by P. J. Fox
Sitting down on the edge of the bed, he bent to unbuckle his boots. Having made a drunken fool of himself to the woman he loved, he was in a foul humor. Beside him, his companion—Nisha—stirred. She rolled over, exposing a swell of naked breast, and smiled up at him. Her smile was hard, knowing, and as real as his interest.
“Difficult night?” she asked.
He studied her, his gaze cold. “Make me believe it,” he said.
And, for awhile, she did.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Aria ran away from home for the first time when she was thirteen, and that was how she met Aiden.
Home was a terrible place, even more so after her sister got married. Zelda was ten years older, and Aria’s idol. She was bright-eyed, voluptuous and witty, everything Aria wasn’t. Aria, as a small child, had been plain. She looked more like the boys her age than the girls, a rail thin slip of a thing with skinned knees and eyes that seemed too large for her head.
She was, as her mother liked to comment, all eyes—especially when she brought Georgia’s maternal wrath down on her head by peering into things she wasn’t supposed to. Aria listened in behind closed doors as her parents fought, or her mother talked on the phone to her boyfriends. She listened as Zelda spoke in furtive tones to Hunter, the man she’d eventually marry. She listened for the sound of her father’s footsteps in the hall as she lay awake in bed, staring at the ceiling and hoping for a miracle. Theirs was an old house, and one particular floor board always creaked. Almost imperceptible to normal ears, but as loud as a gunshot to Aria. She heard that sound, and she knew.
Years later, she still heard his approaching footstep and woke up sweating. Even after the house, and the stairs, and the man were long gone. Her scream would die on her lips and she’d think about how much she hated him and wanted him dead. He’d…done things to her, and made her do things to him, but he’d been careful not to do anything that would leave lasting evidence. She’d lie face down on her sweat-soaked sheets, clenching her fists until her fingernails scored the skin and her palms bled, while he thrust himself inside her and told her that she was still technically a virgin and she’d always be daddy’s little girl.
Her mother was an alcoholic. “Too busy” to do anything except recline on one of the chaise longues on the screen porch and complain about how busy she was, her rage was the ever-present threat in all their lives. Even her father’s, who was as terrified of his wife as Aria was of him. Georgia’s rage was like a bank of hot coals, needing only the slightest breeze to fan them into roaring life. And, sometimes, if the mood struck her, no breeze at all—at least, not that anyone else could detect. In Georgia’s mind, however, she was never the aggressor. She was the victim. People didn’t joke with her, or attempt to make polite conversation; they attacked her, and she defended herself. Disagreements were an attack; differences of any kind were an attack.
When Zelda wanted to study history in college instead of theatre, like her mother, it was an attack. When Aria wanted to talk on the phone to her friends, it was an attack. When Aria brought home a bowl of blue hydrangeas that a friend’s mother had cut from her garden and told her mother that blue hydrangeas were her favorite flower, Georgia wrenched the bowl out of her hands and, throwing it across the room, screamed, who taught you to like blue hydrangeas? They were not Georgia’s favorite flower; Aria was rejecting everything her family ever taught her, all their values, just to be cruel and mean and different.
Aria was hateful; Aria was disobedient; Aria never did anything just to make her mother happy.
And while Georgia vented her disappointment at life through increasingly violent outbursts and Frank turned inward on himself and began raping his own daughters in a misguided quest for some kind of meaningful human contact, Aria and Zelda planned out how to escape an oppression so stifling that it was killing them both. Zelda had done it by dropping out of college halfway through her sophomore year to marry a disagreeable, fox-faced man named Hunter. Seven months later, they’d had their first child.
Aria had been thirteen at the time, and she hadn’t understood—and hadn’t wanted to. All she’d understood was that her sister was abandoning her to her fate. She and Hunt, because of course Zelda called him Hunt, had asked her to move in with them. Aria had refused. Men were not to be trusted and it seemed impossible that within a week this man wouldn’t be raping her, too. So Zelda had left and, with Zelda gone, there had been no other target and Aria’s life had quickly gone from merely horrendous to unbearable.
And so, after one of her mother’s particularly unpleasant rages, she’d run away. Upset that day, because Aria had “made an obnoxious face” while she commented about some fluff piece on the noon news, she’d treated her daughter to an hour long rant about how Aria’s mere birth had made her life a living hell. Aria lectured; Aria didn’t realize that no one wanted to listen to her; Aria didn’t appreciate that Georgia was the only one in the family with a sense of humor; Aria was a dreadful writer and should stop bothering people with her ghastly, plodding stories. They were too heavy on description and too violent besides.
Georgia, meanwhile, was accomplished at everything.
Aria had learned, through bitter experience, that attempting to defend herself only stoked her mother’s rage; she’d weathered the tide until Georgia lost interest and went to fix herself a cocktail. Then, her face wet with silent tears, she’d retreated to her room and brooded. Anything has to be better than this, she’d decided for the first time, establishing a pattern that although she didn’t know it would haunt her for the rest of her life.
Aria had also learned to hide her stories along with her thoughts. The time when her mother found her journal didn’t bear thinking about; Georgia’s excuse for snooping had been, I thought I’d find lots of sweet, innocent thoughts about how much you loved me. Instead, Georgia had found Aria’s thoughts about the abuse that Georgia so flatly denied—by herself and by Frank. On those occasions when Frank made fumbling grabs at his daughters or, even worse, comments about their bodies, Georgia laughed. And drank. And screamed.
So Aria had tucked her journal into her messenger bag along with a collection of mismatched pens held together by a purple rubber band, two pairs of underpants and one shirt, and climbed out the window. She had no clear idea of where she was going, which was frightening, but her newfound sense of freedom was intoxicating. Alone, she didn’t have to worry about saying the wrong thing, or making the wrong face, or having picked out the wrong pair of shoes or put her hair up in the wrong kind of ponytail. She could feel the wind on her face and hold it, eyes closed, up to the sun. And as she’d walked, the tension had begun to ease from her shoulders until soon she was laughing.
Somehow, she’d ended up at General Leicester Memorial Park. Leicester had been a war hero, and that was all she knew about him. Aria had never paid much attention to lessons on the Great War; she got more than enough war at home and besides, the reasons for it made no sense.
Dropping her bag in the shade of a tree, she’d pressed her palms into the grass and done cartwheels through the park. The grass made them itch. About ten yards away, the fountain burbled: an enormous monolith of poured concrete surrounded by an even larger ornamental pool where carp swam in endless circles.
Someone clapped slowly.
There was all the scorn in the world in that clap and…amusement.
Startled, she’d yelped and fallen flat on her behind. Looking up, brushing the hair out of her face along with the grass, she’d met the eyes of her one man audience. He was sitting on one of the benches ringing the fountain, and he had a book. His hair, too, was hanging in his face—although in his case this was a fashion statement. He was older, too, and handsome. His lips curved in a crooked, sardonic smile and she fell in love with him.
It had been bound to happen sooner or later. Aria was a horribly lonely girl, and she probably would have fallen in love with anyone who’d smiled at her and actually seen her. But that person had been fifteen year
old Aiden Ward, sophomore at President Wilkes Preparatory School. A Great War buff and something of a loner, himself, he dreamed of a career in the army.
But she’d learned all that later.
Tucking his book into his pocket, he stood up. She could scarcely credit what she was seeing; was he actually walking over to her? But he was. He joined her in the grass, stretching out lazily. She stared. No one had ever been interested in her before, except to criticize her.
He tossed his hair out of his face. “I’ve never seen you here before.”
She blushed.
“You’re not half bad. Your dismount could stand a little work, though.”
She giggled, and he smiled.
He had a thin, square-jawed face. His straight, fashionably cut hair was the same rich brown as chestnuts and his eyes were the gray of thunderclouds. He seemed always on the verge of laughing at some joke that only he knew, and when he smiled she felt like he was sharing something with her. Surprisingly, because Aria was painfully shy, she found him easy to talk to. He, in turn, seemed to find her easy to talk to—and they’d talked for hours.
She’d lost all track of time, mesmerized by how handsome he was and by the fact that he’d just appeared, like a mirage. He was here, someone she’d never even imagined existed, and he was talking to her. She knew, halfway through that first conversation, that there would be many more.
Before she even realized what was happening, she was telling him everything—things she’d never told anybody. About her father, her mother, her sister, and the hateful man who’d stolen her sister away and left her alone in a nightmare. Apart from asking a handful of questions, Aiden had just listened. He was interested. He was, she realized, as lonely as she was and maybe had been just as anxious for companionship.
“You can have dinner at my house,” he told her, “and then I’ll walk you home.”
“But your parents…?”
“Aren’t home,” he said cheerfully. “They’re on the other side of the continent.”
Aiden’s parents, it seemed, were rarely on the same continent as their son or, indeed, each other. Both had high-powered careers of which they were extremely proud, and Aiden—he referred to himself as their social experiment—had been raised mostly by a series of nannies.
He’d grilled her a burger, and she’d been impressed with his culinary skills. And over dinner, they’d talked about anything and everything. By the time he finally walked her home, it was closer to morning than night. She didn’t care, though; even if she never saw him again, the utter magic of the experience made whatever she ended up facing entirely worth the pain.
Aria had never been so happy, never felt so visible in her entire life. Aiden shared her view of the world; he shared her rage at the unfairness of it, as well as her rage at her parents. He felt a similar rage at his, although in his case for different reasons. With him, for the first time, she felt like she wasn’t alone anymore. Like there was hope.
Her mother had been furious, of course—and Aiden had stood up to her. No one had ever stood up to Georgia before. Her own family was terrified of her, her sisters and mother telling Aria from an early age that she only needed to be “a little bit sweeter” and her mother wouldn’t “have” to yell at her, or strike her, or lock her in the closet for hours on end.
But Aiden had told Georgia that she was wrong to scream and use foul language. And if he found out that she’d done it again after he’d left, he’d come back and teach her a lesson. He explained that he was a determined man—at fifteen, he’d seemed like a man to Aria—and that Georgia couldn’t stop him.
Aria had made up her mind, then and there, to marry him.
TWENTY-NINE
In the years that followed, she’d remained steadfast in her decision.
Aiden grew from a slightly awkward fifteen year old to an intelligent and strong-willed man. He was passionate, and he was witty, and he was beautiful. And since he’d first met her, his interest in her had never wavered. He cared about what she thought, on topics ranging from the mundane to the sublime. He paid attention to her, taking her out and buying her flowers. He noticed whether he went several days without seeing her and when he enlisted, at eighteen, he wrote to her every day. She was more in love with him than she’d ever thought possible. So-called romances paled in comparison to the fire and intensity of her own.
Her life was a romance.
Things got better at home, too, as time wore on. She’d learned to fight her father off and, after she’d done so for the first time, he’d left her alone. She still remembered the look of injury—actual injury—on his face. As though she’d done something wrong, and he were the victim. Georgia, too, had become easier to live with; her alcoholism had progressed to the point where, most days, she never really got out of bed. Instead, she sat around in her pajamas and drank gin and smoked and played word games and chatted on the phone to those few friends who would still talk to her. She and Aria settled into a kind of détente.
Aria still flinched when people touched her unexpectedly and she’d so far resisted Aiden’s pressure to let him do more than kiss her. She wanted to, but she was afraid. She was afraid because of her father, and afraid because she’d been raised to believe that sex was evil—which, although she didn’t really believe that, years of religious education had left their mark.
When he kissed her, it was wonderful. Those first fumbling attempts had been terrifying, but she kept reminding herself this was Aiden and not her father and he loved her. Gradually, she’d grown to welcome his touch and to crave the electric tingling that it created. She felt like she was being lit on fire, and she was amazed, too, that someone as wonderful as him wanted her. Because he did, he’d made that clear. And he’d always defended her, and never let her down, and she’d grown up believing that Aiden was her other half.
God had sent him to her, and meeting him had been a miracle.
Zelda was skeptical but, then again, Zelda was skeptical of everything and always had been. Don’t pick the first puppy out of the box, she’d said. Aria thought that she was being ridiculous. It didn’t matter how many men she’d met—and she’d met plenty—this man was the right man.
He’d turned out to be every bit as ambitious, capable and reliable as he’d always said he would be. He’d also turned out to be a liar, but she hadn’t known that yet.
As the years passed, their relationship matured from heated, amazed infatuation to something deeper—something lasting, and real. They debated everything from the Great War to the stuffed shirt that was Hunter Alderson Eades, her brother in law. Aiden, ever the voice of reason, had defended each side in turn. He’d always had a gift for seeing both sides of an issue, a gift that could be maddening as well as inspiring. And, several years after that first fateful meeting, he’d told her he loved her.
At the end of her final year in school, he’d taken personal leave to come home and escort her to the graduation ball. They’d been escaping the heat, sweat, and frenetic activity of the dance, taking a walk in the now cool-seeming air, when he’d proposed. His hands were in his pockets and her hand was tucked into the crook of one suit-clad elbow. She was carrying her shoes in her other hand, a pair of rhinestone-encrusted sandals, because they made her feet hurt. Blisters were too high a price to pay for three extra inches of height.
She was eighteen and he was twenty.
She lost track of time, as she always did with him, and when they finally stopped she realized they were back at the fountain. He’d never entirely lost that sardonic grin and it was on his face now, bringing it to life in a way that she’d always found both sweet and frightening.
They stood, arm in arm, watching the water splash.
“Aria,” he said, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, “I love you, and I have now for a long time. I know we’re young, but I also know that I always will. I want you to marry me.”
At first, she hadn’t believed he was serious. But he was, and she accepted.
Theirs was, of necessity, a long engagement. Although by no means poor, Aiden was also working for a living and he had to finish school. Which, partly to spite his parents, Aria thought, he was attending on the army’s bit. He wouldn’t even be able to marry her until he was twenty-two and she was twenty. So that, much to her parents’ horror and her sister’s consternation, became their plan. Once they were married, she could live with him in base housing.
Until then, she had to live at home. Which, now that there was a definite end date to her incarceration, became much easier to bear. He wrote, and he called, and he visited, and she continued to be very much in love with him and constantly fantasized about their future.
And then, through a series of unfortunate and entirely preventable mishaps, she’d discovered that Aiden Ward was not the man she thought he was and never had been. If she hadn’t decided to surprise him, if she’d shown up twenty minutes later or twenty minutes earlier, if, if, if. If things had happened differently, she wouldn’t have walked into his commanding officer’s office to ask where he was and discovered him half naked on the desk.
He’d been on top, his commanding officer had been on the bottom, and they were more than enjoying each other.
She’d been directed to this woman’s office, that was the worst part—by a freckle-faced MP who swore up and down, as he followed her out, that he’d had no idea. And Aria had believed him. After all, she’d had no idea and she was engaged to the man. Or so she’d thought.
If it had been a one night stand, she might have been able to forgive him. But he and Lila—he’d had the poor taste to refer to this evil, home-wrecking troll by her first name—had been in a relationship for two years. She didn’t know about Lila, but Lila, as she learned, knew all about her. And, apparently, was willing to meet certain needs that Aria was not.