9. Camille
Camille
Ryan departs soon after our coupling ends.
It’s not like I was expecting him to spend the night, but the speed at which he left leaves me feeling off.
I stand in the entrance hall, one hand braced against the edge of the open door, watching him cross the courtyard beneath the low amber glow of the exterior lamps.
He is walking poorly, I think, smirking to myself.
Not dramatically so, because Ryan would probably rather crawl home on his hands and knees than allow me to see that I have affected him, but there is a slight stiffness to his gait that was not there when he arrived, his steps careful over the uneven gravel, and his shoulders drawn up around his ears as though determination alone might disguise the occasional hitch in his movement.
I offered to walk him home.
He looked at me as though I had proposed carrying him across France in my arms. “Camille, I live next door.”
And sure, there are perhaps three hundred metres between my front door and his, but still, I could have walked him over.
Ryan had glanced toward the bag he left beside the table in the library earlier in the evening, gathered it against his chest, and informed me with impressive dignity for a man whose hair remained disordered from my hands that he was entirely capable of surviving the arduous expedition back to his place.
Regardless, the evening accomplished precisely what I intended—potentially even more.
Ryan has responded to every attempt at assistance as if generosity is merely coercion wearing attractive clothing.
Offer him a ride, and he walks five kilometres in the heat.
Recommend a tradesman, and he spends an afternoon attempting to communicate with one himself.
Suggest that he allow someone else to rebuild the garden wall, and he nearly crushes his own foot beneath a stone before admitting that masonry is not an intuitive skill.
I had believed his resistance was directed specifically toward me.
Tonight taught me otherwise.
I no longer believe that Ryan objects to needing me; he objects to needing anyone.
There is a distinction.
An important one.
And now I understand how to use it.
I close the door.
The house feels unusually silent afterward.
It has always been quiet. I prefer it that way.
Even as a child, sound exhausted me when it had no purpose, and adulthood has given me enough control over my surroundings that very little in this house happens without intention.
My animals create their own small ecosystem of muted sound—the almost imperceptible hum of environmental controls, water circulating through enclosures, the occasional scrape of scale against bark or glass—but none of it resembles human noise.
Ryan resembles human noise.
He fills rooms.
Even when nervous, perhaps especially when nervous, he speaks to occupy silence before it can ask anything of him.
He mutters commentary under his breath, makes faces without apparently realizing he is doing so, asks a question, and then begins answering it himself if I take longer than three seconds to respond.
The thought almost makes me smile.
When I return to the library in order to clean up the evidence of our night together, Raja has shifted higher into the branches.
Only a portion of his body remains visible beneath the enclosure lighting, black-edged scales disappearing into artificial foliage with an elegance that makes something so large seem insubstantial.
My attention falls on the sofa and the multiple drying wet spots across it. A cushion lies on the floor where Ryan kicked it sometime during the evening.
I should have it cleaned.
Instead, I pick up the fallen cushion and return it to its place.
My forearm stings. Four narrow red scratches extend from just below my elbow toward my wrist, angry against my skin; others mark my shoulders and upper back.
Ryan proposed the arrangement himself, which is better than anything I could have engineered. No expectations. No relationship. No promises. Sex when mutually desired, and nothing beyond it that might resemble obligation.
He believes these terms protect him, and perhaps they do, but he doesn’t understand that he’s given me a reason to become familiar without having to ask permission for familiarity itself.
I do not need to persuade him to accept my help tomorrow.
I do not need to push him toward dependence.
That was the error.
I had mistaken isolation for vulnerability and vulnerability for a desire to be rescued.
Ryan does not want rescue.
He wants autonomy so fiercely that he will make his own life substantially more difficult merely to prove no one else owns a piece of it.
And if that’s what he wants, I can accommodate that.
If he comes here because he wants sex, he comes voluntarily.
If he remains afterward for a drink, conversation occurs voluntarily.
If conversation becomes a meal, if meals become routine, if eventually walking through my doors becomes as unremarkable to him as walking through his own—then I will not have forced anything.
People reveal themselves through routine far more reliably than through interrogation.
Sooner or later, Ryan will speak about Alberte without being prompted. He will complain about something he has discovered in the cottage. He will ask what I know. He might even invite me inside himself.
Yes.
This is better.
I need to stop trying to make Ryan need me and instead let him want me. Want is much easier to mistake for freedom.
I collect the wineglasses from the table, almost out the door of the library, before my gaze once again returns to the sofa.
Ryan sat there perhaps forty minutes ago, looking at me as though he had simultaneously discovered something he wanted desperately and something he feared might destroy him.
Learning what waited beneath his clothing didn’t change the fact that I had wanted my mouth on him from the first moment his face flushed beneath my attention.
Yet he had expected the possibility—no, more than the possibility. He had prepared himself for it.
I scoff at myself. Ryan is nothing but a pleasurable means to an end. No matter what has happened in his past, what has shaped him to make him fear a partner’s reaction to him, it doesn’t matter. Knowing more is of no use to me.
I carry the empty glasses to the kitchen, rinse them because I don’t want to leave them for the morning, then stand at the sink longer than necessary, watching water run over my fingers.
I tell myself what happened tonight was lust.
Exceptionally good sex, certainly.
Compatibility.
Novelty.
Ryan is responsive in a way I find compelling. Expressive. Hungry without being passive, despite what he seems to believe about his own desire to surrender control. Even when overwhelmed, he participates in his own undoing with remarkable enthusiasm.
Naturally, I enjoyed him.
I would like to enjoy him again.
This requires no deeper analysis.
I dry my hands.
There are more useful things to think about tonight.
Alberte Legrand, for example.
I leave the kitchen and cross the eastern wing toward my study. The walls are lined with locked cabinets, bookshelves, specimen photography, and two large worktables where I review research outside the university. My desk sits beneath the windows.
I switch on the desk lamp, then flex my hand against the drawer handle, as if resistance might give me an excuse not to revisit the file. This is a dance I perform almost nightly. I have learned that obsession is simply compulsion with a doctorate.
Tonight, I set the folder on the blotter, touch the cover, and hesitate.
The window glass reflects my face, faintly—my expression haunted and pinched, features inverted by the night like a death mask.
I ignore the phantom and flip the file open.
The pages inside are brittle along the fold lines, sticky with the residue of ancient scotch tape and the oils of my hands.
I have memorized each word. Sometimes, out of a perverse hope, I wish to catch myself in an error—maybe I have misread a phrase, skipped a line, misunderstood the cadence of a statement, and thus failed to see what it had meant all along.
But the file is stubborn; it yields only what it has always yielded.
I scan the first page, then the second, ignoring the sense that tonight’s ritual is particularly pointless. I nearly miss the movement outside the study window. The glass vibrates, faint and high, with the engine note of a car running. I look up instantly.
The windows here are tall, and the study overlooks the little spur of road that connects my property, as well as Ryan’s, to the wider world.
At this hour, the lane is meant to be still.
I have lived here for enough years now to recognize the different cars of the locals, but this vehicle is unfamiliar, predatory, and moving slowly enough to be noticed but not identified.
It’s a sedan, dark and low, with its headlights dead.
It coasts past my drive, too far to discern a badge or make.
The hairs along my arms rise. I close the file, finger pressed against a page as if silencing a witness, and wait.
The car should not return; lost drivers rarely turn back on these dead-end lanes.
Instead, two minutes later, I see brake lights pulse at the far edge of the trees, just beyond the boundary wall.
The car idles, engine so soft that I can only hear the change in air pressure as it stops.
I strain, listening. There is no door slam, no voices, no movement of gravel. The car just sits there; it watches.
I flick off my lamp, move deeper into the shadow, and angle myself at the window to reduce reflection.
My pulse is steady, but the rest of me is at attention.
The vehicle lingers another thirty seconds—then it continues, gliding down toward the river bend, where the lane dead-ends into a municipal barrier.