Ellsbeth
He offered her a sad smile. “I pushed him. I gave him access to magic far beyond his capabilities. If I hadn’t encouraged him…”
Rawlins shook his head. “It’s possible he has some idea, but no. Now that he’s out, I think it’s time to tell him the truth.”
“Really?”
Rawlins just kept staring at the small fire burning itself down in his grate. He hadn’t taken a sip from his water, but he gripped the glass tightly in his hand.
“It must have been lonely for you,” Ellsbeth continued. “Not telling anyone all of that. For so long.”
“It didn’t seem lonely. It seemed like—” He paused. “—the way grown-ups are supposed to live. Holding on to things, hiding parts of yourself away in back closets, painting over the doors so that if you ever have company over, nobody is put off.”
She had taken his hand as he was speaking, running her fingertips over the rough skin of his knuckles, down his long, calloused fingers. And then, on instinct, she brought his hand to her mouth and kissed it. “I like your hidden parts,” she said. “And I like that you can tell me about them.”
“I’m not trying to make things more difficult for us, Ellsbeth. I know there’s no future here, for good reason, and that we had made an arrangement to keep things…simple.”
He was wearing a faded Yale T-shirt and no shoes. It was the most casual Ellsbeth had ever seen him dressed, and the hint of chest hair peeking out of his T-shirt’s stretched neckline made her heart race.
“Is it bad if I want to kiss you right now?” she said.
In answer, he pulled her against him and pressed his mouth to hers like a drowning man searching for air. His hands found the back of her head, her neck, her shoulders, and then she was pressing into him, too, shocked at how immediate and right it felt to fall into his arms.
After the initial rush to get their clothes off, their hands became slow and lazy.
Rawlins lay facing Ellsbeth on the narrow couch, running a finger down the curve of her side.
The finger left a trail of goosebumps on her flesh—her ribs, her waist, her hips.
“I can’t believe you look like this,” he said.
“It’s because I’m twenty-four,” Ellsbeth said, trying to make her voice sound light.
“No,” Rawlins said. “It’s not. It’s you. It’s the impossible curve of you, the tiny hairs that stand up on your skin, the way you look right now. The way you look at me. It’s you.”
The image popped into her head unbidden. A small elopement, seeing his face beaming at her as she walked down an aisle in a white dress that he would pull up when they finally reached a honeymoon suite, too impatient to deal with the tiny buttons running down the back.
A lifetime of tangling in white sheets together, of ordering room service somewhere on a honeymoon and feeding each other french fries in bed while bad television played in the background.
She saw herself moving into his house, fucking on the floor, in every room, waking up next to him, feeling the warmth of his sleeping body and kissing his eyelids until he woke up and smiled at her.
There would be pancakes, and singing in the kitchen while dinner cooked, and individual preferences for their favorite coffee mugs.
There would be essays of each other’s to proofread, half-formed ideas to solicit advice on, and debates about mechanicals over bottles of wine that would descend into furious make-out sessions, lips stained burgundy.
There would be dinner parties where she could touch his thigh under the table, see him glancing over at her slyly, secret codes of communication only the two of them knew.
There would be more nights together than they could count.
Nights he could bind her with rope or writ magic, or play with new magic that hadn’t been invented yet, that they could invent together.
Nights to spank her and make her beg, to leave her raw and needy in a way that she had never been with anyone before.
And then mornings where he would kiss her and hold her and whisper words in her ear so soft and so kind that she would have to turn away from him so that he wouldn’t see her tear up.
But the longer Ellsbeth imagined that life, the more it began to hurt somewhere in the middle of her chest. It was like waking up from a dream where you had won the lottery, and being forced to reckon with the fact that you now had to live in the real world.
There was no version of their story where their romance wouldn’t be tawdry gossip.
She might get kicked out of the program.
He might lose his job. Both of them would lose their reputations.
And then there was the simple fact that he didn’t actually know her. He wanted her, sure, for now, because she was young, and pretty enough, and smart. Because he had seen the version of herself she had shown him.
He didn’t know that she was a liar, that she could lie like breathing. He didn’t know that she had used obscuration.
He hadn’t seen the way Officer Marcos’s eyes had gone flat and empty. That life, of pancakes and soft kisses in the morning, would only ever be a facade, because the moment she showed Rawlins the truth at the heart of her, he wouldn’t want her anymore.
Rawlins had been able to show her his true self, to untwist the calcified knot he had kept in a clenched fist, and as she ran her hand up his neck and into his thick hair, she realized that she loved him for it. But she would never be able to show herself to him.
“I love you,” she said before she realized the words were coming out of her mouth and not just echoing in her head.
“Please don’t say anything back. Please.
I didn’t even mean—I just…” She turned her body away from his so that they were both lying on the couch facing the same direction.
“I just want you to hold me. I didn’t mean it. ”
I love you, too. He breathed the words so faintly that Ellsbeth wasn’t certain whether he said them at all, or whether she had imagined them. She didn’t ask, she just let him hold her for long enough that the candle he had burning on his mantelpiece sputtered out.
By the time they were eating chicken cacciatore, the food was cold and it had begun snowing outside. Rawlins popped her plate in the microwave and delivered it to her at the table. “It’s better when it’s fresh,” he said.
“It beats cereal, which had been my dinner plan for the evening.”
Rawlins smiled and brought his own plate to the table, taking the seat next to her. “Bon appétit,” he said, his accent halfway between joking and pretentious.
Ellsbeth lifted her fork with a bite of chicken on it, but she let it drop before it reached her mouth. “I have something to say that I fully realize will sound insane, but: I’m jealous of Dean Lennox,” she said. “Just from hearing that story.”
“It was decades ago.”
“I know!” Ellsbeth said. “It’s not rational.
I know that. And for the record, she took advantage of you.
” Rawlins opened his mouth to protest, but Ellsbeth didn’t let him.
“I’m just jealous! I’m jealous of every other woman you’ve ever touched.
Let alone loved. I can imagine you, in that hotel room.
Her: so smart, so important. How impressed you must have been.
I don’t like the thought of you impressed with anyone except me.
” She had drunk more wine than she had thought, and was talking too much and slightly too loud.
“I’m sorry, forget I said anything. We should go back to the fun part of this. No neediness, no feelings.”
Rawlins wiped his top lip with a curled finger.
“I don’t know where you got this idea in your head that you can’t need anything from anyone else, but it’s not true.
You’re allowed to need other people. And you really should eat.
You’re looking pale.” Ellsbeth took a large bite and lifted her eyebrows as she swallowed. Happy?
“Needing other people just isn’t something I’m interested in,” she said. “You need someone, and then what? When you don’t have them anymore, you’re helpless.”
“I doubt there is anyone on earth who would ever call you helpless.”
“Maybe because I never need anything from anyone!”
Rawlins laughed at that, his tongue pressed against the bottom of his dog teeth, and Ellsbeth thought it again—I love you—but this time she managed not to say it out loud. Instead: “What’s that?”
She gestured toward a photo framed on the kitchen shelf that was taken by the Newlyn gates. She stood to examine it.
It must have been from a decade or so earlier, a group of people with their arms around one another. Ellsbeth found Rawlins, his face slightly rounder, his sideburns longer, smiling with his mouth closed. Dean Lennox stood at the far end of the group.
“Oh,” Rawlins said. “New faculty orientation. My first day here at Newlyn.”
Ellsbeth scanned the photo. “Lennox, obviously. There’s Professor Gaines—she was blond! And…Professor Gallway.”
“Paul, yeah. We started at the same time.” They were the only two men in the group.
“He’s barely aged. It’s weird!”
“Good genes, I suppose,” Rawlins said.
“Or a vanity ritual,” Ellsbeth said, and Rawlins snorted.
Vanity rituals were largely a joke in the world of arcane mechanicals—expensive, impractical, and only ever temporary, sold to the desperate by arcanist hacks and has-beens.
Vanity rituals were the type of thing you saw poorly designed ads for as you scrolled on social media, or advertised in bad neighborhoods on billboards promising low prices for whiter teeth and fewer wrinkles.
Ellsbeth stared at the photo, trying to imagine what Rawlins was thinking as it was taken.
He was the most famous person in the group at the time, riding the success of The Arcane and the Ordinary.
Was he still in love with Lennox then, trying to stand up straight to impress her?
Was he cocky in the way that twenty-something prodigies must be, certain that their continued success was inevitable and upward progress the only plausible future?
She couldn’t read anything in his tight face.
Paul Gallway, on the other hand, was grinning madly, his arm thrust jocularly around Rawlins and his blazer flapping open in an invisible breeze.
There was a pin in his blazer, right on his lapel.
Rawlins had risen to stand behind Ellsbeth, his hand hovering over the small of her back as if he wasn’t certain whether or not he was supposed to put it there.
“What’s that?” Ellsbeth asked. “The pin or button or whatever Professor Gallway is wearing? Do you recognize it?”
Rawlins picked up the photograph to get a closer look. “He attended Newlyn as an undergraduate. I think that’s from one of the societies. Banestooth.”
It was a pin featuring a wolf with teeth exposed, a smile and an attack at the same time.
Paul Gallway was wearing the same button as the one that Ellsbeth had seen in the photographs of Bertie’s bathroom floor.