“You didn’t know she was your mother.”
“No, I didn’t. And understand, our property is isolated. In a place filled with people who seemed beaten and gray, she was bright. It made me protective of her. If I caught anyone watching her too closely, I’d bring them trouble. She was the one who cared for me. Lloyd said something about her once I didn’t like, so I dragged him out to the stalls and ordered him to ride a stallion we’d acquired for studding. He was a winning bloodline, but he had suffered an injury and become a maniac. He’d thrown off his last two attempted riders. Myself being one of them. My father said he was a bargain, but even Colum was afraid. Lloyd pissed himself when I sent him for a saddle, and luckily Fiona intervened. I could have killed him. Lloyd was so anxious to be saved, he told her everything. Including what he’d said to invoked me.”
“What had he said?” I asked, prepared for a blush.
“He was with another boy hanging on the fence, watching her work with the dogs. He told us he’d watched a stud mount a mare the day before. Teresa had smacked him and threatened if he were caught spying on husband and wife doing that, he’d be off to jail. He said if that’s what people do in a marriage, he planned to make Fiona his wife.
“He was ten and I was seven, and she was much older, but I understood. I wasn’t in romantic love with her, but the affection was strong. What if she wanted to marry him too? It occurred to me once she found a husband she’d leave to start her own family, have her own children. I wasn’t trying to kill Lloyd, exactly, but it was the only solution my child mind could come up with at the time.”
“What did she do when she heard all this?”
“She sent him home to his cottage. Then sent me inside ahead of her. She was never afraid to hand down discipline to me. I was surprised she hadn’t on the spot. I was still angry, but all I thought about the long walk in was how worried she’d looked. She came in later but remained distant. She usually ran my bath, but she left my clothes on the bed and said from now on, I ran my own bath. She seemed nervous and wouldn’t look me in the eye. Now I know why.”
“She thought you had…feelings for her.”
“Looking back, I understand the difficult position my confusion placed her in. At the time it felt like rejection. Days went by, and she withdrew more and more. As if slowly weaning me off of our bond. I tried ordering her to attend to me and failed. She began sending Teresa to fill in her roles. Lloyd was smug, and it enraged me. I thought I was losing her. I was sure she was going to leave our cold house for a life of her own. A family of her own.”
“That must have been very scary,” Internally, I shuddered thinking how Tristan would feel if he thought I was going to abandon him.
“It was my greatest fear at the time. When authority didn’t work, I broke down. I pleaded with her to go back to how things were. She pulled me off of her and told me to stop this. She had tears in her eyes. She said one day I would run our house and I needed to act like it. One day I would meet a nice a lady and get married and have children. I would fill this house and make it happy,” he stated, as though reciting a fortune inside an almond cookie.
“What did you do?”
“It only made me more certain she was leaving. So I said the first thing I could think of. I threatened I’d make my father make her marry me. Then she would have to stay with me forever.”
My face fell. “Oh Daniel,” I said, reaching out to him in an entirely inadequate gesture of consoling someone who’s wound was so deep and old it didn’t seem to sting as much as it should have anymore.
“I knew nothing of what I was saying but that she would have to stay forever. That’s all I wanted.”
I squeezed my eyes shut. “I can’t imagine how she felt.”
“Nor can I. Appalled probably. And trapped,” he said, glancing towards me. “She began crying in earnest then and when I went to comfort her, she pushed me away. She demanded I go to my room and not come out until my father returned home. He arrived the next day. I told him most of what had transpired. He didn’t mind I’d tried to injure Lloyd. He called Fiona to the room and told her she’s never to deny me anything. Ever. It’s etched in my mind what he said to me then. In front of her, he said, ‘She is a commoner and a whore. They have their uses, but you will never marry the likes of her.’ She ran from the room in tears. He smiled before going after her,” he recalled, stiffening.
“How could she care anything about him after that? I thought you said she loved him?”
“She did. In some corrupt way, she had fallen in love with her captor, because that’s what my father was. Her captor. He gave her enough to hope and toyed with her. She wanted his acceptance more than anything,” he said, pityingly, and paused. “It wasn’t long after that day when I found them together in the kitchen. They both looked…pleased. I don’t think either of them looked that way in my company. She wasn’t here for me, I thought, she was here for him. It changed my world,” he said, turning his eyes to me again, briefly.
“We remained close but a crack had formed. There were patches, at times, but it widened. I was becoming aware of my social divide with others the more I spent time in the outside world. By the time I was in what you’d call high school, what began as a hairline crack in my relationship with Fiona had become an unbridgeable divide. I was becoming a man set to outpace my father in every respect, which he loved and disdained. I’d broken an old record of his at his alma mater when I came home that summer. They held a banquet celebrating. He didn’t come, but was quick to humiliate my peer’s fathers with my accomplishments. His smile grew twisted when he’d ask Sophie, ‘Aren’t you proud of your son?’ She spent a great deal of her time at our apartment in London, shopping, lunching with old girlfriends, seeing shows, and I never understood.”
“I can’t imagine.” I squeezed my eyes shut and shook my head.
“She had means to escape,” he explained numbly. “I was beyond caring. I had outgrown him and that place. It was Fiona who received the worst. As our relationship deteriorated, so had theirs. As insidious as he is, he can only get away with so much in the eye of the public. He saved the worst for her. That summer he beat her repeatedly, I later found out from Theresa. And he raped her. That’s what he was doing when I walked away that night.”
I was quiet for a while. “Did she ever get out of there?” I hoped for her.
“Yes. When I left that pub and returned to our estate, I demanded the truth, and Teresa told me everything. My mother wasn’t whisked away for the last few years for treatment. She was secluded with Colom in his cottage.” I bit down on my lip.
“I brought Lloyd back from London to Teresa. He’d sobered enough to come with me. She was lying in a filthy bed, frail. We took her, but she didn’t want it. She looked at me like she looked at my father in the kitchen the night he harmed her. Still, I forced my will. She is traumatized, I reasoned. Lloyd drove us to our small plane on an airstrip outside the property and I flew her to Ireland. I called Ahmed and he located a treatment facility there where I took her. She passed within the week.”
“At least her last days were with someone who loved her and that she loved.”
“She said almost a dozen times she should have prevented everything. But it didn’t end so sweetly. I was ready then to confront Hawk. He lied about her treatment. Then she confessed she didn’t want any. She insisted. I respected her wish and came every day to the sight of a woman dying for nothing. I read to her. I tried to feed her. Sitting across from her bed, I looked out the window and reflected to her. Remember the time I put Lloyd on that horse? Of course she did. I could have taken you away then, I said half-heartedly, we can’t blame ourselves. I had disconnected from her but it all came back. She was the true person in my life.
“She didn’t speak, but that wasn’t rare. I realized escaping with her wasn’t charity or empathy. It was an act of love. I let myself feel it again, like I had when I was small. I loved her like my mother. I kissed her head and said as much. I
left in grief, but it lit a hope. That I would change. She died that night and left behind a letter. I could tell it was written long before, folded and refolded many times. She couldn’t face me to tell me I was her son.”
I searched for a bright spot, replying, “At least you have the letter.”
“She was not in her right mind when she wrote it.”
“Oh.”
“I knew she loved me. But she had been through too much. The letter reflected that. How she came to be pregnant. How she was sorry she hadn’t stopped me from becoming Hawk, as though it were already done in her eyes.” I rested my hand on his shoulder.
“So I left, not angry. Not loved, but not unloved. I left with no one in the world able to say it,” he said simply. “Part of what took her will to go on was her love to me. It had become a weight to her. I left robbed of that lightness, that release, shown that I wasn’t worthy of the most unconditional love.”
I wanted to comfort him. But I could tell that’s not what he wanted.
I lay quietly in the silence of my bedroom with Daniel. His mind seemed elsewhere, his eyes focused on the ceiling. The story hung in the air, stirring it. Tragedy, juxtaposed against my crisp white room with white sheets, stories above a busy city in motion. Boats full of people cruising the river below. Many miles away from the beautiful estate in which he’d grown up that was a house of horror. Her life and the pain it must certainly have caused Daniel had scabbed over thickly. Looking at him I wondered if most of the regret I caught in his reflection wasn’t for his inability to feel closer to that particular hurt anymore.
“Daniel.”
My hand squeezed. “I want you to tell me.”
His head turned on the pillow. The light refracting in his green eyes like beautiful stones. He read me and turned, pulling his arm from under my pillow and stretching it beneath his. “It doesn’t matter,” he said.
“Tell me.” I repeated each word more carefully.
His body tensed, but as he spoke, it relaxed. “We met that night, and something miraculous happened,” he spoke, uninflected.
“We had a child.”
“No,” said Daniel. He reached his free arm across his chest over to mine. “More,” he said, cupping my breast, letting his hand slide until it rested meaningfully over my heart. He didn’t break eye contact.
“I fell in love,” I said, what I’d felt he’d implied many times. It seemed no more real than if he’d told me I was a unicorn. It wasn’t what he wanted to hear, so I asked, “And you?”
“You are my raison d’être.”
I swallowed at the declaration—and the tense.
“Why didn’t you tell me this?” I asked, putting it on him. “When we first met, why didn’t you run up to me and tell me? Why didn’t you just ask me on a date?”
“For what purpose?” he defended simply. “You share your body with me eagerly, yet it’s meant nothing. And now that I’ve told you, has anything changed? Do you feel any differently?” I felt Daniel scrutinizing me, but he only found what he’d expected. “Save your pity.” He removed his arm from beneath him, sliding it smoothly back under my pillow. “I know she is dead now.”
I didn’t disagree. He was staring at the ceiling again with a tight set in his jaw. I thought back to my conversation on the street with August.
I stared at him as I spoke. “I don’t think we should do this anymore.”
“No,” he refused.
“What?” I replied.
“No,” he said, resolved, before continuing in a quieter tone. “Maybe she’s gone, but maybe no. There is the chance…that after all this time, she’s been waiting for me, too.”
“Daniel….” How could I explain that love wasn’t on the cards, and probably never had been?
“No.” He shut his eyes. “I must try.”
“It doesn’t seem…reasonable,” I said—healthy, I meant.
“Reason has nothing to do with it. It’s true what your nightclub friend said before the fight. You would not have given me a chance, but that night, you did. You didn’t know who I was, and that was the greatest gift.”
“Status is an advantage, but honestly for you, I don’t think it’d be a challenge without it,” I said, taking in his face, his neck, the scent of his skin. I didn’t need to look lower to prove the point further.
“I mean to say, if you had known me, as I was then, you would not have opened yourself,” he stated patiently. Plenty of women would be with him, wealthy or not. But he was right. If I’d have met him back then, I would tuck tail and run. I had no misconceptions about the girl I was, but still, he was telling me the impossible. I did know one thing for sure; he believed it. He believed it body and soul.
Daniel moved under the sheets, coiling towards me smoothly, until his body hovered above mine, “My answer is no,” he finalized, his eyes locking with mine.
He waited for me to show some sign of agreement. I drew the sheet from under the crook of his arm, squeezing my eyes closed. “This is wrong,” I said.
I could see the gears of his mind shifting. He peered down. “Is that truly how you feel?” he demanded softly. He was giving me a window. More like a peephole, but it sounded like, maybe, if I was adamant enough, if I got up and stormed out right now…he might let me go and never bother me again.
To my immense shame, I didn’t say no. He was beautiful. It felt like nothing else, being with him, engulfed in him. Physically. But I knew what being in love was, I’d seen it, and it wasn’t here, it wasn’t in me. I didn’t understand it. And part of me hated him. Not little hate, a deep cutting gash of burning steel. Hideous and strong. I felt my forehead flash hotly thinking of it and pushed it away, like I had to each time he walked in a room and I focused on extracting for myself only his good. But I couldn’t get out of this bed. I didn’t want to give this up. I felt the lines begin to blur.
I moved to comfort him, to run my hand down the gradual slopes of his arm, but he drew back, raising his body higher. The look in his eye frightened me.
“You do not know what it is to be nothing in the presence of the one who means all,” he confided, reflecting utter torment, offering me himself anyway. Knowing what I couldn’t give yet willing to let me use him. “It’s a torture I can’t be without.”
“Sometimes, when we are together she’s here,” Daniel said, his hand cupping my neck, sliding upward, feeling his thumb run along my throat. His fingers combed my hair and drew it out, splaying it onto the pillow, admiringly, then arranging it—like a doll. My mouth fell open but I stayed perfectly still. “She is perfect,” he whispered, I rested my hand lightly on his concave cheek to stir him. Without distraction, he grabbed my wrist and laid it back down, covering it until it stilled.
My gaze shifted all over, searching his face, begging for contact he was refusing to see. When he found the lone freckle next to my ear as if remembering an old friend, he smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes. I watched his tormented gaze sweetly trace the line of my cupid’s bow, searching my lips, my brow, my cheek; recalling and memorizing, in memoriam, refusing to meet the one place that betrayed the lie. My eyes.
“Daniel,” I choked, my heart breaking for him.
He revealed my body to the sunlight as he moved lower, taking the sheets down with him and dropping kisses like dew. “This is the body I love,” he mourned adoringly, watching hands run more fervently across peaks and valleys. He kissed the plain of my stomach, he kissed me all over, with increasing intensity and a passion that devoured.
“Let me have this,” his voice husked desperately between kisses, but this time he was the broken one. “Let me worship you,” he said, like a man capable of doing just that, at the altar of an idol that was fallen in a great war no one could recall. My fingers twisted in his hair and I shut my eyes.
In a bed up high in streaming sunlight from a cloudless sky, glittering off the Hudson, we were my illuminated forms under the cover of white sheets; and beneath them, two ghosts.
&nbs
p; ~o~
I woke up laying on his chest. I’d heard the low noise—a quiet rustle. Daniel running a hand through his hair. How did I know that sound so well? We’d been in bed for a while and I must have fallen asleep. He looked like he hadn’t. I reached for my phone on the side table to check the time, accidentally picking up Daniel’s. I quickly set it down after seeing the time, and exhaled, letting the flash of heat in my forehead cool. We had an hour left, before I picked up Tristan, in our Switzerland. It wasn’t a lawless place, but possession was still nine-tenths. I rolled back, pushing away his personal text message from Kate, kissing his chest, my hand stretching lower instinctively.
“Perhaps I was just in the right place at the right time. After all this,” he said, sharing what was on his mind, stopping my hand. “You shouldn’t touch.”
“When we met, you weren’t naive. You were waiting,” he said to me. “When I looked into you, I knew what I held. Maybe I just needed to have you. I plucked you gently from the lovely ground and you bloomed in my hand. I thought that made my hand special because I brought you no sun. You were an orchid at midnight, bloomed by moonlight. Every person since you have shown your bloom has fallen for you irreparably and stayed.”
He laid my hand on my chest. “Intention means letting something go. That is the bargain. What we are taught.” His words were pretty and he was angry.
He recollected, no longer looking in my eyes. “We found new earth that night. Not yours, not mine. New soil filled with the minutes of the night and the potential of every hour until end, and longer. We have not found that place again.”
In the Land of Milk and Honey Page 38