Broken Waves

by Aitana Moore

  “I’ll pack,” she said.

  “Why, do you want to leave?”

  “I think it’s best, no?” Her eyes ran over the room, then shifted toward him. “Don’t you want me to?”

  “Not at all. Good cardio.”

  She did laugh. “Don’t be stupid!”

  “I mean,” he said, cocking his head. “I’m not really the type who loves me a pitched battle all the time, but it looks like we both have bad tempers, and that anger management did absolutely fuck-all for us. Still, according to the principle of deterrence, after this show of force we might keep each other calm.”

  Shaking her head, Lee gave a wry smile. “Don’t know if that principle works so well.”

  “Sometimes it results in a cold war, and we would definitely not want anything cold. Still,” he said, sliding toward her. He placed his legs on either side of her body and brushed her hair away from her face. “Not ready to see the last of you.”

  “You think I’m interesting because I might just kill you?”

  He smiled back at her, and there was the boyish defiance in his eyes again — as if he dared her to. “No, I just think you’re interesting.” Pulling her close, he nuzzled her lips with his. “And then there’s this.”

  “What is this?” she whispered, even as her short breaths betrayed her.

  His hand found the edge of her robe and slid up her body. He caught a nipple between the length of two fingers as his other fingers cupped her breast. “Progress has been made. What kind of therapist would I be, if I didn’t continue the treatment?”

  “Don’t talk about it,” she begged.

  “No,” he said, his lips against hers. “It’s not a talking therapy, thank God.”

  She was frightened of what he made her feel, but there were reasons for her to stay. There were fifteen million reasons, Lee told herself.

  FIFTEEN

  Lee’s fear was real, and in the days that followed their physical bond became a tug of war, or rather two: one of Lee against Bryce, the other of Lee against herself.

  She knew what pleasure felt like now — but instead of a garden of delights, she found a lunar landscape full of doubt. The thought that she might become dependent on a man was so overwhelming that sometimes her body would lock like a vault. He would always notice she had shut down, even if she tried not to show it.

  No matter how attracted he was to her, he managed to keep his head, at least in bed. As she dictated what they would or would not do, there was a glint in his eyes that told her he would do whatever he pleased, eventually.

  At that moment, he had stopped touching her because she had kept him from sliding down her body. He put his head on the pillow and began talking of where they could go that afternoon, as if they weren’t lying naked together.

  She wanted him to continue, but he meant to ignore her. It was what he did when she had a fit of shame or anxiety. Her body crept closer to his and she caressed his chest, letting him know that she was ready for him, but he yawned, stretched and got out of bed. Lee was outraged as he walked to the bathroom, leaving her to her desire.

  As the day wore on, she swore to get revenge. Did he think he owned her? He would see. She would have the last laugh.

  The day passed — and he didn’t touch her.

  She watched him from the terrace as he swam laps in the pool. It was as if he had bowed out and left her to her lone struggle, since there was nothing left to deny him.

  James St. Bryce would have made a great criminal. He was a shape shifter and a good psychologist. He was merciless, when he cared to be.

  The ultimate surprise might be that I want his diamond, but every day he surprises me.

  Bryce was also chivalrous in an old, old way. He would stand as she entered a room, pull her chair, take her hand when they climbed down the cliff to the beach, carry her shopping as they walked together in town. She imagined men and women in another century, unable to touch each other beyond what politeness would allow; she imagined them burning for each other all day long.

  Lee couldn’t give in. She called him “James” to his face but kept saying “Bryce” in her head. Sooner or later she would steal his blue diamond. It was better to hate him than to want him.

  But it was in Villa Rossa that Lee began thinking of Mia Archer.

  She had at first dismissed the case against Bryce, knowing that anyone around a violent death or an accident could be considered a murderer. The efficient British police had investigated him and let him go, and his conversation about killing atop the Gothic arches of Balbina might have been simple provocation. But her interest in Mia was awakened when she witnessed his rage. It had appeared before a second had turned into the next. In that second, he had become someone else entirely — the ape he had said he cherished.

  Bryce had to go to the marina to renew the yacht’s registration, and Lee took the chance of looking around the villa. The first thing she noticed, after going through it from top to bottom, was the absence of a safe. At least there wasn’t one she could find. Well, she hadn’t thought the diamond would be in Sicily, anyway. Al Madhi had kept the ruby in his yacht, or anywhere he went, to keep it from his wife’s clutches. Bryce was free. He didn’t have to carry anything around with him, and he didn’t seem afraid of losing things.

  The second thing was that there wasn’t a single photograph of Mia in the entire house. Not one. There were several of a girl who must be Caitlin, but there was no Mia.

  There was no trace of her anywhere: no feminine touches, no clothes, no objects that might have belonged to a woman, apart from what was in his sister’s room.

  It was as if he couldn’t bear to see her at all.

  He must have loved her a great deal.

  For the first time in a while, Lee took her phone and googled Mia. She had been a successful model, and there were hundreds of photos of her on the internet. Mia of the dark hair, the black eyes, the full lips. Mia had been stunning.

  When, scrolling sideways, she happened upon a photo of Mia and Bryce together, it was as if she had been sucker-punched.

  He had loved a woman, had had a life with her. Lee’s throat thickened, and her stomach hurt until she understood with surprise that she wasn’t interested in Mia because she thought James might have killed her. She was jealous.

  She was wildly jealous.

  The image of Bryce loving another woman, in the same bed they now shared, made tears jump to her eyes.

  When he returned, she pulled him to her. His body was cool from the sea, hers hot from misery, and she asked him to close the shutters, but he wouldn’t. There was no escaping him. He was determined to educate her. Sex wasn’t meant to be tidy — it was an exchange where permissions were given, one after the other, where there was gentleness and violence from both sides.

  She ran bruised lips over the scratches on his shoulders before she fell asleep. When she awoke, he was sitting on the bed by her side. It was already evening.

  “Come,” he said.

  He helped her put on a dress and led her through the villa to a room inside his office. It was his darkroom, and she had already seen it that day. But this time Lee gasped. Prints were now hanging from a line to dry, and most were of her. She was in Rome — studying the Bernini statues, buying fruit in the outdoor market, eating an ice cream.

  She was in bed, naked and asleep. Her body made curves against the white sheets.

  “James, you can’t have that!”

  He looked like a devil in the red darkroom light. “We can tear them up and burn all the negatives. But I wanted you to see how beautiful you are.”

  “No,” she shook her head. “This is …”

  He put a loose arm around her and indicated a photo where she lay on her back, her hair clinging wetly to her breasts. “Thou art all fair,” he quoted. “There is no blemish in thee.’ ”

  She turned around in his arms, away from the image, but didn’t look at him. “The Bible? Really?”

  “Well, the Old Testame
nt, when things were epic.”

  “I’m some old sinner, then, or a barren desert woman?”

  “No, and not a goat either. A queen. So stop being ashamed,” he said. “There’s nothing vulgar about you.”

  “Because you aren’t vulgar,” she replied. “You don’t think like other people.”

  He gave her another cheeky grin. “Don’t know about that.” Glancing around, he asked, “Shall we torch all the photos?”

  And Lee surprised herself by saying, “No. Not yet.”

  “You’ll let me have them a while, then?”

  “Yes.”

  “Hell’s bells, I think you almost trust me.”

  Her smile would have been sad, but she made it bright. “Almost.”

  But later, when they were in bed, he said sleepily, “I need to go home.”

  Lee hid her dismay. “Do you?”

  “Yes,” he said, but he was nearly drifting off, and she didn’t ask him any questions.

  Would he invite her to go with him? Or was his experiment over? She needed to get to the safe, but she dreaded leaving the old villa in the sun. She dreaded the change that was coming at them like a monster already moving in the dark.

  SIXTEEN

  A familiar mix of dread and excitement flooded Lee as the immigration officer at Heathrow opened her fake American passport. He ran the encoded information on the opening page through his computer, and she kept her face blank. Bryce, however, tapped the counter twice. It was a slight, unconscious gesture of impatience, but the soft thuds of his finger sounded like explosions to her.

  The officer stared at Lee for a bare second — time enough for her to imagine him turning to summon the guards. Instead, he said, “Have a good stay.”

  Bless you, Quinn.

  London was gray, black and steel blue. Everything seemed delineated by fine ink. Everything was precise, fast and ruthless. They had left the hot yellow days behind, the summer rain and the old bed. This was the real world.

  Lee winced at the noise of wheels on the wet pavement and at the drops of rain falling on the windshield as they drove to Bryce’s apartment.

  “Come on, you don’t have anything better to do,” he had said three days ago.

  She thought that he might ask her to go home with him — men always did — and she had half wanted to say: No, I have to go. I have things to do. She could have said that and never seen him again, but he had pulled her close and started to kiss her breasts over her shirt, and she knew that she would go, for more selfish reasons than she might have followed a different path.

  Bryce’s flat was by the Thames, and it didn’t look like a home at all. It was a folly in glass and steel that some top architect had created to keep millionaires prisoner. He had expensive art and designer furniture, but the real star of the place was the huge window that looked out at Westminster Abbey.

  Again, there was no sign of a woman anywhere. Had Mia never been there, or had he erased her presence as he had in Villa Rossa?

  In any case, London moved at a very different pace than Rome or Sicily. Bryce received a business call almost as soon as they arrived. Halfway through it, he walked into an adjacent study and pushed a wooden panel aside to reveal a safe. He opened it and stood sifting through papers until he found what he was looking for. Pacing back and forth as he consulted the sheets in his hand, he continued the conversation.

  Lee stood in the middle of the living room, shocked by the gaping safe. She could probably just amble over and glance inside, but she didn’t. Instead, she put her forehead against the window, watching the black water of the river below.

  Bryce’s reflection appeared behind her. He had finished his call and now whistled a tune as he looked through his correspondence. A large manila envelope caught his interest. It contained a narrow blue case.

  “Look, I’ve got something for you.” She turned to face him, fearing what it would be. “I know you never wear jewelry, but I thought that unless it’s a psychosis you might make an exception?”

  The case was in his hand, and she wanted to say, “No, no, I don’t want you to give me jewels! Not you.”

  He snapped it open, and inside it there was a thin, delicate chain in white gold and a round medal engraved with geometric forms. She saw at once that it represented two people with stars above them. Three of the stars were tiny — but very good —diamonds.

  “Hate it?”

  Lee shook her head.

  “May I?” he asked.

  She nodded, lifting her hair so he could fasten it behind her neck. He planted a kiss there without saying anything.

  The thought went through Lee's mind like the swift cut of a razor: I love you. She turned to kiss him and kept her face against his, so he wouldn't see how horrified she was.

  Later, he cooked them dinner as she sat on a high stool, watching him. He laughed as he glanced at her.

  “I just had this vision of you as a little girl. Dark-haired, probably a little bit of a tomboy.”

  She nodded. “Yes. I liked to see the stuff boys would do, how they'd make things. They looked so free, you know?”

  “It’s a good time, childhood. Pity the adults are there to spoil it. That’s why I’m having mine a second time.”

  “Are you?”

  “Yes. I’ve done what everyone has to spend their lives doing: I’ve made the money. It’s true that there was some to begin with. Lots of land and crumbling houses. I was lucky, but getting rich was a sterile process.”

  “Was it?”

  Nodding, he poured her a glass of wine. “Just moved money from one side to another. I was lucky, too, that my friend is a whiz at that. He was lucky I told him to go for the risky stuff. It worked out well for us.”

  “So what’s left to do?” she asked him.

  “Plenty.” He took a sip of his wine before he threw pieces of eggplant into a pot with tomato sauce. “When you’re in the desert, you wake up and listen to the silence, but you know it’s not just silence. You can hear the breeze shifting the sand. Sometimes it picks up, because a wind is coming. In a jungle, you’ll hear live things stirring — the birds, the monkeys. You can hear things crawling, even. You can smell the rain about to fall, ripe fruit in trees, animals that are nearby. Your senses are sharp. You’ll spend the day earning your food and your rest.”

  “Most people couldn’t live like that.”

  “No, there are too many of us. And it’s true that it’s not easy — I just find it a bit easier than to be locked in rectangles with glaring lights and machines ringing.”

  “Then you want to go play in the mud again?”

  “I need to.” He turned from the stove and gave her a lopsided smile. “Need to be a man part time. You’ll come with me. I’ll protect you.”

  “You’ll probably have to. I’ll start screaming at the first ant colony.”

  “I doubt that, somehow. Come on, wouldn’t it be better than a kick in the teeth?”

  Lee pretended to consider his question. “I guess so.”

  "Does that mean you have been kicked in the teeth?"

  "By a mule, but she was all I had."

  After dinner, he forbade her from helping, cleared the table and began to clean the kitchen. She moved to the sofa, finding a guitar propped up against the wall. “May I?” she asked.

  Bryce looked over his shoulder. “Certainly. If you know how to play.”

  “I won’t ruin your guitar, don’t worry.”

  “Can you sing?” Bryce asked. “Serenade me, then.”

  Lee plucked at the guitar a little, then softly began,

  Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound

  That saved a wretch like me

  I once was lost, but now am found

  Was blind but now I see …

  Bryce had turned off the tap as he listened to the voice he didn’t know she had, ringing clear in the large room. She had always been able to abandon herself to music.

  ‘Twas Grace that taught my heart to fear

&nb
sp; And Grace my fears relieved

  How precious did that Grace appear

  The hour I first believed

  He moved closer, his hands wet and forgotten by his side.

  Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound

  That saved a wretch like me

  I once was lost, but now am found

  Was blind but now I see.

  “I had no idea,” he said, moments after she had finished. “I had no idea you could do that.”

  She shrugged. “Used to sing it in church when I was little.” She gave a short laugh. “When I believed.”

  Lee didn’t look up, but she felt him approach and take the guitar from her hands. She let him lift her and take her to bed.

  But afterwards, in the silence, she thought of the safe in the living room.

  She had thought one way and then the opposite a thousand times since he had left it open. Why wouldn’t he? He didn’t think he had any reason to distrust her.

  She had thought one way and then the opposite ten thousand times.

  Now she claimed to be thirsty but didn’t let him get water for her. On naked feet, she went to the kitchen and dissolved a Valium in his glass. A life without trusting anyone was impossible, therefore it wasn’t hard to fool people if you were willing to lie.

  Bryce drank the water and fell asleep, and she lay with a tightness in her chest that was like grief.

  There was no time for a proper extraction. She had to take the diamonds and run. Lee didn’t kiss Bryce, touch him or look at him as she put on her jeans, a sweater and Converse sneakers on her feet. She grabbed all her documents and her bag before leaving the bedroom.

  It seemed like a million steps to the safe. It seemed like steps to the gallows. When she got there, the safe was empty.

  Lee stuck a desperate hand inside, feeling for a case, for any object. There were only papers. It was the only thing that could have helped her: to find the ring, take it and leave — but it wasn’t there. Her insides felt as if they were melting. Soon she would be nothing but a pool of dirty water gathering at the bottom of a sink.