Chapter Three
“SMILE LIKE YOU DON’T want to push him onto the tracks,” Mellie hisses anxiously in my ear, which is, frankly, asking a lot.
Mellie’s the publicist, and she’s been circling me for forty minutes with a lint roller and the grim energy of a woman who’s been told her year-end bonus depends on whether I look in love.
The platform at the restored Sunset Station in San Antonio is a wall of noise and bodies, photographers ten deep behind a velvet rope, a brass band someone with more money than judgment decided we needed.
And the train itself, which I’ve been trying not to look at directly the way you don’t look at the sun, except looking at it’s the entire point, that’s what all of this is for.
Someone’s poured a fortune into making it gleam.
The dark green lacquer alone must’ve taken a team of men a month, hand-rubbed, the gold lettering along the carriages real leaf and not paint, I can tell from here, having once spent two weeks pricing gold leaf for a donor plaque I couldn’t afford in the end and replaced with a laminated sign.
That’s what nobody warns you about being broke, that it turns you into a permanent appraiser.
I can’t look at a beautiful object anymore without running the meter on it, and standing here I’m doing the only sum I know, which is how many feet of flight cage this would buy, how many winters of heat, how many of Dr. Abacan’s invoices, and the answer the train keeps hissing back at me in long theatrical breaths of steam is all of them, Blythe. Every single one. And then some.
I’ve been a fiancée for ninety seconds and I already want a divorce.
“You’re scowling,” Mellie warns me reproachfully while beaming at the cameras the entire time, a ventriloquist of panic. “The Karalis fiancée doesn’t scowl. The Karalis fiancée is radiant. The Karalis fiancée would die for the brand.”
“The Karalis fiancée would like a chair,” I mutter back pleasantly while beaming right back at them, and somewhere to my left I feel rather than hear Loukas hold his breath on what I’m choosing to read as suppressed laughter, though on a man that controlled it could just as easily be indigestion.
Then he turns to me, and the noise of the platform drops away the way it does right before something happens.
“Give me your hand,” he says quietly.
“I’d rather give you a list of grievances.” I say it sweetly, for the band, for the cameras, for the part of me that needs one last shot before the cage door shuts.
“You’ll have time for the list. We’ve a week.
” His voice is low and even, pitched for me alone under the brass and the camera-clatter, and there’s something in it that isn’t performance, something that prickles the back of my neck in warning.
“Your hand, Blythe. They’re watching, and a man doesn’t make his fiancée ask twice. ”
So I give him my hand.
And I hate that I give it easily. I hate that some part of me has been standing at a window for eighteen years waiting to be asked, and here’s the truth I’ve never said out loud to anyone, not to Sergeant, not to the dark of my own bedroom.
I decided a long time ago that I was a woman who didn’t need this.
I built a whole life on it, the fake wedding ring I used to wear to keep men at a polite distance, the sensible flats, the way I let the whole county call me the bird lady like it was the entire sum of me, a fortress I spent two decades raising stone by stone.
And the truly humiliating part, the one I’d deny under oath, is how fast the whole structure forgets what it was for the moment Loukas Karalis takes my hand like it was always going to be his.
He takes it the way he takes everything, in his own time, like a man who’s never once doubted his welcome. And my body, the traitor, the same body I’ve trained for eighteen years to feel exactly nothing in this man’s vicinity, just hands itself over and asks him where it should sign.
Behave, Sensible Blythe says.
I don’t. I haven’t behaved within a mile of this man since I was twenty-one, and I’m not about to develop the knack on a train platform with a hundred cameras watching.
And from his pocket comes the ring.
I’d braced for a ring. I hadn’t braced for this ring, an old European-cut stone the color of river water under ice, set in something worn and warm and clearly not bought yesterday off a man in a glass case, and the cold of the metal sliding home over my knuckle sends a strange electric jolt straight up my arm, and for one unguarded second I forget none of this is real.
I forget on purpose. That’s the part I can’t forgive, that for one second I let myself stand on a train platform and pretend a man like this had chosen a woman like me and meant it.
He holds my hand a beat longer than the photograph requires, pressing the ring home against my knuckle like he’s sealing it there, and when I look up to make some remark that’ll save us both, his eyes are already on my mouth.
And here’s the thing I’ll never admit to another living person, the thing I can barely admit to you.
The crowd’s gone up like a struck match, all of them pressing the velvet rope, calling his name and now mine, Blythe, Blythe, show us the ring, and a hundred cameras have turned the pair of us into the only thing worth looking at in the whole bright roaring station.
And I’ve spent forty years as the one in the muck boots at the back, the practical one, the one who keeps the birds alive while somebody prettier gets photographed, and I’d made my peace with that. I’d genuinely made my peace with it.
And now a man the entire state wants is holding my hand up for the cameras like he won me, like I was the one he couldn’t do without, and the awful mutinous truth is that some starved thing in me I’d left for dead steps right into that lie and stretches and basks shamelessly in all that borrowed adoration and refuses, point blank, to come back out.
“Don’t,” I breathe.
“They want a kiss.” He says it lazily, in the tone of a man reporting the weather, except his attention has gone heavy and dark and entirely on me.
Huh? Who wants a what?
Give them a kiss! One kiss! One for the road!
Oh. That.
The crowd’s started a chant I refuse to dignify, and Mellie’s making a noise behind me like a kettle coming to temperature, and his fingers have already found the back of my neck, gentle and certain, tipping my face up to his.
“Smile, agapi,” he murmurs. “This part was always coming.”
And then Loukas Karalis kisses me.
I expected, if I expected anything, a politician’s kiss, dry and brief and aimed at the cameras over my shoulder.
What I get instead is his hand cradling the back of my skull like it’s the most natural place on earth for his hand to be, and his mouth coming down over mine slow and certain and unhurried, the way he does everything, taking his time as though we’ve the platform to ourselves and the train can wait.
A sound gets out of me that I’ll be denying for the rest of my natural life, low and helpless and nothing like the woman I’ve spent forty years being, and my free hand fists in the lapel of his coat instead of shoving him off it, which is what a sane woman, a woman with her defenses still up, would’ve done.
It isn’t a kiss for the cameras.
That’s what I understand somewhere in the middle of it, when my eyes have fallen shut without my permission and the brass band and the flashbulbs and eighteen years of carefully maintained loathing have all gone soft and far away, and his lips start to nibble at mine, unhurried, like a man who’s found something he means to take his time over.
And there it is, rising in me low and bright and entirely unauthorized.
The exact thing I built the whole fortress against, the wanting that doesn’t stop to ask permission, the wanting I’ve sworn since I was twenty-one I was constitutionally above. A kiss for the cameras is a closed door. This one keeps opening.
This one asks a question, and the unforgivable part, the part I’ll take to my grave, is that some long-buried thing in my chest answers it before I can clap a hand over her mouth, in a voice I haven’t heard in so long I’d convinced myself she was dead.
He breaks it first. He’d want to be the one who decides when it ends.
Just a job, Blythe. It’s just a job.
I look up to find him watching me with an expression I’ve never once seen on him in eighteen years, something cracked open and caught off guard, gone again almost before I can name it, the shutter slamming down behind his eyes.
The platform roars. Flashbulbs go off like applause.
Mellie is weeping with professional joy.
“That,” I manage evenly, when I trust my voice, “was extremely unnecessary.”
“It was the job,” he says blandly, but his voice isn’t quite even now, and we both hear the lie in it, sitting there between us, plain as the ring on my hand.
And that’s when I catch her, just past his shoulder, beyond the velvet rope and the crush of press. A woman in a coat the red of a warning light, not photographing us, not cheering, simply watching the two of us with a small private smile that doesn’t go anywhere near her eyes.
I don’t know her. I’m certain I’ve never seen her in my life.
So there’s no good reason for the look on her face to land in my stomach like a swallowed stone, no reason at all for the little voice that picks exactly this moment to inform me, with great calm, that whatever I signed up for on that porch, the kiss was the easy part.