Chapter Nine
I WAKE UP RICH.
That’s the only word for it, and it’s nothing to do with money.
I wake up in a bed worth more for one night than I clear in a month, the storm blown through and the train moving again under me and a man’s arm heavy and easy across my waist, and for about four seconds, before the day catches up to me, I’m the wealthiest woman in the state of Texas, and not one penny of it the kind you can bank.
Then the day catches up to me.
It catches up as a discreet knock and a cart wheeled in by a steward trained to look at nothing, a breakfast laid out under silver domes that he lifts away one by one like a magician with no particular need of applause, and the look of it nearly does me in.
Eggs folded soft as a confession. Fruit cut into shapes that took somebody real effort. A little silver pot of coffee.
And beside my plate, unasked, a small dish of cut lime, somebody on this train having decided that the way I take things is worth remembering.
I sit up clutching the linen to me like the last shred of my dignity, which it roughly is, and Loukas watches me from the other pillow with his hair wrecked and his guard down and an expression I’ve no precedent for, and I understand we’ve reached the part of the morning where we decide what last night gets to mean.
He decides first. He would.
“We’re not children,” he says, reaching past me for the coffee, pouring two cups with the ease of a man who’s never once spilled anything in his life.
“That’s the advantage of doing this at our age, Blythe.
A pair of twenty-year-olds wake up after a night like that and start picking names for the future.
We know better. We know a night is a night.
We’re far too old to confuse what our bodies got up to in a storm with anything that has to answer for itself in daylight. ”
He hands me the coffee. It’s exactly how I take it.
I could throw it at him.
“How wonderfully mature,” I say sweetly, taking the cup. “How very grown. You’ve thought it all through, I see, the whole philosophy, somewhere between the coffee and the lime.”
“One of us had to.”
“And it had to be the man who once stood up in front of two hundred strangers and informed them love was a line item.” I set the cup down before I do something to it.
“You haven’t changed a syllable in eighteen years, you know that?
Still the same boy with a cash-box where his chest should be, still certain that if you just name a thing coldly enough, first, out loud, it can’t get its hands on you. ”
Something flickers behind his eyes, quick, there and gone. “Careful.”
“Or what? You’ll go cold on me? You’re cold on me right now, Loukas, over eggs, the morning after you—”
And I stop, the sentence having nowhere safe to go, and we both hear it not-go.
“After I what?” he asks, very quietly.
“After you looked at me in the dark like I was the answer to something.” To my horror my voice doesn’t come out angry.
It comes out true. “You can call it a storm and a night and two sensible adults all you like. But I was there. I felt your heart. A spreadsheet doesn’t do what your heart was doing. ”
The cabin goes quiet around us, just the rails clicking and the country sliding gold past the glass, and for a moment I think I’ve actually done it, reached past the smirk and the arithmetic to the boy underneath. His face opens. Just slightly. Just enough.
Then it shuts, the way it always shuts.
“It’s a sound arrangement,” he says, picking the philosophy back up like a tool he set down. “Honesty up front, no illusions, two adults who know exactly what this is. Nobody gets hurt that way. I learned it watching a friend do the opposite.”
“Nobody gets hurt.” I almost laugh. “Loukas. Look at me and tell me, this minute, that nobody’s getting hurt.”
He looks at me. He doesn’t tell me.
And this is the truth about a man who’s walled himself in too, brick by careful brick, every brick stamped love is a con. You can’t argue him out of it, the argument being the mortar. So I don’t argue.
I do the one move eighteen years of war never taught either of us to defend against. I set the cup aside, and I cross the foot of expensive cotton between us, and I take that proud, cold, terrified face in both my hands, and I kiss him the way he kisses me, slow, patient, refusing to be hurried, a kiss with all the time in the world in it, a kiss that asks nothing and proves everything.
And for one long sweet treacherous moment he forgets every word of his own cold logic and kisses me back like a man gone under for the third time and glad of the water.
He’s the one who breaks it. He’d always need to be the one who breaks it.
“That,” he says, his voice gone to gravel, “isn’t how mature adults conduct a sensible agreement.”
“No,” I agree, climbing off the bed before my own heart can file an objection, reaching for yesterday’s clothes with all the dignity a barefoot woman can muster. “It’s how the rest of us conduct being alive. You ought to try it sometime, when you’re feeling brave.”
I’ve made it all the way to the bathroom door, almost clean, almost out with the last word for once in my life, when he says my name, and something in how he says it stops me with my hand on the frame.
“Blythe.” A pause, the rails filling it. “I don’t know how to do the thing you’re asking. I’ve never once in my life known how.” Another pause, longer. “But I lay awake last night after you fell asleep, and I have to tell you, it’s becoming a genuine problem that I want to learn.”