Darker Than Night

by Amelia Wilde

  “And it took him to stop you from getting to me?”

  He moves his hands again, up toward my knees, and higher. “There’s no one to stop me now.”

  My legs open for him and I hug the pillow. Sparks, flying. All of me is so desperately greedy and alive that by the time Zeus’s fingers meet my private flesh I’m wound tight enough to moan.

  “Ah,” he says, pushing two fingers into me. I’m so slick there’s no resistance, only a familiar stretch. “You’re very wet, sweetheart.” A hot breath on the curve of my back. “Is there something you need?”

  “A kiss,” I breathe, and he freezes—a heartbeat—and then he laughs.

  Then he turns me over and teases my clit with his lips and his teeth until I come all over him in a burst of pain and pleasure and relief.

  4

  Brigit

  I wake up sometime in the afternoon, still naked but tucked under covers that are so fresh and clean and un-hospital-like that I could die. Except I’d like to avoid that, very much. The first breath I take feels almost normal, but the second—

  Ouch.

  The door to the bedroom opens and Zeus comes in with a glass of water and a pill bottle, which he pops open with one hand. “Can you sit up?”

  Tensing my abs to think about it hurts. Everything hurts, actually. “No.”

  “Don’t try, then.” He puts the water and the pill bottle on the bedside table and leaves again, reappearing a minute later with a straw. He drops it into the water and folds it over, then sits down on the bed next to me. “Time to turn over.”

  I groan at the thought. It was a different life in the hospital, when they had IV painkillers and nurses on call at the push of a button. This hurts significantly more.

  “I know, sweetheart. No choice, though.” He runs a hand over my hair. “I can do it for you, if you want.”

  I open my eyes and glower at him. “Turn me over? I’m not dead, I’m just—” I try to do it to prove my incredible strength and end up frozen in place, panting small breaths through the pain.

  Zeus watches this with raised eyebrows.

  “Fine,” I tell him, as soon as I can stand it. “Do it.”

  He stands up and leans over, slipping his arms easily underneath me. “Breathe out,” he coaxes. “Not hard, or fast. Like a sigh. Until all the air is gone.”

  I do it, feeling like a fool, and as soon as the breath is finished he turns me, sitting me up the slightest bit against the pillows. It takes some of the burning pressure off the place between my shoulders. “How did you—”

  He holds up a hand. “Pill first.”

  “I don’t want it.” I want to see this house. I want to think things through. I want to do a hundred things that I can’t do with my brain shut down by heavy painkillers.

  “I don’t care.”

  I narrow my eyes, preparing for a standoff, but all the fight goes out of me when reality sets in. There’s not going to be a standoff. I almost died. And it really does hurt. So I swallow the pill and drink the rest of the water. This, absurdly, takes an enormous amount of energy. I close my eyes for a second—for a second—and when I open them Zeus has a small notebook open on his lap and is writing something down.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Keeping a record so I know what time you took your last pill. You have to have one every four hours.”

  I snort. “You’re writing it down?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re the most ridiculous person.” My mouth feels thick and heavy around the words. There’s no way the pill worked that fast, is there? Of course there’s a way. Where there’s a will there’s a way. Where there’s a pill there’s a way. I laugh out loud at my own joke and Zeus closes his notebook. Then he reaches over and swipes his hand down over my eyes. “You can’t just do that,” I tell him. “I’m not dead. Or a bird.”

  “I didn’t cover your cage.” A light kiss on my forehead, and then he’s gone, or I’m asleep, and it doesn’t matter anymore.

  The next two weeks are divided into four-hour blocks that begin and end with Zeus. Zeus shaking me awake with a glass of water in his hand. Zeus lifting me off bed and back in. Every four hours exactly, even in the night. I never hear an alarm. Does he stay awake the whole time and sleep only when I do? I don’t know. Do I say anything embarrassing? I’m sure of it. Over and over. But by the time he wakes me up again I’ve already forgotten.

  After the first week I find a new ability to stay semiconscious between pills and Zeus carries me out to the sofa and puts on movies. We only watch mildly dramatic movies for the first three days because laughing hurts and so does crying, but by day six, the pain is starting to fade.

  On day seven, I’m high as a kite during a movie about a dog that gets lost in San Francisco, but at least I’m awake. It’s progress. “I have to ask you something.” My tone comes out grave and determined. Serious as hell. Zeus shifts next to me. The only way I can sit for the length of a movie is if he props a pillow behind me a certain way and then puts his arm behind the pillow. It sounds stupid and it is stupid but it’s also true.

  “Ask me.” His eyes search my face.

  “Is this...” I trail off, looking at him. It’s not fair that he looks the way he does. A man who does bad, evil things should not look like an actual angel descended from heaven.

  “Brigit,” he prompts. “Do you need to go to bed?”

  “No. This is important.” I take a deep breath. “Is this the worst movie you have ever seen?”

  He shakes his head, letting out a breath, and works his arm free. “No,” he says dryly. “It’s my favorite movie.”

  Zeus lifts me off the sofa and I let him, because what other choice do I have? “Are you putting me to bed? I said I wasn’t tired.”

  He ignores me. The worst part is that when he tucks me in, I fall immediately asleep and don’t wake up again for another two hours and forty-two minutes.

  On day nine, he stops bringing me child-size snacks and we start taking dinner on the sofa like civilized people.

  On day thirteen, I’m in the middle of a bowl of stir fry when the most urgent question of my life springs into being. It’s been a long time, what with the painkillers, and the less my back hurts the more I stay awake. This does not make them any less potent. “Are there other people here?”

  Zeus answers this with a level look. “Do you see other people here?”

  “No, obviously not.” I take stock of the room again. “But you have people here.”

  “Like who?”

  “Like, people. Like staff.”

  “Occasionally.” He sticks his fork into his own bowl. “Not since you’ve been here.”

  My mouth drops open. “Then who’s cooking all this?”

  There’s a long silence. “Brigit.”

  “Yeah?”

  “You can’t be serious.” He flicks his eyes toward the ceiling like a praying man might. “You’re not cooking anything. Does that answer your question?”

  “You? It’s you?”

  “For Christ’s sake. You’re lucky you won’t remember this later.”

  “I will. I vow to remember it.”

  I don’t remember it. I only remember that he spends the rest of this time applying patches to the wound, proprietary treatments developed by some army somewhere that make it heal faster. I only remember the way he curses softly under his breath every time he removes the bandage and how gently he touches me when he replaces it.

  “I believe you,” Zeus says, clearly lying. “Watch the movie.”

  That night he helps me walk back to the bedroom and when we reach the door I find that he’s long since let go, and there was no pain. The last of the painkillers is starting to wear off. I test it a little more by walking into the bedroom by myself and sitting down. Zeus folds his arms over his chest and watches me from the threshold.

  “I’m getting better,” I tell him.

  He looks grim as he comes to stand in front of me. “Only a l
ittle.”

  “Are you going to write this down?”

  His eyes burn with a secret I can’t name. “Brigit, 11:48 pm. Exhausted. Hurting. Only slightly farther away from death than she was last night.”

  I reach up a hand to cup his cheek. “You don’t feel guilty, do you?”

  It flashes through his eyes, fast and fierce, like a comet. He does feel guilty. “Why should I? It was only my building that came down around you, that almost pierced your spine.”

  “I’m getting better,” I say again, my voice softer this time.

  He pulls another white pill from the orange bottle and places it on my tongue. A bottle of spring water washes it down. Then he helps me recline onto the bed. Soon my eyelids feel heavy. He pulls up the blanket to my chin. Then his large palm passes over my forehead, and it is like I’m a bird being put away for the night. Like I have a blanket over my cage, but I’m not going to rail against the bars. It’s cozy here. It’s safe.

  Thankfully, the painkillers don’t last forever. The morning after they run out I start the day with a newly cleared head. My back is healed enough to be able to roll over without thinking much about it, and I do it several times in the empty bed.

  His side is cold. He’s been gone for a while.

  The smallest excitement kindles in my chest. I don’t want him to be gone, but I do want to look around. Ever since we arrived, I’ve been so curious about this place. About him. I thought Zeus and the whorehouse were the same.

  Surprise.

  Not only are the two things not the same, but this is an inner secret of his, carefully guarded. He’s never mentioned it. No one at the whorehouse ever mentioned it. If the rest of the girls knew, they would all be vying for an invitation. There wasn’t even a whisper of this during the hours we spent getting ready for the evenings.

  My heart squeezes at the thought of them. Where are they now? What happened to all of them? My memory of that night is fragmented but I know they weren’t in the ballroom. I hope they weren’t in their rooms when the ceiling came down. I hope none of them were. Not even turncoat Savannah, who is still fairly mysterious, even now.

  He’s left me clothes for the morning in a neat stack on a chair by the bed. Soft shorts, underthings, a tank top, and a silk robe. On top of the stack is a note.

  He writes notes.

  My heart kicks itself into a run.

  Brigit—

  I have a meeting. Stay on the second floor.

  I’m coming back

  —Z

  I fold up the note and slip it into the pocket of the silk robe the moment it’s on, and then—because I’m only human—I go to snoop in Zeus’s house.

  The first thing that’s immediately obvious? It’s not just a second residence. This place is lived-in, which makes no sense to me. He was always working, always in his office, or on the floor, or upstairs.

  Or I only thought that he was. I believed the illusion because he wanted me and everyone else to believe it. The real truth is that he’s been here. The three books on the nightstand have dog-eared pages at different points. I bend down to read the titles. The first is a space western I’ve never heard of. The second is a hardcover called The Two-Mile Time Machine, about an ice core from Greenland. A giant, frozen chunk of ice that scientists use to learn more about the distant past.

  The third is Anna Karenina by Tolstoy.

  Everyone knows the line about happy families, and unhappy families.

  I let the books fall back into place and pad out into the living room. I’m coming back. That’s probably the most romantic thing he’s ever said to me. And he put it in writing, too.

  I spend the first hour in the kitchen. He keeps enough silver and dishware for a dinner party of six. He drinks pulp-free orange juice. He keeps three boxes of seashell pasta. One shelf in his fridge is entirely taken up with berries in glass containers. Raspberries. Strawberries. Blackberries. No blueberries, though. Odd. In a glass Tupperware by the microwave I find a covered basket of small pastries and steal one. It turns out to be an airy cinnamon roll.

  The list of things I can’t imagine him doing is shrinking. In the kitchen, I’m forced to imagine him doing things like drinking pulp-free orange juice and eating cinnamon rolls and leaning against the island and washing his hands in the sink. Every drawer I open lights him from a different angle.

  The second hour I spend in his bedroom closet. It’s big enough for him to change in, like his former closet, but this one doesn’t have any paintings. He doesn’t hide them here. They’re out where he can see them. In Zeus’s home he keeps a collection of his usual suits, plus a larger selection of casual clothes.

  He owns three pairs of swim trunks.

  It’s the swim trunks, more than anything, that makes me fall into another dimension of the swooning, painful crush I already have on him. I’ve imagined him on a beach so many times. A brief scene involving me asking him to go swimming sends heat rushing to my cheeks. Such an ordinary thing.

  When I’m finished with the closet I come out to scrutinize the paintings. They all have the same name scrawled in the corner. Erich something.

  I spend the third hour looking at his huge collection of books, pulling them out at random. In a few of them I find places he’s underlined.

  By the end of the fourth hour, he’s still not home.

  I need to stretch my legs.

  I walk back and forth across the living room but I want more than that, I want a little lift in my heart rate, so I make sure my robe is secure and stride to the main doors.

  No one is on the other side, or on the stairs. The lobby waits in silence while I consider the double doors.

  His note didn’t forbid going in here. It only said to stay on the second floor. And my impatience is starting to get the better of me. I need a distraction for the worry that’s lapping at my mind with growing waves.

  The doors are unlocked.

  One of them swings open with a whisper.

  I’m expecting complete darkness inside, and once again, I’m wrong.

  Zeus has divided the theater in two. The sunken floor creates another high ceiling, with tall windows. They’re closer to the ground, of course, so the light isn’t as intense as it is upstairs. He’s also taken out all the theater seats, because this is his office.

  He has a round meeting table to one side, surrounded with chairs. It’s covered in neat stacks of paper and clear at first glance that he wasn’t lying—people don’t come here. It’s a work table. A wheeled chair sits at an angle to a low-slung desk. I can see his pose from that angle. Feet up on the desk, a book propped in his lap. And the book waits for me in the center of the desk.

  If I weren’t paying attention, I might mistake it for one of the whorehouse ledgers. It’s not one of those ledgers. I circle the desk and look down at it. A blue cover. The cover has his neat print on the front—about three months ago.

  Goose bumps erupt down the length of my back. This whole place has a very forbidden energy about it.

  It’s irresistible.

  Zeus has been gone for more than four hours. He’s just as likely to be gone for another four. I step around the chair with extreme caution and open the cover of the book on the desk.

  It’s more than a ledger.

  It’s more than a notebook.

  It’s a journal.

  The very first page has a date in the upper-right corner—the same date as the one on the front.

  I should not be looking at this.

  I can’t help myself.

  I pull the robe tighter around me. I’m only going to read one. One page, and then I’ll close this and go back upstairs, like he told me.

  I saw her again this morning. Her/you. A figment of my imagination in that dress. M never wants to leave until I take him to the door and these women cannot get through a night without having a crisis. Three-drink minimum from now on. Five, and she’s just around every corner. You have got to get out of my brain, Katie. It’s been too long. And
not long enough.

  My throat closes up. He still thinks about her. Writes to her. I’m not jealous of her, not exactly, but I do ache for him. For the person he used to be. He still is that person, in a way.

  I’m due for another pill soon, but I don’t want to fog up my mind with it. Not now. Not when my heart is beating so fast.

  The next entry is from three days later.

  Demeter is paranoid this week. The courier message was particularly unhinged. Her daughter is not going to run away to the fucking city. Maybe we’d all be better off if she did.

  Three days after that:

  Anna Karenina: this book is bullshit

  I laugh out loud. Who is this person, who sneaks away from his entire life to write these things down in a secret notebook? I wonder if Anna Karenina has been sitting beside his bed all this time while other books cycle around it.

  That’s the end of the first page.

  God, I want to read another one. Just one more page of his writing. One more sentence. I turn it over, breaking my promise to myself, and I’m about to look down at the writing when another bookshelf catches my eye. It’s close to the desk, wide and tall, and the middle shelf—

  The middle shelf is full of notebooks just like this one.

  How long has he kept these journals? A pain at my back warns me that I’m due upstairs. The note in the pocket of my robe warns me. But a soft glow at the center of my chest keeps me pinned in place. It’s a wild, heady love.

  I’m so lost in it that I don’t hear the footsteps on the stairs. They’re very muffled, likely due to great insulation. The voice upstairs seems far, far away.

  Until it’s not.

  Until the footsteps are thundering outside the door.

  Until it slams open, and I’m caught in a slash of light from the window, caught by the golden anger of Zeus’s eyes.

  He steps into the room and the door closes behind him with a hard echo. I can feel my heart in my fingertips, feel every hair on the back of my neck as he stalks toward me—dangerous, dangerous—and I can’t move.