We stand there for a long minute, Proserpina looking outside while I hold her against my chest and draw circles around her exposed navel. My cock is fully hard again, aching against the top of her backside. After a while, she turns to me with a sigh.
“Well?” she prompts. “Are you going to ask me?”
“Ask you what?” Although I already suspect.
She sighs again. “Where he is.”
“I don’t want to know,” I lie.
“That’s what you said the first time you and I spoke on the phone too. But I’m not giving you his postcode and flat number, Auden. I thought you’d just like to know, as his Dominant and his half-brother, that he was safe somewhere.”
“I don’t want to know,” I repeat, and she gives me a look like she sees right through it, although when she speaks, her voice is kind.
“You’re not your father, Auden. You can trust yourself. You can trust yourself with this. The name of a city, nothing more.”
I brush the hair away from Proserpina’s face, marveling for the millionth time how lovely she is to me, how wonderful. The rise of her cheekbone, the corner of her eye. The slightly elfin peek of her ears between the waves of her hair. She cannot be sketched, she can only be drawn, and when I draw her, I need all of my pencils.
Leaf Green and Chrome Oxide Green and Viridian for her eyes. Browns 946 and 947 for the undertones of her hair, Espresso and Chocolate and a hint of Burnt Ochre for the rest. Blush Pink for the tips of her ears and her nose, Rose for her lips and cheeks, and Black for the sooty lashes that frame her summer eyes.
Even her imperfections are art—the asymmetrical widow’s peak, the creases in her full upper lip—and I abruptly want to cancel the rest of my life, my job, my work, the renovation, eating meals, all of it, and spend the rest of my life drawing Proserpina Markham. I want to spend the rest of my life with her naked in the late summer light, stained and smudged with the marks and bruises I’ve given her, and I want the most important question I ever answer to be which shade of blue to use for the veins tracing their way along her throat and chest.
“Do you know how long I waited after the two of you left before I went to Thorncombe looking for him?” I ask her now.
“No.”
“Three hours. I made it three hours before I decided I was dragging him—and you—back to me.”
“But he didn’t go to Thorncombe,” she says. And then she understands. “Oh.”
“Exactly. He didn’t go back to his house, because he knows me. He knows I can’t be trusted. It’s just better if I don’t know anything about where he is, because even now, I still—”
I stop, too ashamed to continue.
Even now, I still want to chase him, catch him, pin him to the ground.
Make him swear that this time he’ll stay.
Poe searches my eyes, and then she shakes her head. “I don’t believe you,” she says softly. “I think you’re a better man than you think you are. Your father was a murderer, Auden. An asshole. You’re not.”
“I lied to St. Sebastian. I hid things. I pushed every boundary he set. I’m well on my way to being him, Poe.”
She leans in, her breasts pressed against my chest, her lips against my throat. “So you fucked up,” she murmurs. I can feel the vibration of her words against my throat, humming right down into my chest. “We all do, every single one of us. The important thing is doing better now.”
“I don’t know if I can,” I admit, holding her close. Outside the rain sweeps even harder across the lawn, like the Hyades are personally weeping over my valley, and somewhere in the house I hear Sir James bark. “Doing better means letting him go. For real. And I just—I don’t know if I can.”
“You held on to him all these years,” she says. “Not with your hands or your words, but inside your thoughts, inside your heart. You don’t have to stop loving him, Auden. All you have to do is give him the space to choose that love or not.”
She’s right, of course, she’s right.
But.
“He’s already chosen,” I say, and then I pull her away from the window. “Let’s get dressed. We can go see the door now, if you’d like.”
She makes a face. “In the rain?”
“Unless there’s something else you’d like to do while we wait for the rain to pass?”
She gives me a wicked smile and then lowers herself to her knees in front of me. “I can think of a few things.”
I’m deeply indebted to the inventor of drawstring pants because I have my cock past those rose-hued lips in seconds. I let out a long, relieved sigh at the feel of her tongue against the underside of my erection, and then my hands are in her hair as she looks up at me. I go slowly, so slowly, letting myself skate along the edge of restraint and release, until I can’t take it any longer and tie her to the bed. I fuck her until she comes, and then I allow myself a long, trembling release, the kind that feels never-ending.
After I come, I keep her tied to the bed for a little while after, just because it makes her happy and it makes me happy, and when I untie her, she curls into my arms and falls into a sleep that seems thankfully dreamless.
Wise, curious, dreamy girl.
And I lied earlier, I now realize. Because there is one thing I would sacrifice my own life for, there is one thing that could make Poe’s dream come true.
If something ever threatened her or St. Sebastian—or even Rebecca or Delphine or Becket—and if my life was the only price that could be paid for their safety . . .
Then yes.
Yes, I would walk to the door without ever having to look back.
Chapter Five
Rebecca
“It’s your mother’s birthday next week.”
“I know. Have you heard back about the play park yet?” I ask.
My father sets his fork on the table and dabs efficiently at his mouth with a napkin before leaning back in his chair. We’re not in an office at Quartey Workshop, we are not even in a company car on the way to an important meeting.
No, we are at a restaurant.
During business hours.
And not just any restaurant—not someplace fast, convenient, inexpensive. We are at a French restaurant in Spitalfields with several courses, with an elegant (if rather fussy) menu, and a wine list longer than many bestselling novels.
The building used to be a chapel, and so light pours through the stained glass windows and floods the space, illuminating the wooden trusses of the Victorian ceiling above us. Auden would like it. He’s reliably pleased by buildings that emphasize capaciousness or history or both. Even I like it, as it’s unpretentiously designed and filled with glimpses of sky, which I always crave in the city.
The surprise is that Samson Quartey seems to like it. The man who spent the last fifteen years eating apples and reheated rice in his office because he refused to take time away from work in order to get a proper meal for himself. The man who once scolded me for eating my lunch in the nearby park instead of at my desk.
This same man came into my office this morning and suggested we get lunch somewhere today. And this same man is now smiling at me over the table as he reaches for his wine glass. “Not yet, but I have every confidence it will be approved.”
We’d decided, after a citizen’s meeting about the Severn Riverfront project, to incorporate a play park into our plans. An idea that is very popular with the borough council members and significantly less popular with the borough’s solicitors, since it opens up a fresh host of safety concerns. It is the sort of development that normally calls for several meetings, twice-a-day emails, and a daily visit to my office to make sure I’m on top of the situation.
But instead he’s sitting here, sampling Continental cuisine in a stylish restaurant and telling me he has every confidence.
I stare at him. “You’re not worried? You don’t want me to call our contact at the council or pressure the solicitors into moving faster?”
He swallows his wine with a faint sm
ile still tipping the corners of his mouth. “It’s only been a few days, Rebecca. Give them time.”
I continue to stare. He’s been like this since he reconnected with David Markham. Warmer, smilier. Happier. Like the man I vaguely remember from my childhood, the man who used to carry me on his shoulders and ask me to point out the horizon.
You missed that man, I remind myself. You should be glad he’s back again.
“Enough about work,” he says, setting down his glass.
A sentence I’ve literally never heard him utter before. It’s like waking up one day to a green sky or a slightly tilted floor—something that could be normal, but is so very not.
“I want to know how you’re doing.”
“How I’m doing?” I echo. “Not . . . how my projects are coming along?”
“Of course not,” he says, smiling at me like I’m being the silly one. “How are you?”
I’m so unused to talking about anything other than work with my father that question almost feels invasive. Even though I don’t want it to be invasive, I don’t want it to feel like an inveiglement or an intrusion. Because this is what I wanted from him, for so many years, since we moved to London, since I took that first cursed IQ test.
I wanted him to see me as more than the vessel of the Quartey name. To see me as more than a Cartesian brain in a jar whose sole purpose is to win awards and make money.
So why do I feel resentful now that he’s giving it to me?
When I don’t answer, he prompts, “How are you and Delphine Dansey?”
And that’s it, that’s the spade driving right through the soil of my heart and hitting the rock underneath. I feel the strike of her name in my bones, and for a second I can’t remember how lungs are supposed to work, how they expand out and down to draw breath, how they push that breath back out.
I’m still yours. If you want me to be.
I would like to never see you again.
“Rebecca?” my father asks, suddenly looking concerned, and it must be all over my face, how I feel and what she’s done to me, and the humiliation of my feelings being known is almost as great a sting as the feelings themselves.
“I’m fine,” I mutter, ducking my head and flicking away the wetness spilling from my eyes as fast as I can. My father reaches across the table and I pull back even more. “I’m fine, Daddy.”
“You don’t seem it,” my father says. Kindly. “Do you want to talk about it?”
No. I definitely do not want that. I want to seal the memory of Delphine Dansey in a box and then drop that box into an Icelandic lava fissure. “There’s nothing to talk about. We stopped seeing each other a couple weeks ago.”
He turns the stem of the wineglass between his fingers. Grayish London light catches the glint of the glass and the gentle swirl of the burgundy inside.
“You seemed happier with her,” he offers. “You smiled more. When you were at David’s house, I could see how you looked at her. How she looked at you.”
“She cheated on me,” I blurt, and then I want to smash my face onto my plate. Why did I say that? Why did I say that to him? When just a few seconds ago, I wanted this conversation to be over?
Delphine broke me. That’s the only answer I can come up with. I used to be molded, glazed, and fired exactly as I wanted to be, and then she came along and smashed me into a million pieces, and now nothing fits together right. Anger, pride, embarrassment, sadness, neediness—all of those things used to be contained inside a watertight shell. And now they leak out of me like I’m a cracked teacup or a badly repaired vase.
“Never mind,” I mumble, “I shouldn’t have said that, just pretend I didn’t—”
A warm hand finds my wrist over the table. “Sweetheart,” my father says, his eyes softer than I’ve ever seen them. “It’s okay. It’s okay to be upset.”
“I loved her,” I hear myself saying. Why am I still talking about this? When it hurts me so much? And in the middle of a public space where anyone can see or hear me? I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know, and yet I’m still talking, words are still dripping out. “I told her I loved her and she told me she’d cheated on me. And I deserve better than that, I deserve so much better, and at the same time, I can’t let go of this idea that if only I’d told her sooner that I loved her, if I’d been warmer or easier or something—”
I don’t stop because I’ve come to my senses and realized that I’m spilling my deepest fears in a trendy French restaurant to my father of all people, and during business hours of all times.
No, I stop because I am crying. (In a trendy French restaurant in front of my father and during business hours.)
(Like a prize fucking idiot.)
What has happened to me?!
“Oh Rebecca,” Daddy says. “I’m so sorry, sweetheart. That was awful of her. Awful and selfish.”
Perversely, I almost want to defend her. To say well, it was just some spanks and a kiss. To say, she’s so incredibly sweet and soft and funny and she was so gutted when she told me, she was so sorry and so sad.
“I’ve never had anyone like how I had her—like how I wanted to have her. I could see an entire life with us together in it, and I wanted that life so badly, and then before I had a chance to tell her all about it, it was gone. She’d taken it away from us both.”
“I don’t know her as you do, but I do know her parents, and they are good and kind people. I’m sure whatever she’s done, she deeply regrets hurting you.”
I see her face crumpling as I told her I never wanted to see her again.
I’m sorry. I know—I know that’s not enough, that it could never be enough, but you should know all the same.
I’m so sorry it hurts.
“I know you will survive this, my daughter,” Daddy says, squeezing my wrist. “Of that, I have no doubt. But whatever parts of yourself you found when you were with Delphine . . . I hope those parts of you survive too.”
Daddy has a meeting across town after lunch, and so I decide to take some time to search for a birthday gift for my mother. I take the Tube to Green Park Station, and then walk to Old Bond Street to peruse the jewelry shops, not so much enjoying the solitude and fresh air as numbly accepting it.
My face is still tight from crying, and my throat feels as if someone’s lodged a stone right in the middle of it, and the memory of Delphine is an acacia tree growing right through my chest, right between my lungs. Each time I try to inhale, I’m punctured and stabbed with thorns. When I exhale, those same thorns snag on my bronchioles and tear at my tattered inferior lobes.
All these years of resisting every kind of feeling, and for what? I’m still walking around the city like a raw nerve in a Cushnie trouser suit. I’m still drifting down the street with swollen eyes and dried tears on my face. I’m still leaking and bleeding and hurting, even though I knew better, I knew better.
I knew better.
Somehow I still manage to browse my mother’s favorite jeweler’s, I manage to walk and look and examine, like an automaton built for the sole purpose of shopping. Even the dilatory response from the employee behind the counter—and the way she helps an older white woman first even though she came into the shop after me—doesn’t animate the numbness any. It only adds to it, like of course, of course, this is what my life is, this is what it means to be Rebecca Quartey. It didn’t matter how many times I was photographed for the RIBA Journal or name-checked in Architectural Digest, it doesn’t matter that I’ve played by every single rule for as long as I can remember. I can still walk into a shop on Bond Street and be ignored, I can still have my heart broken by a girl who grew up riding horses and wearing Holland & Holland tweed.
Eventually, I am approached by the employee. Eventually I find something I like: a slender gold bangle studded with rubies—bold but also traditionally feminine—something for a woman embarking on the next stage of her life. I arrange for the shop to have the bracelet sent to Accra, along with a note I scribble right there at the counter
.
And then, feeling a little lighter, a little more like myself, I finish the transaction and leave the store.
See, this is who I am.
I set tasks and I accomplish them. I identify problems—mother, divorce, birthday, micro-aggressive shop employees—and I find tangible solutions—pretty bracelet, international shipping, taking the shop manager’s business card to email them later.
That is Rebecca Quartey. Not the woman who has been sleeping curled around a fuzzy blanket because it was her ex-sub’s favorite, not the woman who just cried in front of her father over a plate of clafoutis. I am the person who pushes past all obstacles—I am the person who builds things, who fixes things, who never gets hurt.
I can be that person again. Right?
I’m walking back to the station when a storefront catches my eye. It’s another jeweler’s, but there’s something very modern about it, very arty. There’s no classic blue boxes or gleaming cases of glass, no piano notes lilting through the air. Instead, all the jewelry is arranged on mannequins and sculptures and slender logs.
Yes. Logs.
It’s very ridiculous and self-aware and trying too hard, but the pieces themselves are fascinating. Unusual. Bright where I’d expect them to be colorless, and geometric where I’d expect no geometry at all.
I find myself slipping inside the shop, drifting from display to display. Despite the alt-pop music currently droning through the speakers and the clerk with a septum piercing, all of the jewelry is just as exquisitely made—and just as expensive—as the shop with the little blue boxes where I just came from.
But this is not the kind of jewelry I would give my mother, no—not at all.
There’s Art Deco-inspired brooches and playful Victorian-esque rings. Things of beaten gold and silver and tungsten; pieces wrought into animal forms, botanical forms; earrings that look like talons and necklaces that look like finely tatted lace. This is the type of jewelry you give to someone who knows what your mouth tastes like.
Door of Bruises (Thornchapel Book 4) Page 5