CHAPTER 7
THE WEDDING NIGHT
POV: MAE
The closet is bigger than my cell.
I stand in the doorway with my hand on the frame and count, the way I count everything.
Eleven dresses. Nine sweaters. Four coats, one of them camel wool so soft I’m afraid to touch it.
Shoes on slanted shelves, lined up like pews.
A row of drawers, the top one half open, spilling something pale and lacy.
Everything in my size.
“He had it done in October,” Rosa says behind me.
Rosa is the housekeeper. Fifties, dark hair in a low knot, a gold cross at her throat and an accent from somewhere down around Fall River. She has called me ma’am since last night. An hour ago, coming back from the church, she called me Mrs. Draven, and then looked like she wanted to cross herself.
“October,” I repeat.
October is when I first saw the car.
“Yes, ma’am.” She smooths a sleeve that doesn’t need smoothing. “The measurements came from— I didn’t ask.”
I pull a sweater off the shelf. Cream cashmere. There’s no tag, but I know what it cost. I kept the books for a convent for two years. I know what things cost.
This sweater is a month of heating oil.
I put it back.
“Do you need anything else, ma’am?”
I need my father not to be a man who sells me at card tables. I need the blood to come out of my good shoes. I need to know why my throat still throbs where his teeth went in, and why every time it does, my stomach turns over in a way that has nothing to do with fear.
“No,” I say. “Thank you, Rosa.”
She goes. The door clicks.
I turn around and look at the room.
***
It’s beautiful. That’s the worst part.
A bed with a dark carved headboard and white sheets. A fireplace with a real fire in it, low and orange. A window seat looking down on Louisburg Square, where snow is falling on the little iron-fenced garden and the gas lamps.
Heavy curtains. I pull them open.
There’s no blind.
Nobody on the street is looking up. There’s no black car at the curb. The black car is in a garage somewhere under this house, and the man who sat in it all those nights is on the other side of that wall.
I look at the door.
It’s in the wall beside the fireplace. Dark wood, like the headboard. A brass knob.
I cross the room and put my hand on it.
On my side, there’s only the knob. No bolt. No thumb-turn.
I turn it.
It doesn’t move.
Three nights ago, I had a lock only I could open. He gave it to me. He knelt at my door in the dark and put it there with his own hands.
This lock is his.
I stand there with my hand on the knob until the brass is warm.
***
I take a bath because there’s a bath. Clawfoot, deep enough to go under. I don’t go under. I sit with my knees up and the water at my collarbone, and I look at my throat in the little mirror over the taps.
Four fingers and a thumb, faded to yellow.
On top of them, perfect and dark, the shape of his teeth.
He covered another man’s hand with his mouth.
I touch it. It aches.
Everything below my stomach aches with it.
You married him three hours ago, I tell myself. It isn’t a sin anymore.
It doesn’t feel like it isn’t a sin.
It feels like the biggest one I’ve ever committed.
***
The drawer that was half open is full of nightgowns.
White silk. Black silk. Something in cream lace that I shut the drawer on at once, and then open it again.
I choose black.
It’s thin. It slides over my skin like water and stops at my knees. I stand in front of the fire with it on and look at the veil where I laid it on the bed, and after a long time, I pick it up and put it back over my hair.
I don’t know why.
Yes, I do.
I take the breviary off the nightstand where Rosa put it. Cracked spine. I open it between Compline and the Psalms. My little book is there. My sins in pencil. And under the last one, in his hand, Soon.
There’s a pen in the drawer of the writing desk. Black ink. Heavy. His, probably. Everything is.
Under his word, in ink, for the first time, I write:
I married him today.
My hand is shaking. I write one more line.
I want him to open the door.
I close the book and put it back on the nightstand, spine up, one corner hanging over the edge.
Exactly how someone careful would leave it.
At four minutes past eleven, the lock turns.
***
I’m sitting on the edge of the bed. I’m on my feet so fast the lace swings.
He comes through the door and shuts it behind him.
He’s taken off his jacket and tie. White shirt open at the collar. Sleeves rolled to the elbow, forearms thick and corded and dusted with dark hair. I’ve never seen his arms. There’s a pale ridged scar across the back of his right hand, old, running over the knuckles.
No gloves.
He’s not wearing gloves.
He stands just inside the door and looks at me. At the black silk. At the veil.
His eyes stay on the veil a long time.
“You kept it on,” he says.
“You gave it to me.”
“I gave you a lot of things.” He comes toward me, not fast. “You kept that one.”
He stops a foot away. The fire’s on my left and he’s on my right, and I don’t know which one is hotter.
“Take off the nightgown,” he says.
My hands don’t move.
He watches them not move. Then he lifts his eyes to mine.
“Tell me to go,” he says, “and I’ll walk back through that door, turn the lock, and you won’t see me until breakfast.”
The fire pops.
“Tell me, Magdalene.”
I open my mouth.
Nothing comes out.
“That’s what I thought,” he says softly.
He reaches out and takes one strap between his thumb and finger. Bare fingers. Warm. He slides it off my shoulder, slowly, and the silk slips an inch. Then the other one.
The nightgown falls.
It pools around my ankles, black on the wood, and I’m standing in front of a man for the first time in my life with nothing on but a veil.
I don’t cover myself. I want to. My hands actually lift.
“Don’t,” he says.
They drop.
He looks.
He doesn’t hurry. He looks at me the way he read the ledger.
Every column. Every line. My collarbones.
My breasts, small, the nipples tight from the air and from him.
The freckles across my chest that nobody has ever seen, not even a doctor.
My stomach. The dark hair between my legs. My knees, which are shaking.
“Two years,” he says, “I’ve watched you pray.”
He goes down on his knees in front of me.
I stop breathing.
He’s so big that on his knees his face is level with my ribs. He puts his hands on my hips, bare palms on bare skin, and the heat goes through me like a fever.
“My turn,” he says.
He puts his mouth on my stomach, just below my navel. Then lower. His hands tighten and he pushes me back, gently, until my knees hit the bed and I sit down hard on the edge of it. He spreads my knees with his shoulders and looks up at me through the lace.
“Hold on to something.”
I grab the sheets.
The first touch of his tongue is so soft I think I imagined it.
The second isn’t.
He licks into me slow and flat and thorough, like he has all night and plans to use it.
My hips jerk. His hands clamp down and hold them still.
He finds my clit and circles it with the tip of his tongue, and then he closes his mouth over it and sucks, and every thought I have ever had leaves my body.
“Oh—oh God—”
“Not Him,” Ronan says against me. “Me.”
He does it again.
I fall back on the bed. The veil tangles under my shoulders. I stare at the carved ceiling and can’t see it. There’s only his mouth and his hands and the slick sounds I can hear and can’t believe are coming from me.
Nothing I ever did alone was like this. My fingers were a candle. This is a fire.
“Please,” I gasp. I don’t know what I’m asking for. “Please—don’t stop—”
“I won’t.”
He pushes one thick finger into me, slow, and curls it, and presses up while his mouth pulls down, and I come apart.
My back bows off the mattress. I hear myself sob his name, the whole of it, Ronan, like I’ve been saying it for years. My thighs clamp around his head. He doesn’t stop. He holds me through it with his mouth still on me, gentler, until the shaking eases—
And then he starts again.
“I can’t,” I whimper. “Ronan—it’s too much—”
“You can.”
He adds a second finger. The stretch burns, and then it doesn’t.
He fucks me with them slowly, deep, while his tongue works me in small, relentless circles, and the second one builds faster than the first, higher, until I’m crying for real, tears running into my hair and the lace, my fists full of sheet.
It breaks over me like a wave taking out a pier.
When I can see again, he’s standing.
He’s standing over me at the edge of the bed, wiping his mouth with his thumb, and his eyes are black.
I look down.
His trousers. He’s hard. Hard enough that I can see the shape of him straining against the fabric, thick and long, and my mouth goes dry, and my body, which should be finished, clenches on nothing.
I sit up. My hand reaches for his belt.
He catches my wrist.
His thumb on my pulse.
“No,” he says.
“Why?” It comes out raw. “I’m your wife. You married me—”
“I did.”
“Then—”
“When you beg.”
I stare at him.
“I just—I said please—”
“You said please to not stopping.” He bends down, still holding my wrist, until his face is close to mine. His lips are wet. They smell like me. “When you beg for the rest, Magdalene, you’ll know. So will I.”
He lets go.
He straightens. Picks my nightgown up off the floor and lays it across the foot of the bed like a man folding a flag.
He walks to the connecting door. Opens it.
On the threshold, he looks back at me. Naked on his sheets, veil twisted, tears drying on my face, thighs still trembling.
“Goodnight, Mrs. Draven.”
The door closes.
The lock turns.
On his side.
***
I lie there a long time while the fire burns down.
My body hums. My throat throbs where his teeth went in. Between my legs I’m swollen and sore and still, God help me, wanting.
I could get up. Knock on that door. Say it.
I roll onto my side, facing the wall he’s behind, and pull the veil down over my face like a sheet over a body, and I make myself stay where I am.
I already know the word.
I said it twice tonight.
The third time, I won’t be begging him not to stop.