She smiles a proud grin at me and opens her mouth to speak but swiftly closes it again.
“What?” I’m distracted. I can’t stop my eyes roving the sea of faces, hunting out my master. Searching for Dimitri’s face. And seeing one I do recognise.
“Oh, nothing,” She hedges, though her tone is back to being light and playful, a sign that her concern over my situation and anger at me for failing her and our master has passed in a haze of something else, “I just didn’t expect it to work so fast.”
I pause in my search and look at her - I’m sure I just saw Saskia Hunter. Distracted, I really look at Delilah. Her face is the way it has always been. A mask of decorum, of perfect little-lady manners with a hint of spice that has constantly garnered her the “wicked” label by women and men within and without of her peer group. But it is just that, a mask. Delilah has never been the shallow-waters type. But it seems I’m seeing it properly for the first time. I always wanted her to be the blonde bubble head that I could accuse of being less intelligent than me, even if she is far prettier than I am.
But she is so much more than that.
The dull low-light of worry clouding her eyes for the last few days – that was all for me. And here I am missing the perfection that is my best friend right before my eyes. Completely oblivious as to why Dimitri chose her.
Shame floods me, but I stifle it under my new-found self-assurance and tilt my head to her. “What do you mean?”
“Listen, Sugar,” I settle into the knowledge that I am about to be graced to the closest thing Delilah has ever gotten to an authentic lecture, “For months now I’ve had to see you being meek and mild and casually self-depreciating all because of some ass who, quite frankly, never deserved you in the first place. Now, you may not believe this, but I really had your best interests at heart when I mentioned you to Dimitri-”
“I know, Honey,” I whisper, but she continues undeterred, oblivious to my meek acknowledgement of her consideration of me, her southern drawl gaining in accentuation with each self-assured syllable.
“And I’ll be damnded if I wasn’t totally right. Hardly five nights in this place – in the den of vice -” She giggles salaciously and pinches my cheek with that annoying habit of hers, “And my sweet, puckered friend is once more the roving goddess I always knew you could be.”
She smiles at me from her natural height advantage, looking down on me for all the world like a condescending older sister, but her eyes gleam with pride. And vast affection.
I squeeze her to me, still trying to hold back the wave of sadness at my actions, my distasteful disregard for Dimitri’s love, my shame at having thought badly of her, but also now embarrassedly awash with love for my Delilah.
The only thing that could perfect this moment would be if all the dirt of the last few hours could be cleansed from me. Sadly though, I’m lost in my own sexual abandon.
I still haven’t decided for certain if that is a good or a bad thing.
Delilah, seeing everything, takes stern note of my wandering eyes. “Yeah,” She mutters, her mood falling marginally, “I haven’t seen him yet either. Didn’t even know he was having a party tonight. You’d think Cecily would have said something,” She mutters harshly, her jealousy shimmering like an eel beneath a calm ocean’s surface, “I would have dressed to suit.”
I give her the once over and scoff, drinking in her ridiculous beauty in folds of green velvet.
“What? I can do better,” She winks pleasantly at me, giving me a hint at the self-mockery in what would otherwise be a perfectly vapid comment.
“Why should Cess know about it and not us?” I try to keep the jealousy from my tone, no place for it now with the two women I feel closest to in the world, but it seeps through anyway.
Delilah gives me a surprised, if somewhat pitying, glance, “I keep forgetting you’re new to how he works. You know Cecily is great with organisation. So she arranges all his “self-hosted” events.”
“Oh,” Understanding finally dawns. Delilah may know everyone, or so it seems, but she’s no good at actual clear organisation. In fact, if it weren’t for all her ‘helpers’, Crème would have probably collapsed under the pressure by now. Cecily, on the other hand, is beyond exceptional at hosting events and is also fanatically good with money. Now that I think about it, it does seem slightly ludicrous of me not to have noted that she would not just be a flapper for Dimitri, but he would naturally make use of her skills as a business woman as well.
“A bit sombre for Cecily’s usual, don’t you think?” I mutter as I throw another casual glance around the entrance hall spilling into a main dance hall on the opposite side of the library which I have, as of yet, not had the pleasure of exploring. Something had been bothering me up to now, though my distraction in searching out Dimitri or Levi or anyone even remotely familiar had stopped me from being certain of the feeling’s origins. The entire affair has a dour feel to it. Mostly, the revellers are dressed in black and deeper, less frivolous colours. I spy much lace and velvet in evidence and many a skirt seems to be longer than the usual party decorum would dictate. A few ostentatious hats also seem to be making the rounds and the music being played is of a mournful string orchestration though I’m struggling to find the source in this hive of quiet activity.
Delilah’s lips purse as she surveys the crowd as well. “True. I’ve never seen her go quite this morose before in her decor. Is it just me or is the arrangement of fauna in shades of red and white?”
Red and white? Funerary colours. But she is correct. I look over to the sideboard closest to me where a beautiful bouquet of red and white roses has been established in a magnificent crystal glass. Perched directly in front of the vase and surrounded by little white candles is a photograph in a beautiful gold-edged frame.
I can’t quite make out the inhabitant’s features, but she seems strikingly familiar in a way. Just as I feel I have put my finger on who it may be, a couple shifts into my view and blocks off the portrait.
“D, is this some kind of memorial?” I mumble under my breath, not wanting to offend any bystanders or appear incredibly naïve to some others.
Delilah is remarkably quiet in response and when I turn my face to hers, bewildered by her ability to remain still, I notice she has spotted the framed portrait too. But her height gives her a decided advantage over me and the look on her face sends chills up and down my spine.
I squeeze her hand lightly in my own at the shocked expression covering her features, “What’s wrong, Honey? Who is that?”
“How could she be so stupid.”
It’s a statement, not a question. And Delilah’s voice has lost all hint of play and befuddlement. She’s angry. I can feel it radiating off of her as her eyes remain transfixed on the sideboard with the photograph.
Finally a gleam of vision graces me between the bodies blocking my view of the picture in its pretty frame and I recognise the face on display – Addison Fleur, the ‘suicide girl,’ one of Dimitri’s past lovers. Her claim to fame is that she made specific mention of him in a suicide note she scrawled in her own blood on her bathroom floor moments before (so the coroners say) she bled out from the inch deep self-inflicted wounds in her wrists.
Nobody but the family and some well-paid-off city officials know what the contents were of the message and nobody knows why she killed herself – a beautiful girl, a rich family, and a member of the city council to boot. She had been known to liaise with Dimitri and more than one reporter claimed to have caught the pair quite snug in some scandalous moments. There had been rumour of her spending time at his home too – this home. The thought makes my stomach churn with jealousy as vertigo hits me.
I don’t know him. He isn’t mine. Even though every fibre in me screams that he is and I do.
But whatever had happened between the two of them, Addison Fleur had been driven to kill herself for it and smear his name in a message intended to hold him culpable. In so much as a mentally unstable woman could.
>
I really wish I could read that note. But what would it mean to me? Why should it affect anything? I know Dimitri. Things have been strange here, but he is a good man. Reliable and true to his word. And tender. He could never drive someone to such a hasty end.
Maybe it had nothing to do with him at all.
My eyes fall on Levi, resplendent in a neat black suit, white-shirt collar lightly open. Hi gaze catches mine and he lift a glass in my direction.
It’s like even just his look on my body puts me back there, makes me a disgusting whore all over again.
And it feels like they all know it, even Saskia Hunter, who slips away into the crowd, glancing at Delilah and I over her shoulder.
Delilah is still glowering at the portrait. “She wasn’t stupid, Plum. She was probably just lonely. You know what it’s like,” I flush with a hint of anger – she knows better than I do even, “Being around him… And then not.” That ending feels lame to me.
Delilah shakes her head impatiently, finally snapped from her reverie, “I’m not talking about Addison,” She says the name softly with respect, like she would say my name when defending me to others, maybe Alexander. “I’m talking about Cecily. This is such fucking bad publicity for him!”
That gives me pause, but before I can question her further, concern flooding me for my little sister, the dream of her rigid corpse crying in the cold still ringing through my skull, a smell strikes me. Instantly Dimitri’s face comes to mind and I turn to the library. The lights are dim inside, but I could swear he’s in there. Like the tug of a wire. He smells like spice, warm spice on cold skin.
I move closer, dazed, incapable of slowing my pace, desperate just to see him, to verify for myself that he does not know of my indiscretion with Levi, that Levi has said nothing, that if he does know, he forgives me, he understands. That he is not infuriated with me. That he acknowledges my effort to please him.
My hand is shaking; so much so that it twitches. I’ve picked up a glass of wine, a full glass, but the taste of wine is sour on my lips. A servant dressed in a smart black tux walks away from me with an empty glass stained red on his tray.
I don’t remember drinking any wine, but the room is slightly hazy before my eyes.
Dimitri’s smell teases me again and a pang blips in my abdomen, almost painfully. Nerves or fear or both, intertwined with lust and excitement and sadness. That same dizzying sadness of earlier – that I don’t know him, that I will never be with him as much as I would like, that he will always have things outside of me. Like Delilah and Cecily, and his business and party guests.
And Addison Fleur. The suicide girl.
Masochistically, I allow scenes to play through my head, I feed them and the pangs of pain through my middle come harder and faster, so deep as to evince nausea in me. This girl gets to me. Not to say that my sister and my best friend sharing him with me doesn’t, but this one particularly hurts. And I hate him for that. For wrecking us. I hate him for dragging me into this weird fucking cult shit.
And then I hate myself for hating him.
Jesus! I can’t possibly be this fucked up? What the hell is wrong with me? I am Eva Wright. I have never loved a man in my life, I have never allowed a man to possess any part of me. I have always stepped back from emotion that could injure me. And yet, here I stand. My stomach churning at the thought of a polyamorous arrangement. Allowing myself to become involved with a man who has multiple lovers. Letting my emotions for said man get the better of me so that I quit my job. Completely forgetting my sexual scruples to be called a whore by a man just to avoid being … Cast from my Dimitri?
I try to compose myself, but I shudder with sorrow again as Dimitri’s face surfaces in my mind and I am robbed of my will, of the rage I only just felt coursing through me at what I have become. So suddenly. So quickly and without warning. A few days ago, Dimitri was a friend, a potential lover, and a story. Yes, I had hoped he would be more, even I can admit I had begun to lower my gates for him, but within only a few short days he flipped everything I have known backwards. He let me slide into misery.
No. I did this to myself. I can’t blame him. I should have picked up my bag and walked out as soon as I saw Cecily walk into the bedroom he left me in.
And now it may just be too late.
My eyes are snapped back to the shadows of the library as another scent comingles with that of my Dimitri. Perfume, sweet, fruit-laced. A woman’s scent.
And then a generous feminine sigh ripples the air with a gasp.
The pangs are becoming insistent, demanding, gouging a hole somewhere in me, a hole to be filled with every moment of betrayal and hurt I have felt since Saturday. And all those little such moments still to come. As there will be many, I am sure.
I deserve this. This is my punishment for what I did. For being a whore.
Or maybe it just justifies what I did.
He’s in here with a girl.
I step forward, not bothering to mask my footfall with the silent buzz of people talking in hushed tones in the foyer – a noise meant not to be a noise. Sound that is supposed to be quiet. I stalk forward and replay this scene in my head like I am watching myself. I am certain of what I will find, but my feet don’t falter. Nor does my hand as it lays itself on the door frame and I slip into the room through the marginal gap left to let the light in from without. Mercifully, it does not creek, the carpet does not ruffle and the noises within drown out any small intakes of breath my traitorous heart drags me towards as I hold the wall for support.
It’s not long before my eyes adjust and I wish I had listened to my impetuous self screaming at me to just leave.
This shouldn’t surprise me. Not at all. All evidence points to such behaviour from the man I love. And yet the sight of him, exquisite in his nudity, atop a naked woman so beautiful, so familiar – Saskia - that it stings my eyes… No, wait, those are tears, aren’t they?
I turn to the wall beside me, my sense finally overruling my insanity. Because that is all it can be – insanity. Following any logical process in trying to understand what has been going through my head, I can only think I have been losing my grip. But then again, insanity is supposed to be blissfully free of self-condemnation and ridicule, or disgust, or concern over simple, trivial things.
Like the shattering of my heart.
So it can’t be insanity. Because madness would never hurt this much, madness would never have the sobs wracking through my body.
I never thought I would experience that pain and misery so bad that it makes your skin hurt, like a sudden fever has taken you, but here it is, scratching over me and making my skin cringe with every beat of my heart tied to those awful pangs of emptiness.
And the very worst of all of this is the mild sense of disgust, though it pains me to think it of him. A girl killed herself for him. She’s dead for his sins, or her sins, or whoever’s sins their secrets protect. And in the midst of those mourning her, here is my Dimitri, lavishing in the act which most likely drove her to end it all. With another woman. I wonder somehow if they know; the ones mournfully cavorting outside? If they hate him for it? Her poor family.
Cold fingers slide down my back and play with the lace of my dress, ripping through my contemplation. Mortification riddles me, I hadn’t realised the noises in the room had stopped.
I don’t want him to see me like this, my face scrunched, red, wet from crying when I should be able to be adult about all of this and not wither like a little girl.
The fingers retreat from my back to lift my chin away from the wall and I see it’s the woman, her big, black eyes are like wells into the earth as she smiles but it never seems to reach into those pools. Her hair is slowly disentangling itself as it falls around her face, a black halo. She’s shorter than me, but the power she radiates puts me in my place and the pangs are forgotten for a brief moment as – it must be the wine deadening my dignity – she pulls me into her, her mouth opening slightly to kiss me, her lips grazing mine and her
tongue briefly touching against my own.
She pulls back from me and says quietly, “Dimitri, you didn’t tell me she was so lovely.” His face behind her is impassive and slightly cold, as he watches her, his eyes do not even flit to mine for a second.
Her hand settles into my hair, grasping it and she gently pulls my head to the side, the pain uncompromising but enticing. I obey her action, not sure why, still entrapped by her eyes so like starless galaxies.
The woman’s voice is as neglected perfume in an old-spray bottle, still potent but now stagnant in the air as if it’s always been there, “I miss those girls. Soft. Not so utterly androgynous.”
She presses her lips to my neck and her mouth opens against it. The feel of her tongue pulls on strings in my abdomen as something builds in me and her hands relax in my hair just as her body tenses and she pulls me closer, gently.
“Saskia.” Dimitri says sternly.
I jump. For a brief moment I lost control. Again.
The fear of simply handing myself over to strangers for mine and their lust settles over me again. I can’t be trusted not to humiliate myself anymore.
She is tense with her body pressing mine up against the wall. Over her shoulder Dimitri watches us, his eyes still calculating, his face slightly stern. His gaze holds mine finally and the reprieve that her spell placed over me is broken. The tears fall quietly down my face on shallow trods.
“Who gave you these books?” Shane shatters my recitation yet again and this time I tut audibly, ignoring the question as I turn back to a newer picture of him, that I plan to place nearer to the door.
Shane sighs and seat himself on the edge of my bed.
“Don’t forget, Eva, that these are technically sessions and you and I had a deal. If you don’t cooperate, I’ll be forced to make you do so. Or worse, give up on you entirely. You know that would mean your indefinite stay with us here at Mercy House.”
The Key (Sanguinem Emere) Page 13