I stare at her like I’ve never seen her before. And maybe I have never seen her before like this, all vulnerability and surety tangled together. I have the abrupt, acute sense of something very important slipping through my fingers. Something so important that I might die without it.
“Why?” I ask in a numb voice. “Why can’t we go on like we have been? Because it has been easy, you know it has.”
She shakes her head slowly, her honey-brown eyes pinned to mine. “Easy for you, perhaps. But I don’t even think it’s been that, has it, Bex?”
I want to tell her she’s wrong. I want to tell her that casual sex with her is the easiest thing I’ve ever done as a kinky adult.
But I can’t.
She gives me a long appraising look, as if my silence is answer enough. “I wanted to be easy for you, you know,” she says. “My whole life, that’s all I’ve ever wanted, actually. How funny is that? Some people grow up wanting to be smart or ambitious or brave, and all I wanted was to be easy. Because that was something I could change about myself, even if I couldn’t change my body. I could be easy, pretty, graceful, fun. Not anxious or messy or difficult or afraid. Frictionless, you see, because I’d used up all my points on having this body, so I had to make sure that I was otherwise marvelous to be around, because if I wasn’t, then who would like me? Who would love me? And then somehow, at some point, and I don’t know when, wanting to be easy turned into hiding. And the hiding turned into lying, and you know what the lying turned into, Bex, you know what it led to. I don’t want to do that anymore. I don’t want to hide, and I don’t want to contort myself into knots pretending that I don’t still love you and that I don’t want you to love me back, so that I’ll be easy enough for you to keep around. I’ve apologized for what I’ve done and vowed to do better, but this is something I deserve. I deserve the right not to be easy.”
I don’t know what to say, and I find that I’m pacing, pacing in front of my desk in the flats she gave me this summer because she hated my other traveling shoes so much.
“Delph, do you honestly think I have no idea what that’s like? You think I don’t understand having a body that the world judges on sight . . . what it’s like to have only a certain number of points that are already spent merely by being who I am? You think I don’t understand what it’s like to have to be easy? I’m a Black woman—an immigrant—and I’m queer—you don’t think that I’ve ever had to negotiate exactly how ambitious I’m allowed to be, how messy, how difficult? I can do those equations in a split second, on a moment’s notice. I can do the math—the differentials, the multivariable integrations—of being easy in my head while I’m giving a presentation or talking to a cab driver or trying to order at a restaurant. The necessity of easiness was spliced into me at birth, Delphine, you don’t have to explain it to me. Fuck.”
I’m shaking a little after I say all this, things I’ve never said aloud to anybody—not all at once at least—and I step back until I find the edge of my desk and can prop myself against it. But when I lift my eyes to Delphine, the shaking eases a little. She is not defensive. She’s not crying because she felt that was hard for her to hear. She is nodding, listening, her eyes warm and clear all at once.
“You’re right,” she says softly. “Of course you’re right. I’m sorry I didn’t understand that before.”
“No, I—” I lift a hand and then drop it. “I appreciate that. But I didn’t say it to win a fight, Delph. I’m saying it because I get it. I get it. But do you? Because if we’re going to talk about easy and who’s allowed it, then you have to know that you’ll always be allowed more. So much more than me.”
She lets out a long breath as she nods again. It’s a slow, thinking breath.
“Yes,” she says after a minute. “There is a value to my skin, isn’t there, that will always shield me, lift me—and that value goes beyond size, it reaches past it. I should have seen that. My reality is shaped by that value, and so everything else—being fat, being easy or difficult—it will always be layered with it.”
She gives me a rueful kind of smile. “I don’t want to perform the mea culpa at you, because I know the performance means nothing without really understanding—without action—but I am sorry for not seeing, and reflecting on it, Bex, I’m so sorry. Of course you get it. You get it so much more than I ever will have to.”
She’s right that I don’t want performance. What I do want is much simpler.
Not easier—definitely not that—but simpler.
“I know you know this, Delph, deep down. I wouldn’t have been with you if I thought you didn’t. And I’m not invalidating what you felt or what’s happened to you to have made you feel that way—I just need you to accept my reality too. To make room inside yours for what I experience as a Black woman, because you will always have more latitude than me, more social and functional legal capital. More safety.”
“Yes, Rebecca,” she says, and she says it not like a submissive, but like a friend. Like someone who is ready to earn trust. “I will.”
I have to look down, suddenly, because there’re too many feelings—radiating from her, boiling in me. Boiling, boiling, because even though she says she understands—even though maybe she does understand—she’s still ending this. Ending us.
“I’m not saying this to win a fight,” I say, looking up again. “I’m only saying I don’t let it excuse my mistakes.”
Her voice is still soft when she answers, but it’s firm now too. “I’m not either,” she says. “I know what I did to you; I’m responsible, and I’ll apologize as many times as you want to hear it. All I’m telling you is why I can’t do this anymore.”
“This. Us.”
“Not us. This isn’t us—this is a shadow of us, a ghost of us, and we both know it. And I can’t make myself into nothing hoping that one day you’ll give me a crumb of something. And I hope you know in return that you never have to be easy with me. I can’t promise you much else, but I can promise that. Even if we’re not having sex, even if we’re only friends, I will always hold room for you to be all of yourself. Without the multivariable integrations, without the points. All of you, as you are, and as you want to be.”
My throat hurts; my eyes sting. It’s all I’ve ever wanted a lover to say to me. All I’ve ever wanted anyone to say to me, maybe.
With me, you can rest.
And then my muscles are tightening with panic, with imminent loss. She’s really leaving right now. She’s really saying no.
And the worst part?
It’s for a good reason.
Even I, wanting to keep her as I do, see that it’s a good reason.
She slings her bag over her shoulder. “I’ll see you back at Thornchapel, Rebecca. And I—” She hesitates and then says it anyway. “I love you. You don’t have to say it back or feel it back or anything. You don’t even have to forgive me. I just want you to know.”
And then she leaves me alone with damp knickers and tears already beginning to fall before she’s stepped onto the lift down to the lobby.
It’s a long week. A terrible fucking week.
I hate it. I hate every single day of it. I’m out of sorts and I can’t sleep and even my bones ache with missing her, and I hate it.
Finally, though, it’s nearly at an end, and I’m in my flat packing for Thornchapel—and trying to decide what I want to say to Delphine when I see her again—when I hear the buzz of someone at the door. My chest seizes like it’s just been caught up in a giant’s fist, and I run down the stairs like a teenager expecting someone they fancy, smoothing my clothes and licking my teeth for stray lipstick as I go.
But it’s not her.
It’s my father, standing there with Auntie Yaa’s groundnut soup and banku. “Supper?” he asks, as if I’m going to say no to hot groundnut soup. I step back and let him in, and he trots easily up the stairs.
I notice again how much warmer he is now, how much happier. But instead of stirring resentment inside me, it only
stirs sadness for my own lonely state, and a melancholy kind of joy for him. I’m glad he’s happy, I realize, feeling for the first time that it’s really, honestly the truth. I’m glad he’s happy now.
“I won’t be long,” Daddy assures me as he starts laying out the food on the table. “But I’m going to America tomorrow, and I wanted to see you before I left.”
I’m stunned. “You’re going to America? But you haven’t said anything about it at all—and we haven’t planned for it at the Workshop—”
“It’s only for a week, and if anything comes up, my capable daughter will be able to handle it most superbly,” Daddy says. “What’s the point of being the boss if I can’t give myself time off now and again?”
It’s still startling to hear my father talk about work like this, like it’s only part of life and not all of it like I’ve been raised to believe. And yet—yet, I do smile a little this time around. Maybe I’m getting used to this version of my father. Or maybe I’m starting to untangle all the ways perfection and hard work were knotted up with love for me, and so I can finally understand why he’s been able to let go of perfection too.
I pour us each a glass of Beaujolais, and we sit down to eat, talking a little bit about work and the latest gaffe in the mayoral race, and then out of nowhere, he asks, gently, “How is Delphine Dansey?”
Her name burns through me hotter than any scotch bonnet pepper, and I take a drink of water, stalling for time. “Fine,” I manage to say after a moment. The word sticks in my throat, but I somehow dislodge it. “She’s doing fine.”
My father leans back and gives me the famous Quartey Stare, his dark eyes scraping over my face. “And how are you doing?”
I start to say fine, and then I can’t manage it, I can’t force out the lie. I take a drink of wine instead, swallowing it and looking out the window instead of at him. I don’t want our new family tradition to be me crying about Delphine Dansey over food.
I can feel the heat of his stare a moment longer, and then I hear him reach for his own wineglass. I see him swirl the Beaujolais out of the corner of my eye as he says, “Your mother and I failed you in a lot of ways, Rebecca.”
I swivel back to him, ready to protest this. Whatever their faults, Daddy and Ma gave me the best of everything—and they pushed me to be the best in turn. And as exhausting as the latter was and is, I can’t say that I wish they’d done any differently.
But my father holds up a hand, forestalling my objections. “No, no, not like how you’re thinking. But in other ways, we have failed you, and I know this because we failed ourselves too. We didn’t show you there are ways through hurt and pride. We didn’t show you a way to navigate conflict that wasn’t avoidance or shielding or separation. I wish that I had been braver and more direct with Lydia before this year. Not only for us, but for you too.”
I’m shaking my head as he speaks. “It’s different,” I say. “Delphine and I are different.”
“Because she cheated on you? I cheated on your mother.”
“Is it so wrong of me not to forgive her for it?” I demand. “I gave her something I’ve never given anyone and she spit on it. What kind of a woman would I be if I allowed people to do that to me? Without any kind of consequence?”
“But you love her?” Daddy asks, his eyebrow crooked ever so slightly. “You miss her and want to be with her?”
“Yes, of course I do,” I say in exasperation. “That has nothing to do with forgiveness.”
“I think it does, Rebecca. If she’s apologized and pledged to be better, then she’s made the amends she can. And if she’s made her amends, then why not admit your own feelings as evidence in her case? Why not allow yourself something you want for the simple reason that you want it? No one can tell you what choices to make in a circumstance like this because no one is you, and no one else will reap the rewards of loving her.”
“Or suffer the consequences,” I mutter.
The eyebrow quirks up the tiniest bit more. “Is your pride really more important than your happiness?”
Indignation flares through me, followed by a sharp kind of sadness. “Daddy, if I don’t protect my pride, no one else will, don’t you understand that? I’m the one who has to fight for it, to guard it, to know what I’m worth, because I live in a world where it’s not a given. And it’s not a matter of my pride versus my happiness, it’s a matter of what I deserve. And I deserve more than being cheated on.”
He gives me a long, uncomfortably gentle look. “Of course,” he murmurs. “Only I worry that you’re using the wrong math here. Arithmetic instead of algebra, fractions instead of irrational numbers. You’ve flattened your thinking into something two-dimensional: this or that, safety or hurt. Me or her. Loving someone isn’t about rigid, oppositional certainties, loving someone is . . . it’s quantum. It’s subjective and alchemistic. It’s difficult to measure and impossible to see with the naked eye, and even more impossible to explain.”
“Quantum.”
“Both things can be true at once, Rebecca,” Daddy says. “Just like light can be both a particle and a wave, it can be true that she hurt you and also that loving her could be the smartest and most wonderful thing you ever do. Now, let’s finish this good soup and talk of easier things, hm?”
He reaches across the table to take my hand, like it’s the most natural thing in the world for him to show me this kind of affection, and it breaks something in me, something as old as my Red Dress Barbie.
I start to cry, and when I start, it’s not just for Delphine and me, but for him and me, for Ma and me. For the simple fact that we as the Quartey family have our own complicated, quantum love, and I think I finally, finally understand exactly how beautiful it is.
And will be.
Later that night, I’m opening windows to let in the wet October air. I can’t decide if I’m hot or cold, and so it seems better to err on the side of a cold room and then huddle under blankets if I need to.
I have the second window swung open when it happens. I see something in the glass behind me, a fluttering, and I turn to see a wren perched on the top of my headboard.
“How did you get in here?” I murmur, stepping toward it as it tilts its head and studies me with one eye. It chirps and sidles a little toward the side of the headboard, then flies up to perch on a bar I have mounted to the wall for perverted sex reasons. “Come on then, let’s get outside with you—”
The bird chirps once more and then disappears. Not flying away, not hopping down, not moving at all. It’s simply there one moment and gone the next, and I am frozen with a confusion I’ve never felt before. Because even with the things we’ve seen at Thornchapel, I’ve never, never doubted that I saw them. I knew I had, I knew they were real in their own fashion.
I’ve always been able to trust my senses.
But that wren was never really there.
It takes me a very long time to fall asleep that night, long enough that the sleep doesn’t even feel like sleep before the morning comes, it feels like a fitful, foggy haze instead. And when I wake up, chilled and sweaty and aching, I know something is wrong.
I wrap myself in the warmest, softest clothes I can find and go to Thornchapel.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Auden
The girl at my feet is exquisite. She is artful obscenity.
She is living surrender.
Marks already decorate her tits and thighs, her hands are bound, her full lips are parted for my cock, which she takes and takes and takes, until I withdraw, leaving it jutting between us like a sword.
I reach down and untie her hands. “On the bed. On your stomach.”
She is naked, with a thick braid draped over one pale shoulder, and when she nods, the end of it brushes against a stiffened, lovingly abused nipple. “Yes, Sir,” she says, and moves to obey. I can see the pale flash of her soles as she walks through the shadows to our bed, and I think after we’re through tonight, I’ll play with them. Massage them and pet them unt
il she purrs.
But she doesn’t need to purr right now, my little bride, she needs to cry. For the past two weeks, she’s been growing more and more withdrawn, and sleeping worse and worse, and she says she’s fine, but it’s apparent to all of us that she isn’t. I’ve tried ordering her to rest, to take time off, I’ve tried pampering her, watching over her, until Rebecca, wrapped in her blankets by the fire and shivering with fever finally told me I was doing it wrong.
“She needs spanking, not spa days,” Rebecca said. Though her lips were dry and her eyes glassy, her voice was steady still. She’d come to Thornchapel more than a week before that with a fever and intermittent hallucinations—a wren, she said, always hopping away from her. She’s visited a doctor twice—was admitted once overnight in Exeter for observation and then released—and there’s nothing the doctors can find as the source of her fever. They’ve sent her on to a rheumatological specialist for a consult in a handful of weeks.
I’m terrified, if I’m honest with myself.
I’m terrified that she is ill with something that cannot be cured—or that can be cured by one thing only, which is closing the door.
But that is a worry for later, a problem for later. I have another problem draped across my bed at the moment, and it’s a problem I’m determined to solve. Rebecca is correct, and there is no getting to the treasure inside Proserpina without first breaking the lock. Much like her namesake’s mythical fruit, she is meant to be peeled open, and so peel I shall.
Checking to ensure that she’s comfortably positioned and can breathe easily—my mattress is firm and the blankets stripped back, but I still feel better knowing—I climb onto the bed with a few choice supplies, straddling her thighs on my knees and giving her backside a nice swat, loving the way it moves when I do, loving the way she moans in response.
Door of Bruises (Thornchapel Book 4) Page 28