Wildalone

by Krassi Zourkova

  Another roll of thunder. The train had taken off and promptly vanished in the distance.

  “Talk to Rhys, please. There are things about my brother that I’m sure you would—”

  “Your brother is a liar, Jake. And not just that. He is cruel and selfish. I saw him having sex with another girl, right in front of me, and he wouldn’t even stop. So I have no intention—none whatsoever—of talking to him ever again.”

  “Even if this wasn’t exactly what you think you saw?”

  “Not exactly? Then what was it, his double? Are there three of you now—the sex maniac, the elusive ghost, and the exonerated hero?”

  He shook his head. “You have it all backward.”

  “No, backward would be if Rhys caught me having sex and then my sister, out of the goodness of her heart, decided to arrange a reconciliation for us. Except I don’t sleep around and Elza happens to be dead, so . . . bummer. Otherwise she might have been quite convincing, don’t you think, with her—I believe you called it unmatched—beauty?”

  “Me? What are you talking about?”

  “About Elza. She’s the real reason you came to my first concert, isn’t she? And with a white rose, no less!” I could see the fret in his eyes, more eloquent than any answer. “Nothing wrong with that; I take your undying adoration of her as a compliment. Too bad I couldn’t live up to it, though, right?”

  “Thea, what’s gotten into you?”

  “Your butler gave me a photo last Saturday. There was a dedication on the back: To the most beautiful girl in the world. And a heart made up of the musical clefs. Very clever.”

  “First of all, I was only twelve back then. I had no idea what I was doing. And yes, I wrote that thing, but . . .”

  “But what?”

  “It was a world in which you didn’t exist.”

  “Now I do exist, Jake.”

  We stood there, looking at each other, as if an invisible wall had come between us.

  “My hands are tied; you know this. Rhys is my brother, which makes me a brother to you. You have to help me try.”

  As I walked away, I caught one last glimpse of him. He slid down on the nearest bench and remained there. Leaning back. Motionless. Face turned up toward the heavy platform roof—a grid of beams that could have been sky.

  “SORRY, ARE YOU SLEEPING?” I really meant Are you crying?—Rita’s face was all puffed up, with swollen eyes and a red nose—but I didn’t want her to feel ambushed. “We missed you on the Street tonight.”

  “How was it? Any awkward encounters?”

  “Well . . . Dev was there, with a few guys. Dead drunk. Didn’t seem too happy.”

  “Tesh, I was actually asking about Rhys.”

  I stood by the door, unsure how to respond.

  “Let’s lie on the floor, it’s cozier.” She dropped a few pillows on the fluffy woolen rug (her one decor quirk; she claimed to have skinned Chewbacca). “Not that I want you to be running into Rhys or anything.”

  “No, me neither. By the way, you own some very strange objects.” I pointed to what looked like a magnified powder brush, propped on its handle in the middle of the floor.

  “Do you like it? It’s a lamp.” She pressed a button, and a blue luminescent cloud engulfed the spray of hair-thin tubes. “Fiber optics: light conducted by glass. I’ll be writing my thesis on this next year. Imagine a fiber capable of transmitting three months of HD video in a single second!”

  I loved listening to her talk about things I understood only vaguely. Jake had done it too, in that telescope room under the dome of stars.

  She frowned and turned the lamp off. “I really should throw this thing in the garbage.”

  “Why? It’s beautiful!”

  “Yes, except it also happens to be a gift.”

  “From Dev?” It had to be, given how upset she looked all of a sudden. “What’s going on between the two of you?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Of course it does. Especially if you spend your evenings on a dorm room floor, with your phone turned off and staring at fiber optics. Please tell me what’s wrong.”

  “Dev and I . . . we had an issue with New Year’s. He’s going home and supposedly wanted to invite me, but his family would have been outraged.”

  “What’s their problem?”

  “That I’m not Indian. Technically, the problem isn’t theirs, since he never bothered to mention he was seeing someone. So I told him to take a hike. Now he can go find himself a proper Hindu princess, just in time for the holidays.”

  “Maybe he’ll change his mind.”

  “He won’t. The guy is a total sucker for what others think of him. And even if he did, I refuse to sit around while he does his soul searching.”

  “I know the feeling.”

  “Luckily, you don’t. Yours is a different kind of beast.”

  My “beast” was exactly the same: indecisive, paralyzed by family duty. I realized how much I needed to talk to someone. Besides, Rita and I were finally connecting as friends instead of one mentoring the other—so I told her everything. My crush on Jake. How I had mistaken Rhys for him. And how, ever since, he had been stepping aside, leaving me to his brother.

  She stayed quiet for a while, then shook her head. “That’s incredible! You know I’m not a fan of those two. And I hate to defend either of them, especially after the Ivy episode last week. But I have to ask: What on earth were you thinking?”

  “Me?”

  “You, yes. First you choose Rhys over him, then the two of you proceed to have this super-intense romantic affair in every house they own on the East Coast. And now you expect Jake to go after you and try to win you away from his own brother? I mean, come on, Tesh, what planet are you from?”

  I listened to her, amazed that she would say these things. And afraid that she might be right.

  “Frankly, I’m starting to like this Jake guy. To still purr at your feet after all this? Oh, and Tesh, if you’re really that into him, do something about it. Don’t be a wimp like . . . like everybody else. Otherwise some other girl will be spending New Year’s with your man, as simple as that.”

  I left her room and looked at my watch. Past midnight. No way to do anything without breaking social norms.

  But none of that mattered. All I wanted was to see him. And Rita was right: I had waited long enough.

  HE PICKED UP AFTER THE first ring: “Thea?”

  “I want to see you.”

  “You just saw me. Has anything happened?”

  “No, but I do.”

  “It’s almost one o’clock . . .”

  “What difference does it make?”

  Silence.

  “I want to see you.”

  “Okay, I’m coming over.”

  It took him only minutes to drive to Forbes. He entered my room but stayed by the door—as far from me as possible.

  “Thanks for getting here so quickly.” I had no idea what to say to him. How to make up for months of mistakes. Where to even start. “You don’t want to take off your jacket?”

  The jacket stayed on. “Thea, what is it?”

  I want to be with you, I’ve been wanting it for so long. Saying it to him had seemed possible, earlier, when I wasn’t yet in his presence.

  “Sorry, that was rude of me.” He slipped the jacket off and folded it over the back of the chair, then came nearer. “What’s wrong?”

  “Jake, I . . .” Our chests almost touched. His shirt was so close, his warmth so palpable under it. “I’m not going back to Rhys.”

  “We can talk about it again, if you want. But you have to see him.”

  “I have nothing to say to him.”

  “That might change, once you give him a chance to explain.”

  “I don’t want his explanations. He’s not the one I should be with.”

  I had finally said it. A hot flush went through me, my face was probably all red—but I didn’t care. My fingers slipped under his shirt, over his stomach—
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  His hands, much stronger than mine even when they hesitated, closed around my wrists and slowly pushed them away. “I would do anything for you. Anything. But don’t ask me to betray my brother.”

  “How are you betraying him? Rhys and I aren’t even together.”

  “That’s for the two of you to decide.” He reached for his jacket. Then the door.

  “Jake—” I was now frantic for a way to stop him. “Fine. If you insist, I’ll see him.”

  His hand froze on the doorknob. “You will?”

  “First thing tomorrow. On one condition.”

  The question smoldered behind the alert blue of his eyes. But this calm was a mask. It had to be.

  “Kiss me.” And don’t you dare walk out that door, or I’ll never speak to you again. “Not on the cheek, like you almost did once. Really kiss me.”

  I saw the anger erupt, a dark wave of alarm and pain. Transforming his face. Aging it. He dropped the jacket down. Walked across the room—just a couple of steps, carefully. Stopped in front of me and reached for my face: no hesitation this time, the inevitable had started happening. His beautiful fingers took my chin, lifted my mouth up toward his until we felt each other’s breath, then closer, his own lips opening—

  I had imagined it so many times, but he erased everything. No one had kissed me before him. No one had touched me, or looked at me, or known that I existed. I began and ended there. He found me. Tasted me. Lost himself in me, as if I was the universe. His lips gave in to mine completely, dissolving me with their warmth, their softness, their incredible way of letting me know they had waited for me always.

  I lifted his arms, pulled his shirt off. He left his body to me—its unbelievably smooth skin; the fine hairs on his chest and down his stomach line; the freckles, scattered like shy constellations all over him.

  I stood on tiptoes, so my lips could reach his ear. “Take off my clothes.”

  He breathed faster as he opened my shirt—taking in every inch of skin that was baring itself for him under his fingers—and slipped it off my shoulders, down to my elbows, and then, with one final pull, made it fall to the floor.

  “All of them.”

  I wanted him to hold me naked—completely naked—in his arms. He unzipped my skirt. Pushed it down my legs. Then started kissing me all over, burying his mouth in me until I could no longer breathe.

  I moved his hand back to my hips, to the only piece of clothing he hadn’t dared to remove from me: “Everything.”

  I didn’t want to tell him that he would be the first. Just to let him feel it, if it could be felt, once he was inside me. My fingers found his jeans. Unbuttoned them—

  “We can’t, not like this.” His hands became violent, pushing me away again. “Not until I know what happens tomorrow.”

  “Nothing will happen tomorrow. Rhys and I are done.”

  “Maybe. But I can’t take this chance. I need to know.”

  He threw on his jacket. Didn’t even bother with the shirt. Then thought of something and turned around.

  “My heart will always be yours. Either way.”

  I HEARD THE RAIN AS soon as I woke up—my window was half open, and the tiptoe of drops down bare branches filled the room with its cryptic beat. It had come, with one unusually warm morning: the day when I would see Rhys to say good-bye.

  I was ready, in theory. But imagining something and going through with it were two different things. What exactly was I supposed to tell him, anyway? That I was now switching over to his brother, whom I had wanted from the start? And that this same insecure brother of his was sending me to break the news, instead of confronting Rhys himself?

  I threw on a sweater and went for a walk on the golf course. There wasn’t much rain by now, just a faint, inert drizzle. Already anemic, the grass had sunk into the earth, caught in premonitions of darkness and snow. Yet in one last whim of the dying fall, the rain had trickled through the blades, filling them up until they appeared—for a few final hours—fresh and vibrant with life.

  I tried to come to terms with what I had seen on these hills. To imagine taking Rhys back, if he offered enough excuses. He was a guy. He needed sex. The spontaneous, guilt-free sex that he wasn’t getting from me and that, frankly, most other girls were probably eager to give him. Add to this the family fortune and the genetic threat of dying young—no wonder he went through the world like a hurricane. Selfish. Destructive. Entitled to everything.

  The pine tree stood by the gravel path—almost collapsing, weighed down with rain, its ragged bark exposed in the daylight like the wrinkled skin of a man already too old to die. There was no menace under those branches. It was ordinary. Just a tree.

  I went back to my room, called Jake and told him I would be at his house in half an hour, to end things with his brother. All I heard was “I’ll tell Rhys”—then he hung up the phone.

  “Tesh, are you nuts? Where are you going in this weather?”

  Rita had just come out from brunch and saw me crossing the Forbes lobby. I looked through the glass doors. She was right: the rain had turned into a downpour.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll be fine.”

  “How exactly? It’s a deluge and you don’t even have an umbrella!”

  “I’m not made out of sugar.”

  “Nuts or blind? Hmm . . .” She lifted her hands, palms up, as if measuring on scales the likelihood of me being either. “Sorry, but I have to give you a ride.”

  “Since when do you have a car?”

  “Since I stopped wasting time with Dev and decided to jump-start my life. Now we can hit New York whenever we want!”

  The jump-start turned out to be a gray minivan. She had probably picked it for its size, to fit the entire RCA group.

  “So where to? Library or practice room?”

  “The corner of Springdale and Mercer, behind the Graduate—”

  “I know where it is. Although didn’t you say Jake had a dorm room?” When I wouldn’t answer, she shook her head and started the engine. “I thought you were done with Rhys. It’s your own life, of course, but I hope you know what you’re doing. I really do.”

  By the time she dropped me off, the downpour had stopped as suddenly as it had started. I was fifteen minutes early but it was better that way—we could get the whole thing over with sooner.

  The house waited on the other end of the lawn, undisturbed, crowned with its own silence. I realized, as soon as I saw it, that to me it would always remain his house—Rhys’s, not Jake’s—and that I would never want to be in it again.

  The wet grass squelched under my steps. I knew that the doors to the living room were closed, that there was no one on the granite stairs. But I saw Rhys as if he were real, rushing out to meet me. To lift me in his arms so that my shoes wouldn’t get wet. And to carry me. Carry me and kiss me through the entire lawn . . .

  Not this time.

  My feet found the stairs, my fingers—the handle of a door. Then I heard the two voices, echoing throughout the house from inside the library.

  “—because if that’s what you think, Jake, you are out of your fucking mind! It’s not why I allow you to live here.”

  “This is my home. I don’t need your permission.”

  “Stay out of my life, or you’ll never set foot near Princeton and you know it!”

  “Do whatever you want with your life. But it’s her life too.”

  “And since when is Thea’s life any of your business?”

  No answer.

  “What time did she say she’s coming?”

  “Ten more minutes.”

  “You’ll tell her that I went out. And that it’s better for her not to see me again—now or ever.”

  “You need to talk to her yourself.”

  “Are you starting again?” Something hit wood and hit it hard—the windows shuddered. “You’ll tell her exactly what I say!”

  “Rhys, you broke her heart . . .”

  “And you don’t think the truth would have bro
ken it? Stop lecturing me, because you have no idea what it’s like, being forced to lie to the woman you love.”

  “Then don’t lie to her. You never should have.”

  “Apparently, you and I differ on what I should or shouldn’t do. Especially as it concerns Thea. It’s rather presumptuous, actually”—his voice was charging up with anger again—“that you feel entitled to even have an opinion. But either way—you’ll do what I say and that’s the end of this conversation!”

  “What I will do is not your decision.”

  “Don’t make me turn against you, Jake. Or I swear—”

  “I don’t care what you do to me. She deserves to know and if you don’t tell her—”

  “Then what—you will? Is that it? Is that what my little brother will do for me?”

  This time his voice exploded with a rage I had never heard from anyone. The walls could no longer contain it, and it shook the entire place.

  “If you tell her anything—anything at all—I want you out of this house! Do not come back!”

  A door got slammed. When I came in, Jake was alone, bent over the writing desk.

  “Thea?!”

  “If you tell me what exactly?”

  “My brother is the one who should—”

  “Yes, he should. But your brother will never be honest with me; I think by now he’s made that more than clear. So please, don’t be like him.”

  He looked crushed. Defeated.

  “And don’t act like hearing the truth would kill me. I know most of it already.”

  “You do? How?”

  “It doesn’t matter how. I know about your family’s . . . about the illness that runs through generations. And the way your mom died. I was very sorry to hear it, but I really wish you and Rhys would just—”

  “It has nothing to do with my family. It has to do with yours.”

  He walked up to one of the bookshelves, pulled a large volume and showed it to me. Mikhail Vrubel. The Siberian who had painted the canvas in Rhys’s room.

  The leaves flew under his fingers. Portraits. Stylized icons. A still life here and there. Then a complete change of course: an obsession with Russian fairy tales. Girls becoming swans. Flying seraphs. Sea kings chasing red-haired maidens. Until a single image obliterated all the others—raw, magnificent, bursting its colors over two entire pages.