by Camilla Monk
I snorted. “Not even that. I landed in Rome, but I didn’t have the balls to call him or stalk him, and then I ran into Lily, and I met you, and things just went downhill from there, in case you didn’t notice.”
He ducked his head with a sheepish smile. “I’m sorry for getting in the way.”
“Don’t be.” I gazed at Faust’s reflection next to mine in the mirror. He’d always been here. Even when I didn’t know he existed, Faust had been part of my life. The mistakes may have been all mine, but he’d set the beat. He’d stilled some of the best and worst moments of my life. My throat went tight. I didn’t want to tell him, but the words spilled out. “You stopped time, the last time I saw him.”
His eyes widened, but he remained silent.
“It’s not really a bad memory,” I added quickly. “We ate a hot dog and looked at dumb seagulls on the beach. It was okay. And after that, you got me in and out of trouble a few times when I was older.”
His smile returned, mixed with an emotion I couldn’t decipher—that was at once pain and happiness. “I didn’t want to ask, but I did wonder what it was like . . . for you.”
My heart tightened. “I thought I was crazy. So crazy I didn’t even dare telling it to the shrinks my mom sent me to. I thought they’d lock me up if I told them I could feel time stop. I’m just glad you didn’t do it often. I think it helped me stay sane. I remember that nothing happened for almost a year when I was fourteen, and I thought, ‘It’s over; I’m cured.’”
He gave a nod of understanding. “I am not allowed to use Chronos’s power in vain. What qualifies as vain, however, is left to my appreciation.”
I smiled. “No stopping time to catch the bus?”
“Sadly, no.”
I ran a hand over my mouth. “You know, I was so fucking angry when it started happening again . . . Good thing we didn’t meet when I was fifteen. I’d have kicked your balls real deep up your ass.”
Faust winced. “They’d have healed anyway, but I’d rather not think about it.”
“Anyway, most of the time I’d just freak out and wait until it was over.” I spared him the darkest details. I didn’t want to look back on those times of utter distress. “I think it helped me distance myself, being so sure I wasn’t sure it wasn’t real. But there’s been moments . . . moments when I used it to my advantage, and afterwards I’d convince myself things happened differently—that it was just luck with a side of hallucinations.” I chewed the inside of my cheek, seeing myself stagger out of a Walgreens with free makeup, or running away from a run-down squat in Hunt Points before a ‘friend’ could introduce me to her pimp. “Nevermind. Let’s just say not everything I ever fucked up was because of you or my mom.”
“Your mother?” In the mirror, Faust double cocked his head, intrigued. I retreated to the head of the bed and huddled against the fluffy lace pillows, mentally smacking myself for the slip. It was too late though. The mattress moaned, and sank as Faust moved to lie closer to me. “Emma?” His voice was infinitely cautious as if he feared I might detonate any second. “What Lady Palombara said this afternoon . . . I think she was only trying to—”
“She was right,” I rasped, studying the floral pattern on the blue brocade bedspread to avoid his silvery gaze. “I know she wanted to mess with me, but it worked because she was right . . . about everything.”
“You two don’t get along?”
At once a simple question and an impossible equation chalked on a blackboard. I’d heard those words so many times from well-meaning counselors and shrinks when they leaned back in their chair and tried to look me in the eye. My best defense had always been stubborn silence; at first to protect myself, then because it was the only way for me to win, to feel powerful. I could never make my mom love me, could never be Lily’s equal in her eyes. What I had were two perfectly working middle fingers to flip off the rest of the world.
Faust waited, his head turned toward me on his pillow. Lady Palombara had said that too, that he was one of the most patient persons she knew . . . Words welled in my chest and died just as fast; bubbles of pain and anger that wouldn’t come out. I reached to the nightstand and tugged at the chain hanging from a Chinese vase lamp there. I preferred darkness.
I rolled to my side, looking away from him. “We were never close, even when I was a kid. I think she had me too young, and it didn’t help that she hated my dad. She thought he was a huge loser. She took care of me, but I noticed we didn’t really talk or hug like the other kids did with their parents. We were roommates,” I murmured.
“Never more?” Faust asked.
“No,” I rasped, a shameful prickling in my eyes. “Not long after my dad disappeared for good, she got a fresh start with Lily’s dad. Lily had lost her mom very young, and there was this insta-love between her and my mom, and you know, the great grades, being a cute little girl with a big heart and shit . . . I just couldn’t compete with that.”
“You were jealous.” That wasn’t a question, but his tone held no reproach, not even pity; it was almost tender.
I sighed and tossed on the mattress, staring up at the swirls of blue brocade on the canopy bed’s ceiling. I couldn’t find the courage to look at Faust while I bared myself like that, but it was still better than just having my back to him like he wasn’t here. “You bet. I turned into a little turd over the next few years because I was just so pissed there was no room for me in the picture. The three of them were a family, and I was like, ‘hold on—what do you mean, ‘club’s full?’”
Faust gave me a knowing smile, the sort I’d seen all my life, and for a second, I hated him almost as much as I hated myself. “This is very common among children whose parents enter a new relationship. Perhaps your mother—”
“Plot twist. When I turned twelve, she dumped me in a boarding school upstate, and she kept Lily.”
There was a beat of stunned silence before his eyebrows jerked. “Was that . . . a permanent relocation?”
“Sort of. In the first few months, I’d go home every two weeks, but we stopped doing that because I’d just fight with my mom, steal some cash, and spend the rest of the day out. So, she came up with strategies to keep me away: camps, summer schools . . . I think she tried everything except kennels. They had to take me home every year for Christmas though, and it drove her totally insane.” I snorted. “I went to three different schools because I kept stirring shit and getting expelled, and when I hit eighteen, I just grabbed my backpack and took off.”
Faust shifted closer. Ever closer, in every way. His hand found mine in the dark, grazing it as if to read the lines of my palm.
I swallowed. “And now I’m a waitress at Tuna Town, and most people think I’m joking when I tell them about it. And . . . I guess that’s it.” I gave an awkward chuckle in a desperate effort to cut through the tension.
He squeezed my hand a little. Heat seeped where our skin touched. I shivered from the foreign, oddly intimate sensation. “I see,” he said at last.
I figured we were done. I’d given him a bone to chew, a nice, abridged summary of my life. Twenty years of going nowhere until a capricious god, hiding somewhere in another dimension had decided to place a black hole where all magic ended inside me. I sighed, tried to close my eyes. Maybe I could doze a little, forget until the sun rose over Lady Palombara’s secret world.
But then, Faust let go of my hand. His fingers traveled upwards, to brush a stray lock of hair away from my cheek, and he asked, “Emma, how long did you stay on the street?”
I went rigid, my neurons suddenly fast-forwarding through a thousand shitty memories. I rolled to my side to present him with my back—my shell—but I could still feel the warmth of his body, lying inches from mine. He waited, always so fucking patient. A silent pressure built between us, pulsing with the blood under my temples.
My chest hurt, and my eyes were hot with tears that wouldn’t come out. A brittle murmur escaped my lips, and I heard myself reply, “I always think it’s written
all over my face and it’s, like, the first thing people see. But you’re actually blind . . . so I guess it’s kind of a whole new low.”
I felt his hand brush down my back, petting me like his cats, I thought. “Few of my dates ever sat down with me for a nice bout of panhandling . . . You seemed in your element.”
Did I? Maybe he was right, and I belonged outside no matter what. How long until I unraveled again, and my ass landed back on Madison? My nose prickled, and I wanted to sniff so bad, but I didn’t want him to know he’d made me cry over that shit. “I didn’t stay that long,” I eventually mumbled. “Less than a year and a half, after I dropped out. My school was upstate in Uthica. I took the bus back to New York, and after that, I just . . . hung around, I guess. Got small jobs I didn’t keep—probably smoked too much too. I went to a couple shelters, but I figured I was better off on my own. I knew a few squats, so I didn’t sleep out on the street that often.”
“You didn’t ask for your family’s help?” Faust probed softly.
“Not a chance,” I snapped. I welcomed that zing of anger in my veins; it reminded me that I was strong in spite of it all. “Lily said my mom called the cops after I went AWOL, but they dropped the ball because it wasn’t a kidnapping or anything.” I shrugged. “Took me a while to get back on my feet, but in the end, I went to see a social worker in a shelter, and I just said, ‘look, I’m broke, I’m on the street, I want out, and I’m ready to be serious about it’.”
The smile returned in his voice as he noted, “I recognize your tenacity.”
I rolled to my side to face him in the dark. “This has to be the longest I’ve ever discussed my life with anyone, you know . . .”
Faust’s head dipped closer to mine. “I’ve been told I’m a good listener.”
“And it’s a great way for you to avoid talking about yourself,” I sighed, turning my head to avoid his lips. His beard grazed my cheek, soft and rough curls tangled together; goose bumps peppered my nape in response. I bit my lower lip, increasingly aware of the quiet tension lacing the air between us, the way he breathed my hair deeply—we were in a bed, and we’d taken off our socks, after all. “I’m not sleeping with you,” I reminded him, allowing my head to drop on a fluffy pillow that smelled faintly of lavender. Man, that was nice, and I was fast losing the struggle to keep my eyes open.
At my side, Faust settled in his half of the bed with a low purr. “I can wait. I have all the time in the world.”
Tap, tap.
A familiar sound woke me up, the echo of a dream still clinging to me. I couldn’t remember what it was I had dreamed of, except Faust had been in it . . . I blinked puffy eyes at the blue brocade tapestry on the walls, the stripe of blinding white peeking between navy curtains. Lady Palombara had changed her mind: it was snowing again in the park. Flakes swirled behind the window, adding to the smooth coat covering the balcony and the park beyond.
My gaze drifted to the golden bowed legs of the dressing table, the mirror atop. I wasn’t alone in bed. Faust snored softly at my side. In dawn’s bleak light I saw the hole in his T-shirt. I smiled to myself; he really needed a fresh one.
I didn’t mean to wake him, but the mattress bounced when I sat up, shaking him slightly. His snoring hitched and ended with a grunt, then a yawn. He propped himself on his elbows with a lazy grin. His voice still husky with sleep, he said, “I dreamed that I woke up in bed with a beautiful woman, after a night of—”
“Nothing. It was a night of nothing, and . . .” I wrinkled my nose. “You need to wash your feet and everything else too.”
His eyebrows wiggled under the mess of blond curls. “As you do. I can think of a solution that would solve both our problems.”
I let myself fall back and sink into the feather duvet with a groan. “You never give up, do you?”
“Et res non semper spes mihi semper adest,” he declaimed in his singing Latin accent, with a dramatic flourish of his hand.
“Sure . . .” I agreed, then rubbed my eyes.
“My hopes are not always realized, but I always hope—from the great Ovid.”
I chuckled. “I’ll stick to Aerosmith’s version if that’s okay with you.”
His brow creased but then he got it, and there it was, his Faustiest smile. “Dream until your dreams come true? Oh Emma, Emma . . .” he purred. “How can I ever give up when you wile me so?”
“That’s me, wiling all the time.” I sighed, dragging myself out of bed to inspect a delicately painted door near the dressing table. Naked girls around a fountain—I turned the porcelain knob and peeked inside—Yup, that was the bathroom. I raised an eyebrow at the massive clawfoot tub peeking from behind an ancient Chinese screen where colorful fish swam against a golden background; that looked like the most expensive bath I’d ever take in my life . . . “Calling dibs on the bathroom,” I announced.
Faust fell back on the bed, silver peeking between his half-closed lids. “This old infirm will wait for his turn, and dream of the silk of your skin.”
I leaned against the door, a lopsided grin dancing on my lips. “You know that’s basically harassment, right?”
He winked. “Only if you ask me to stop.”
My mouth opened, only to close without a sound. There was a foreign flutter in my chest, and maybe he had a point.
I was tying my hair in a high ponytail when Faust came out of the bathroom, smelling of the same flowery soap I’d used not long ago. I glanced over my shoulder. My eyes went wide, and laughter erupted from my throat before I could stop it. “Please don’t bite me,” I managed in between chuckles.
He felt for the balloon sleeves and neck ruffles of his clean white shirt—kindly provided by either Palombara or Ryuuko to replace his holed-out tee. “These used to be all the rage you know.”
I crossed the room to inspect his new look. “In the Middle Ages?”
“How provincial of you.” He rolled amused eyes and sobered. “Do you feel better?”
“You mean ready?”
“Yes,” he admitted.
“I don’t even know what I need to be ready for, so ignorance is bliss, I guess.”
He went to sit on the bed to slip on his boots, which lay near the bed. I winced when he pulled yesterday’s dirty socks from his pants pocket and slipped them back on. “Theia won’t leave us in the dark much longer.”
“Theia, that’s how you called her yesterday. It’s her first name?” I nudged one of the boots closer, so he could grab it.
He took it with a grateful smile. “Theia the Bright, yes.”
I sat by his side on the fluffy duvet, watching him fasten his laces. “And Palombara, it’s just a pseudo?”
His fingers paused in their work, and I realized that a solemn expression had chased his usual smile. “It was her husband’s name. Massimiliano Palombara, Marquis of Pietraforte. All you see here was built by him.”
I went through several stages of shock and disbelief before I managed to reply. “Like, he built the dimension?”
“No,” Faust corrected. “He was human. He had the villa and the park built in 1650, as a green retreat on the Esquiline for Theia and himself.” He let out an unsteady breath. “After his death, Theia used most of the power she had left to create this place, a dimension where the villa would forever remain preserved from the ravages of time.”
My brow lifted in amazement. “So, it’s a copy?”
“The original building fell to ruins and was destroyed by the city at the end of the nineteenth century to rebuild the Esquiline district.”
I pondered Faust’s revelation and the sorrow creasing lines around his mouth in stunned silence. “She must have loved him a lot, to marry him even though she knew he’d grow old . . .”
“He did not,” Faust said. His hand searched mine. “He was the man you saw in the Libro.”
I gripped his fingers tight, holding onto him as the room seemed to tilt around. His was a mind like no other, fascinated by the hidden nature of things, that so few
humans understand. I’ll tell you about him someday. The mystery sorcerer. The man who had defied death with an embalming spell and tried to summon Perses in his fight against Faust . . . was Lady Palombara’s late husband? Maybe that was her other, hidden reason for helping us. Montecito was barreling down the same slope which had killed the man she loved. Palombara knew better than any of us what kind of pull Perses exerted over those he chose. But . . . “You’re the one who killed him,” I murmured, struggling aloud to make sense of all this. “And she’s still your friend?”
Faust brought our joined hands to his heart, almost unconsciously, it seemed. His skin was warm against my palm through the fine linen; the feeling sent my pulse racing. “She couldn’t, so I did it for her. He wanted things Theia could never give him, and that desperate need destroyed him.” His jaw clenched. “It had to end, and he left me no choice when he tried to summon Perses.”
“He wanted true immortality?”
“More than this.” Faust shook his head. “He wanted a child.”
The oldest human instinct. I studied Faust’s hand, still holding mine on his lap. My heart broke a little for Palombara, even though we barely knew each other. I wasn’t exactly great at the whole feelings and empathy game, but this, I could understand: the unbearable grief of loving someone and knowing you can never be enough for them. “She lives in her memories,” I said, my voice brittle. And that was the real reason Palombara was unable to fight Perses: because she had wasted all she had—all of herself—to preserve a memory of the villa and her husband.
“I envy her,” Faust admitted.
I looked up at him, my brow furrowed in mild shock.
“Only a great love can hurt so much.”
“There’s nothing to envy,” I replied, snatching my hand back from his grasp. “Anyone is better off alone than going through that kind of emotional meatgrinder.” It scared me just thinking about it. I never wanted to experience the kind of love that had wrecked Palombara—or turned Lily’s brain into oatmeal whenever that bag of dicks Dante was around.