way you choose a knife for a specific cut.
"So help me understand something, Dillion.
A grown man and a grown woman, best friends.
What is there to fall out about, that big, that isn't one of you falling for the other? "
"Respectfully, Madeline, this has nothing to do with you."
It came out before I'd approved it, and it came out in the voice before the media training and the investor dinners, the voice that shows up when something gets too close to the wiring.
"Respectfully, Dillion, I disagree." Her voice didn't rise, didn't crack, stayed exactly as level. "If we're supposed to be moving toward something real, this is exactly the kind of thing I need to know. So don't tell me it's not my business. Make it my business, or tell me why you won't."
She settled deeper into her chair, getting comfortable the way a woman does when she’s prepared to go toe to toe with you.
"One of you is in love with the other." She said it the way you say something you've already decided is true and are just waiting on confirmation for. "Has to be. Grown people, what else is there?"
Thunder filled the whole house with itself, acting like it wanted parts of the discussion.
"I'm not stupid, Dillion."
"I never said you were."
"Then don't treat me like it." Madeline set her fork down.
"Stop making me drag it out of you one word at a time, as if I’m not intelligent enough to have already figured it out.
She loves you and you don't want her. Or worse, you love her and she rejected you.
Or you both fell for each other and things got weird, ruined your friendship. Which one is it?"
I sat there, in my grandfather's house, at my grandmother's table, with the storm on every window and this woman's question hanging in the candle smoke, and I understood that I had gotten exactly what I'd ordered.
I'd wanted honest. I'd wanted a woman who asked for things out loud, and kept it real with me.
I'd sat at that bar and toasted the fact of her directness like it was a vintage.
Directness, it turns out, doesn't stay pointed at the world. Eventually it turns around and looks at you. Sometimes God answers prayers too well.
"Which one, Dillion?" She pushed.
"Drop this." I shifted in my seat. "This is not a road you want to go down, Madeline."
"Because I won't like what I find when I go down it?"
Thunder cracked somewhere close enough to feel in the floor, and neither of us so much as flinched toward the window.
"Because the past is the past. I'm moving forward."
"Are you?"
"With you."
"You feel stuck to me." She folded her hands on the table in front of her plate, composed as a closing statement, and the lights browned down for a second, the storm testing the wires, then held. "And that's leading me to believe this is exactly why."
"Why what?"
"Why do you keep this distance like I'm something that might burn you. Why a week alone with me on an island still isn't enough to let me in. Why you won't just—"
"Fuck you?" It came out flat and ugly, the last of the polish gone. Rain hit the windows like it had heard me and agreed. "I said we were good tonight. You gave me your whole speech at The Perch, and I'm down. What more do you want from me?"
"You're down." She laughed, one note, no joy anywhere in it, and the sound got swallowed by another roll of thunder like the sky wanted the last word too. "I got a beautiful dinner and a man who tells me true things that answer nothing. Dillion, I have practically had to beg you. Me."
She pressed two fingers to her own chest, and her voice cracked on the word and she hated it, I watched her hate it, watched her jaw fight to take the crack back.
"I have never begged a man for anything in my whole life.
I've had them outside my sorority house with car notes in their hands.
Had fathers request meetings to arrange a marriage with their sons who are political powerhouses, heirs to fortunes unlike anything I've even seen in Roena County.
And yet, I have been auditioning for a man who holds me at night like I'm somebody's borrowed second hand coat. "
I set my glass down and realized I had a choice, the same choice I always have, the one my grandfather drilled into me before I understood what he was arming me against. Because the cruel sentence was right there.
Racked and ready. The one that would end the conversation, end the begging, end the week, one clean cut: You're right.
It's her. It's always been her, and you've been sleeping in her spot.
I could feel the shape of it in my mouth, and I want to be honest about how good it would have felt for exactly one second, the way the first swing always feels good for exactly one second, before you're just a man standing over something you broke.
I didn't swing. Madeline didn’t deserve that. Instead, I slowly let a breath out, the way you bleed heat off a pan before it takes the butter past brown.
"I told you what I wanted this week to be," I said, hearing my own voice finding the boardroom, level, reasonable, terms and conditions.
"You and me. No noise, no restaurant, no family pressing on it.
A week to find out what this actually is, now that we're grown people and not kids who get to talk for a couple minutes every summer at boring-ass parties.
I told you that on the dock before you ever unpacked a bag.
I said slow, and you said you liked a man who knew what he wanted.
So tell me where the crime is, Madeline.
Especially when you're about to get everything you came for tonight. "
"Everything I came for." She said it back to me the way you'd read a line off a receipt. "Wow."
"You keep bringing it up like it's a list of things you wanna check off before the week's out. Fuck the Chef – "
"That's not –"
"Tell me, then, Madeline." My voice was climbing and I couldn't stop it, didn't want to.
"I'm here treating you like the woman you are.
I'm giving you time I've never given to anybody else.
I'm actually getting to know you without either one of us confusing anything, because our minds are clear.
And yes, tonight, I made it clear I'm open to more.
What else do you want? Tell me what else you need from me so I can give it to you and be done with this. "
"Let me make sure I have the terms right, Chef, since we're reviewing the agreement.
" Her voice stayed level even as the lights flickered behind her, the whole house holding its breath along with both of us.
"You set the week. You set the pace. You set the menu, the drinks, the ice in the glass.
And I said yes to all of it, because I liked being chosen by a man who doesn't choose easy. But somewhere in your math, me wanting you got filed as a deliverable. Something on the itinerary. Get through dinner, don’t answer any questions, and then do what?
Fuck me into submission to keep me distracted from the fact that you have given me nothing? "
She stood up, twin fires in eyes that weren't backing down from either of us, me or the storm.
"I wasn't asking you when I get fucked, Dillion. I was asking who's in the bed between us. There's a difference, and you know the difference, because you're the most precise man I have ever met in my life. You don't confuse things. You arrange them."
Jesus Christ. How was I sitting here having this fight, with a woman who wasn't even mine?
A woman I hadn't been inside of, hadn't told I loved, hadn't sat my parents down about like a man does when he's serious.
I'd had this fight exactly once in my life, with the one woman it actually belonged to, and it cost me the whole friendship and left a wound I'd been picking at for four months straight.
And now here it was again, secondhand, aimed at me by somebody who didn't even know she was standing in somebody else's argument.
The universe wasn't even being cruel. It was being a mirror, reflecting shit back to me that I didn't want to face.
Something in me wanted to laugh and another part of me wanted to climb into a blender and hit the highest setting myself.
Both of those had to stand in line behind the fact that she was right, and behind the uglier fact underneath it: that I knew she was right and couldn't make myself say so.
I wasn't scared of the fight. I've never been scared of anything that comes at me swinging, that's the one category of trouble I was built for.
What I couldn't stand in front of was the look on Madeline Dubois' face if the truth landed.
Because the truth wouldn't just hurt her.
It would end the week, and the week was the first thing in four months that felt like living.
Somewhere in the last few days I'd stopped being able to tell whether my silence was protecting her or feeding me.