Back in Dr. Xenakis' Arms

by Amalie Berlin

  Out on the water, with the boat not moving, it was getting hot fast. Or perhaps she was getting hot.

  Crossing her arms, she planted her feet. “It’s already taken too long.”

  “We have some things to sort out—even if everything was finished between us a long time ago,” he said.

  Not entirely accurate. She still had questions about why he’d done what he’d done, but those answers wouldn’t change what had happened. Those answers couldn’t make her heart hurt less over that loss.

  “We have nothing to sort out,” she denied flatly.

  Ares stepped around her and went to sit on the bench, ignoring her instinctive flinch away from him. He leaned back, not quite sprawling on the seat, and with his sunglasses on, he looked like a caveman who’d got lost in a Sunglass Hut, with loads of curly black hair—some of which the wind had pulled free of the band he used at the clinic in a vain attempt to keep it neat.

  When the glasses were on, all she saw was hair, beard, shiny black plastic and forehead. She did not look lower than the beard. Because she didn’t need to think about his body, which was probably blanketed in similar thick fur.

  “The questions aren’t going to stop if we don’t straighten things out—or at least figure out how to be around one another.”

  Had it been only a day since their breakfast meeting, with Deakin pointing out the tension between them? Even if it had been a week, it still would have felt too short.

  Her spine stood like a marble column between her shoulder blades, holding her unnaturally erect—which made it hard to stay on her feet in the natural sway of the boat on the waves. She spun the captain’s chair and sat in it, keeping her distance.

  “I know.”

  The fewer words on her part, the quicker their conversation—and she wanted it over with. She couldn’t deny it. He might have plucked the exact same thoughts from her head earlier.

  He pushed the sunglasses back into that mass of wild black curls. His spring-green eyes pinned her to the chair.

  “What do you suggest we do about it?”

  “Put the glasses back on.”

  He paused, the look on his face irritated and yet he was considering her request. “Why?”

  “So I can go on pretending you’re not you.”

  He didn’t move for several seconds but eventually did as she’d asked. “What can I do to put you at ease around me?”

  “Nothing. You can’t make this up to me. It’s not a thing that can be fixed.”

  “Why did you never tell Theo about it after you left?”

  “I didn’t leave. ‘Leave’ implies active participation. I was taken away.” Once she’d pointed that out, she waved off the rest. “We’d all lost too much in our lives already. I wasn’t going to be the instrument of anyone losing any more.”

  “You’re under no obligation to me.”

  “It’s not about you. Knowing would have hurt him.”

  “Because he loves you. I know he’d feel loss over—”

  “And he would lose you.” She cut him off. “He’d look at me and see...”

  “What?”

  “An explanation.”

  “And my guilt?”

  “Theo always watched out for me. While I was away, I wrote to him all the time. I could certainly have told him a thousand times what had happened, and what was going on with me. Because he asked. He asked so many times. But I played it off as something else—something shallow. It would have hurt him to know any piece of it. He’d have lost you as his best friend. He’d have known he’d lost the chance to be an uncle—have you seen him with Evan?”

  Her throat filled with what felt like a lifetime of hurt, and she had to swallow twice to force that emotion back into her chest so she could speak again.

  “He’d probably have felt honor-bound to turn his back on Deakin and Chris too, if they didn’t agree with him over cutting you out of his life. They would all have suffered. In your head this might be all about how soft-as-cheese Erianthe is protecting you, but what I’m really doing is taking care of them.”

  The bonds that tied them together had been forged by heartache and discord in their homes. They’d become a family because they’d needed each other and found solace together. Theo was her actual brother, by adoption, but in reality they were all her brothers. Except for Ares. She’d known very early on that he made her feel different.

  They all understood what having a family break apart felt like and she’d never do that to them—not to this family.

  “But these days we’re not as close. It might not hurt them to lose me. Especially if I just leave. Out of sight, out of mind. Nothing dramatic to instigate it...”

  “So you’d just go and never come back?”

  He nodded.

  “And I would then have to pretend not to know why they’d lost you? Your magnanimous bowing out would leave me to keep yet another secret.”

  “Or tell them later. I don’t know, Eri. I don’t know how to solve this problem now any more than I knew how to solve it then.”

  A blast of furious heat hit her face, but she gritted her teeth and forced herself to skip over the fact that he’d referred to their daughter as a “problem.” She just didn’t have any more room in her head or her heart for more hurt.

  “I can’t tell them. It would hurt Theo more to know any of it now.” She swallowed past the gravel in her throat and turned her gaze out to the deep blue sea. “He and Cailey are expecting their own baby. It would hurt him to know what I went through and that he wasn’t there for me. I don’t know the answer either. What is it you want? You had to have an objective before you kidnapped me.”

  “This is not kidnapping. It’s the only way I could get you to stay in one place long enough to talk to me. You smile at everyone but me. You look at everyone but me. Like you’re doing now, you stare off into the distance when we’re talking. And they see it.”

  “I haven’t smiled at anyone today.”

  She heard him sigh, even over the sound of the ocean.

  “No, no smiles today... If we can’t figure out some way to be around each other, this will fall right off the cliff. And our patients will pick up on the tension too—which I know you don’t want. I’ve seen how you connect with everyone you treat. You even reach out to those who accompany your patients. It’s suspicious that we don’t connect at all—especially when we can’t explain why other than using those dumb teenage excuses. He bugs me. She’s too bossy.”

  It wasn’t meant as a complaint—logically she knew that—but the subtle sound of loss in his voice pinged at her conscience.

  “If I could turn this feeling off, I would.”

  “How do you deal with your parents?”

  “I don’t. I haven’t spoken to either of them since I became an adult.”

  “At all?”

  She shook her head. “I stayed away. Changed my number. Ignored emails. Sent back letters and deliveries. I never came back. Not even once.”

  “Since you left home?”

  Even now she had a hard time calling Mythelios “home.” Was it because she didn’t ever go to her childhood home? Or to Ares’s home, which she’d spent a year of her life picturing as her future home?

  She still couldn’t bring herself to look at him, but looking out at the water brought no rocking, soothing comfort as she longed for it to do. There was just the baking heat of the sun and a loss of the anger that had briefly fired her up—and the realization that she couldn’t wait her way through this anymore.

  Sliding off the captain’s chair, she joined him on the bench—far enough away to keep from touching but closer than she had been. It was all the overture she had in her right now.

  “You didn’t come home for holidays when you were in school?” he asked.

  “I came to Greece once, the summer I was sev
enteen, and stayed in my aunt’s house in Athens for a few weeks. But mostly if school was out, I found other things to go to. Extra schooling. Volunteer work.”

  Why was she telling him these things? Because he sounded hurt? Because the idea of causing him pain still twisted in her belly like a blade? She should just change her name to Brie-anthe. She was so tired of hurting, but hating him wouldn’t bring her daughter back.

  “I didn’t think it would still hurt so much to be here now. But if I act a little weird, they’ll understand that it’s weird for me to even be here.”

  “Home?”

  She shook her head.

  “Eri... Psihi mou...”

  A jolt of agony sliced into her and she was on her feet, rounding on him before she’d even really understood what he’d said.

  “Don’t call me that!”

  If she was his soul, he was in worse trouble than she was.

  He scrubbed both hands over his face, up under his sunglasses, then let them fall back to his nose as he turned away to look out over the endless blue.

  The marble that had set in her spine began to soften and she sat again, not stopping until her elbows on her knees were all that supported her. She’d have just lain down on the deck of the boat if she could. Being with him had used to energize her. Now they were done talking, she felt half-dead.

  A full minute passed and then he stood up and returned to the captain’s chair, sitting but not spinning away from her as if he was about to start driving again.

  “What they know is that you were sent away from here because of your rebellious activities so you could focus on your studies. They’ll imagine that being away from home was really unpleasant and lonely, but unless you tell them something traumatic happened while you were gone, then your behavior will seem strange and worrying.”

  She looked up then. “Are you worried about me?”

  “Yes, dammit. Of course I’m worried about you. If I could do anything to take what happened from you, I would. All I know how to do is to try to contain it.”

  “Contain it?” The words shouted through her but came out quiet.

  “Not increase your pain by having you watch it spread and wreck the rest of them, or relive it by answering a million questions.”

  He slid off the chair to squat before her and reached for her hand.

  Sluggish and slow, she saw what he intended, but only mustered the strength to snatch her hands back when he was close enough for her to feel the energy he put out. One touch a day—more than that and the thread of hope she dangled from might snap.

  She sat up straighter so he wasn’t so close, so that the wind didn’t part around him as if he was sheltering her.

  “All this is too much for you,” he said, not standing up but tucking his hands away, accepting her dramatic hints not to touch her.

  He was worried this was too much for her because it wasn’t too much for him. It had never been as real for him. How could it have been? Her stomach had still been board-flat when he last saw her. He hadn’t spent months of lonely sickness, wonder and worry, watching her body grow round and her clothes grow tight. He hadn’t felt life moving within her or heard the strange, alien sound of that little heart beating.

  He might have tried to imagine it, or maybe he’d just put them both out of his head after the way it had all ended. There were times when she could even picture him being relieved that her baby had never been born.

  It didn’t leave her with much room to know how to react to him. How to see him, even.

  There seemed to be no half measures with them in these fraught conversations. One thought led to another, and another, and it was simply too much. If he admitted to feeling relief about the baby... Well, she didn’t know if she could continue to keep protecting the others. Or him. Even if she did worry about him too.

  “I’m worried about me.” Also true.

  “Do you want me to leave the island? Maybe it’ll be easier for you if I just go.”

  “You can’t just go. That would just have the same effect as me acting...”

  “Shell-shocked?”

  The bleakness in his voice clawed at her. She might never be ready to hear how he felt about the baby, but she heard guilt scratching through his voice. Guilt over her.

  He knew Theo, Deakin and Chris would demand answers if he left suddenly so soon after her arrival, and they’d most likely hold it against him. He’d lose the only real family he had—and they were still important to him, no matter what he’d said about the physical distance between them all. And yet he was offering.

  Guilt and sacrifice—that was what he offered. For her. It was there in his voice, in the way his jaw clenched, as if he were chewing on nothing, or everything.

  He’d do it.

  But she couldn’t do that to him, let alone them. This was all going to come undone if she couldn’t bring herself to make a better effort.

  “You never answered my question about why you brought me out here to talk. What did you have in mind?”

  “Exposure therapy. My idea was exposure therapy.”

  “I’ve already been exposed to you.”

  “But not enough to build a callus.”

  She wanted to poke holes in his theory, because she didn’t want to commit to spending more time with him than her already fraught nerves could support. But there was a kind of logic to his suggestion. Continuing to say It’s too soon was stupid. When was it going to be long enough if not ten years?

  “Not enough to build a callus?” she repeated, bracing her elbows on her knees. Propping herself up was easier than holding herself up when her muscles were already strained to the point of exhaustion just having this conversation. “Define exposure.”

  “If I say it, it’ll sound like a come-on.”

  “If you say sex, I’ll push you in and turn you to mush with the propeller.”

  He chuckled a little. “No, I was thinking dinner.”

  “At your house?” So he’d come this way for a reason. “Won’t your father wonder what’s up with us?”

  “He’s currently residing in France.”

  She’d heard nothing about that, but then she didn’t ask questions about any of the Xenakises. “Why?”

  “New French wife.”

  “Oh.” French wife—that was indeed new. “When did that happen?”

  “I don’t know. Must’ve been some time this year, since they’re not divorced yet. I’ve lost count of his marriages, but I want to say this is the tenth. Maybe eleventh? The last wife I met in person was number eight.”

  “You’re just numbering them now?”

  He shrugged. Nothing in that shrug showed how his parents’ frequent divorces had devastated him as a child. He’d definitely built a callus over that, she thought.

  “What’s her name?”

  “It’s not worth trying to make family connections with someone who won’t even be around next year.”

  His parents hadn’t been neglectful so much as absent, and his stepmothers had made more of an effort to be in his life when they were married to his father than either of his true parents had. But the inevitable divorces had come along and they’d always disappeared. She remembered that it had been another lost stepparent that had been the catalyst that had had her stealing a boat to go to him and ending up in their first kiss—once upon a time in a completely broken fairy tale.

  The knot that twisted in her throat said she wasn’t up for this tonight. “I think I’d like to go to Chris’s house now.”

  Unlike earlier, he met her request with a simple nod, returned to the helm and fired the engine.

  Soon they were bouncing across the water again, in the correct direction this time, and she kept her eyes open. Not because she expected another trick, but because the whole conversation had left her unsettled—emotionally dizzy. Having som
ething solid to pin her gaze to seemed the most sensible action. Even if looking over the battered coast of her homeland brought its own kind of ache.

  Soon enough they were docked, and he tied the boat up before offering his hand to steady her as she climbed off.

  She almost took it, but her courage faltered at the last second and she grabbed the rope to steady herself instead. Counting on someone else to save you was the quickest way to get lost. She knew that lesson—had learned it over months and years of agony and heartbreak.

  But she didn’t have to trust him. She just had to stop flinching from him if they were going to make working together a viable option.

  “Part of exposure therapy involves confronting the things that trigger your anxiety,” Ares said. “What do you fear will happen if you look at me or touch me?”

  With her feet on the solidity of the dock, she wanted just to keep walking. But the short conversation had eased her a little. He’d been honest, and she’d leave him with the same courtesy.

  “I’m afraid I’ll cry.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  ARES STOOD ON the steps leading up into the local registrar’s office, waiting. Not for someone, but for his guts to stop swirling. The idea of his best friend marrying in this place had haunted him since he’d been reminded of it in a way he hadn’t been able to ignore.

  He’d tried to talk both Theo and Cailey into having a small ceremony at his villa instead, but neither of them had gone for it. The mayor was opening the building on his day off, at a late hour, as a way of saying thank you to them for their efforts after the quake. And they didn’t have time to get an off-site wedding put together. Location didn’t matter, they’d argued, just sentiment.

  But experience told Ares differently. The one time he’d tried to orchestrate a registrar’s wedding had turned into the biggest sin of his life.

  He should’ve known it would end that way—just like all his parents’ marriages.

  Knocking Theo and Cailey out and forcing a change of venue wouldn’t be acceptable from a guest—let alone the best man.