Chapter Seventeen
In the weeks that followed, Eng and I went about our daily routines, both aware of something between us, unspoken and growing.
I didn’t go to his room every night, and he didn’t ask me to. When I did, he made room for me without a word.
I found myself studying Eng anew, the subtleties I’d glimpsed now coming into clearer focus. He wasn’t diffident, as I’d assumed,
but deliberate. I noticed how different his expressions were from his brother’s: how much he could convey in a terse sigh
or a raised eyebrow, how he cocked his ear when he was truly listening. The way he paused, considering, before moving a chess
piece.
Eng tended to disappear behind his brother’s showy charm. But he was patient and observant, canny in ways that revealed themselves
over time. This made him good at chess and poker—and, I would learn, at wrangling horses.
One afternoon, a neighbor complained about a spirited black colt that kicked and bit anyone who came near it. “The animal
is worthless,” the man said when Eng offered to try to tame it. “If you can catch it, it’s yours.”
I went out to the paddock and watched as Eng lassoed the skittish horse, Chang moving with him silently and not entirely happily.
The colt’s flank shone with sweat, its dark eyes rolling with fear and defiance.
Eng pressed a steady hand to the colt’s quivering neck, his voice low and soothing in its ear.
There was something intimate in the way he approached it—not with force, but with calm assurance.
When he slipped the rope around its neck, the colt stilled beneath his touch.
Soon it was pressing against his palm, seeking more contact.
Within hours it walked obediently in its harness.
When Eng sold the horse for a healthy profit, its previous owner shook his head in disbelief. I, too, was impressed—not only
by what Eng had accomplished, but by the patience, the measured deliberation, with which he’d won the animal’s trust.
I began to notice the ways he tried to please me, anticipating my needs before I knew them myself—not in grand gestures or
sweeping declarations, but in small observations. Are you a little chilly? Now that he mentioned it. Hungry? I was. Thirsty? I hadn’t realized until he asked. We began to share a language of glances and subtle gestures. The touch of his fingers as
he handed me a plate, the way his eyes found mine across the room.
Living like this taught us how to be intimate. How to carve out private space in plain sight, to shut out the other two. In
a household where nothing was truly ours—not a room, not even a bed—we learned to find each other in a crowd of four.
As the house tilted toward sleep, I stepped onto the porch and gazed up at the translucent moon. The sky was starless, the
air as soft as silk. An owl called in the woods, its low, mournful hoot carrying across the fields. I breathed in the loamy
scent of dirt and felt the coolness of the planks beneath my feet. Then I went inside, up the stairs, and into my room, latching
the door behind me. I poured water into the tin bowl, dipped a rag into it, and washed myself: first my face, then under my
breasts and arms and between my legs, touching all the parts of my body.
I wanted to be ready. I wanted him to know that I was.
In the hallway, I turned the knob and let myself into their room. Chang’s presence felt benign to me now; he was just a silent weight on the other side of the bed, a slumbering animal. What he was thinking or feeling meant nothing to me, did not matter at all.
I slid into bed beside Eng and lifted his hand, pressing it to my lips. My face so close to his that I could feel his breath,
warm and even on my cheek, the gossamer tickle of his lashes against mine. Then I kissed him.
Except for that brief moment at the altar, our lips had never touched.
He leaned into me and kissed me back—soft at first, then gentle and deep. My only other experience had been hasty and crude,
all teeth and tongue. I thought of the rumors about him and Chang in Europe, their adventures in bordellos and brothels. This
was a kiss born of experience.
Eng’s breath was hard now. He stroked the underside of my forearm, encircled my wrist with his hand, smoothed a palm down
the side of my body, feeling its fleshiness and hollows. Pulling my nightdress up, he ran a hand up my leg, hesitating briefly
when he realized I was naked. My bare thigh, my hip, my abdomen: so much skin. He moved his hand up to my breasts, cupping
one in his palm and then the other.
“Don’t worry,” he murmured. “We can go slow.”
“I’m not worried.”
I felt him smile. “Lucky me.”
I bit his lip.
As I lay on my side, facing him, I could feel the physical strain between him and his brother, the stretch of the ligament.
I tried to accommodate him, to move closer, without touching the band.
(It would be some time before I felt comfortable enough to acknowledge it.) He kissed me again, tracing my face, my ear, the side of my throat with his fingers, pushing my hair off my face.
He was all sinewy shadow, long, lean limbs, his skin smooth and cool to the touch, the hair on his arms soft and fine.
His hand moved to my waist, sliding up beneath my nightdress, his touch growing bolder.
The wonder of his fingers, slippery, insistent between my legs, the surprise of abandon: none of it was as strange as I had
feared.
“Ready?” he murmured, though it wasn’t really a question.
“Yes,” I whispered.
Propping himself on an elbow, he deftly put one arm around my waist and slid me underneath him. When he shifted his weight
on top of me, I felt his brother’s body fall heavily against mine. Strange and uncomfortable and close, too close. I could
hear him breathing.
Eng touched the side of my face with two fingers. “Look at me,” he said. “Only me.”
I gazed into his dark eyes, inches from mine, as he guided himself inside me. A stab of pain, a momentary jolt, and then it
was just the two of us, alone, his body moving rhythmically with mine. I could feel all of him, through to my bones, to the
core of me. Every flex of his torso, every intake of breath, every shudder.
All right, I thought. This is how it is. How it will be.
I woke in the bed the next morning, the room washed in pearly sunlight. Stone Mountain rose in the distance, smooth and solid
as the haunch of a mare. I went through the motions of the day flushed and tender, the memory of Eng’s touch like a stone
dropped into water, rippling through me.
The next night, it was different.
I was unmoored, reeling, as drunk on him as he was on me, both of us dazed with desire and surprise.
He quivered as my tongue traced his ear, his cheek, the curve of his neck.
I inhaled the smell of him—musky, salty—and felt the heat of his gaze like pressure against my skin.
He touched my face, my hair, my breasts, his hands tender but deliberate, as if to say This—this is mine.
When he slipped his fingers between my legs, I felt a quickening, a heedless warmth. They moved gently, insistently, the
smallest motion the only thing, everything. I gasped. Clenched my teeth to keep from moaning. I wanted to suspend the moment,
to live inside it. And then, eyes closed, I had the sensation of falling through water, winnowing through waves. The flow
of the current rushing around me and past, an undertow both dangerous and thrilling. I resisted it briefly, then let go, rising
on the wave, up the swell, higher, higher until it broke—and I broke with it, releasing in a long, shuddering breath.
It’s strange how quickly my perspective changed, how fast my conception of normalcy was upended. It was like lighting a candle
in a cave—suddenly, the way forward was clear. What had once been unimaginable became ordinary. What had been taboo became
routine.
The brothers wanted Addie and me to sleep in their bed every night, though they didn’t insist. Unless one of us was unwell,
or if there had been a quarrel, I joined Eng for three nights and Addie joined Chang for the next three.
Sometimes on Addie’s nights I woke from wanton dreams, my skin flushed, pulse throbbing. I felt hands moving over my body—soft,
insistent—only to find they were my own. I bit my lip to keep from crying out, then shivered into silence, trying to catch
my breath.
I had not known I could feel this way. That anyone could. That longing would feel like hunger. I moved through days fevered
and distracted. Desire burned in my belly, my throat, smoldered like brandy on my tongue. Even when he wasn’t near, I felt
him against me—a shadow presence, an ache. Like a lightning bug in the grass, I was ordinary in daylight, longing for darkness
where I could glow.
There were nights I couldn’t stay away. Nights when I slipped into bed beside him even when it wasn’t my turn, just to feel him next to me—his slight, supple body, his warmth, his lips at my ear, the weight of him. Want pulsed inside me.
On the days in between, we made a game of our tamped-down passion. A stolen glance, a covert touch. His finger grazing my
wrist, his hand resting on the small of my back. He teased me, brushed my arm as I passed, pointed out a smear of butter on
my cheek, tucked a stray strand of hair into my bun. These moments felt like small acts of defiance, tiny rebellions in a
relationship that was never entirely our own.
Once, when Addie had dozed off in the parlor after supper, I followed the brothers upstairs under the pretense of fetching
a shawl. I meant only to speak with my husband, to be near him. But when the door closed behind us, our lips found each other—urgently,
almost recklessly.
Beside us, Chang made a faint sound of disgust. I stepped back, breathless. Eng touched my face, his thumb stroking my cheek.
For a moment we stood that way—wanting more, knowing we couldn’t. Not now. Not like this. He let his hand fall.
When we returned to the parlor, Addie was awake. Her eyes moved from me to Eng, then to Chang. She said nothing. But when
Eng’s fingers grazed the back of my neck as he passed behind my chair, I felt her stillness sharpen.
That was the season we fell in love. We were two creatures waking from hibernation. But a certain intimacy remained out of
reach. We could not linger in bed on a rainy morning or steal away for a secret tryst in the afternoon. There were no whispered
confessions shared over supper. It was hard to develop the shorthand most couples take for granted, given Chang’s constant
presence, his harsh, if silent, judgments.
There was always a witness. A spy in our midst.
I chafed against it, but what could I do? I wanted the impossible: to fit with my partner like two halves made whole.
Chang’s drinking, which exasperated Eng, sometimes felt like an unexpected gift. When he drank too much, he fell asleep quickly,
slack and unbothered. At the end of an evening in the parlor, as Chang poured another glass, I sometimes whispered, “Let him.”
On those nights—with the bulk beside Eng inert, irrelevant, easy to ignore—I felt most free.
The gossip didn’t stop when we married. If anything, it intensified. I read the outraged editorials, the letters to the editor.
Plenty of people believed we were depraved. One paper called our union “a grotesque tangle of flesh and sin.” Another warned
that “no child born of such an arrangement could carry the mark of legitimacy.” There were mutterings about partner swapping,
uncertain parentage, indiscriminate touching.
None of that happened.
Which is not to say nothing happened.
No one knew what our private lives were like except the four of us, marooned on that remote homestead in Traphill. We were
actors and witnesses, watchers and participants, our desires as entwined as our limbs beneath the sheets. Each of us a body
ruled by impulses we didn’t entirely understand.
Sometimes, while his brother and my sister breathed heavily beside us, Eng and I touched in secret. Silently, subversively,
he stroked my throat, my breasts, slid his hand between my thighs. When he was pulled away, I turned from the three of them,
panting with them, my own hand a substitute until he returned.
At times, our couplings felt like a performance. My husband and my shadow husband, always present. An arm beneath my neck. Breath warm in my ear. After Eng and I finished and he drifted to sleep, I often felt Chang stirring on the other side of him—restless, fully awake.
On a few occasions, whiskey made Chang bold. His hand brushed my waist, my breast, lingered a moment on my thigh. His leg
pressed insistently against mine. I knew it was a game to him—a dare, a provocation. To see if Eng would notice. If I would
respond. To see, perhaps, whether it was mutual. I hated him for it, but I pitied him too. In those moments he seemed both
daring and lonely, as if testing not just my tolerance but the limits of his own enmeshed life.
I wanted to talk to Eng about it, but there was no way to speak in confidence. I considered writing him a letter, but how
could he keep it from Chang?
For all his usual perceptiveness, Eng seemed not to notice—or perhaps he chose not to. There was a comfort in that blindness,
but also a kind of betrayal. Wasn’t he supposed to know his brother better than anyone? Or was I the one who should have known
better?
What disquieted me most was the sense that I, too, was complicit. I told myself I hadn’t encouraged Chang, but there were
times I hadn’t discouraged him either. When I let the possibility linger, when I allowed the moment to stretch. Dare I admit
there were times I wanted to be desired by both men? When I invited them both to look, when it felt like power to bend their
gaze to my whim?