by Bromberg, K
“Oh, that name sounds…” Olivia didn’t finish the sentence. Her expression said it all.
I explained. “If we’d ride down too close to dinner, our father would tell us if we didn’t get back in time, we were dead men. So.”
“He never killed them, but there was this one time—”
“We should go,” I interrupted my mother more sternly than intended. “Please.”
“I’ll tell you later,” Mom whispered. “Funny story.”
Olivia came toward me, and Mom tucked away the album with a satisfied smile.
* * *
The trail to Dead Man’s Grove narrowed as it turned down the ridge, and I pulled Keats to a stop so Olivia could take the lead. Once she was settled in the saddle, she was a decent rider, letting her body sway and rock with Brontë’s gait the way she moved with mine when I fucked her.
She waited for me around the turn, where the path widened, tall and straight in the saddle as if she were queen of all she surveyed, including me.
I should have felt threatened. Instead, she lulled me into a sense of security I had to shake.
“The horse’s names,” she said, then waited for me to walk astride. “Is it John Keats and Emily Brontë?”
“Charlotte, actually.”
“I ride corrected.”
She smiled at me from her saddle, tightening a connection I’d been trying to deny. It was getting harder and harder to turn my back on the obvious.
“My mother has a degree in English lit with a focus on poetry,” I said.
“And you were named for Lord Byron?”
“After Dante, my father put an end to naming children after poets. The horses weren’t so lucky.”
“‘I want a hero:’” she quoted, “‘an uncommon want, when every year and month sends forth a new one.’”
“Don Juan was a satire from the first line.”
“Agreed,” she said. “There are no heroes.”
She wasn’t protesting too much. She wasn’t irritated by the fact or crying out for change. She didn’t need a hero. She didn’t need to be saved. She was the champion of her own story, and she knew it. Olivia asked for nothing not because she feared she’d never get it, but because she was a master of creating her own truth.
I didn’t want her or anyone. I was going to be alone the rest of my life. But she could tempt me, this magical creature who fought like a warrior and quoted poetry like an artist. This goddess who needed no one but chose me for now.
I trusted her not to love me, but I was too trusting of myself. The ocean-scented air blew strands of gold from her ponytail and over her cheeks. With the trop-tropping of hooves and the lope and rock of the animals under us, I was lulled into flexibility. My thoughts came unbridled in loose, curling strands of gilded light. They were so absorbing I left the vault door open, forgot to check the lock on my heart.
That moment was when my feelings of tenderness grew from my lust, but I was equally convinced the tenderness had been lying in wait. Like a seed with the potential for the entire tree inside it, it was always there, waiting for the water of her laughter and the sunlight in her eyes.
“‘She walks in beauty,’” I said. “‘Like the night. Of cloudless climes starry skies; And all that’s best of dark and bright, Meet in her aspect and her eyes; Thus mellowed to the tender light, Which heaven to gaudy day denies.’”
“You’ve impressed me.” She smiled, swaying with Brontë. “But it’s still satire.”
“You obviously haven’t met you.”
She raised an eyebrow at me as if I’d lost my mind.
Maybe I had.
“Over here,” I said, pointing toward a little picnic area surrounded by a log fence with piles to tie the horses. Colton had carved the words DEAD MEN TIE HERE with hacked triangulations where curves should have been.
We kept the area grassy and clean, with a teak table and chairs in the center, next to a hundred-year-old ficus that kept the space in shade.
I got off Keats, tied him, and tried to help her down, but she’d already slid off her saddle with competent grace, so I unpacked the leather saddlebags Nellie had filled with our lunch. Together, we laid out the crackers, cheese, and meats. Olivia cracked a little jar of jam and raised it to her nose.
“Is this fig?” she asked.
“No clue.”
“I love fig jam.”
She sat, and I straddled the bench facing her.
“Let’s see.” I prepared her a cracker with brie and jam, then held it up.
She took it in her mouth and rolled her eyes with a deep mmm. “It’s fig all right.”
“Chalk another one up for the Crownes.”
She laughed, snapping a piece of French bread in two.
“I like your parents,” she said, wedging a slice of hard cheese between the crusts. “They’re nicer than I thought they’d be.”
“How did you think they’d be?”
“Aloof. Guarded, maybe.” I must have been easy to read, because she explained before I could ask. “My mom used to take me to these parties sometimes. She wanted me to meet people who could help me in my life, but they knew I wasn’t one of them. One of your crowd. So, it was a lot of them testing me. Like Bianca Papillion.” She held up her water with her pinkie in the air. “‘Darling, if you want to ski, it’s Zermatt or nothing.’”
I laughed in recognition.
“Maybe I’m exaggerating,” she added. “But not that much.”
“You don’t really see it until you start working with people who need their jobs.” I fed her another cracker with brie and fig jam. Doing that little bit for her was a fleeting pleasure.
“Are you happy?” she asked. “Is this what you hoped, inviting me here? If I could see you with your people, I’d be happy to raise a child with them around?”
“Yes.” I looked away from the sharp edges of her blue eyes. “These people, as you say? They’re better than me.”
I wasn’t baiting her. I didn’t want her to throw back an exhortation about my value, and to my relief, she didn’t.
“You’re one of them.”
“I haven’t been in a while.”
The statement was made in a moment of weakness, and I instantly regretted opening the door to questions and stories.
“Your mother told me you found Samantha.”
“She must like you,” I said. “Do you like camembert?”
“I do.” She popped a cornichon in her mouth, and I thought we’d passed the danger zone. But no. Olivia twisted the padlock as if she were a safecracker. “I’m sorry that happened.”
Happened. Like a hurricane or an icy patch in the road that you didn’t see no matter how careful you were. As if my back had been turned just long enough to kill someone.
My insides seized like wet concrete the instant it turned solid.
What was I doing? Why was I looking at this woman with golden-haired beauty as if she was safe for me? This wasn’t allowed. She was strong, but she was human. If I let her in, loved her and asked her to love me back, she’d expose herself, and that would be the end of her.
If I thought highly of her, the only thing to do was make sure she was protected from me.
“Well, I’ll tell you a secret.” I cut a thick slice of meat as if its length offended me, then I ate it with a crust of bread, chewing as my mind searched for the coldest part of my heart. “I wanted out of that engagement. The whole thing was a trap, and she let me out of it. I wish I could repay her for the favor, but oh well.”
“You can’t mean that.”
Had I offended her? Shocked her? Made her take a step back? “Why shouldn’t I?”
“It’s heartless.” Disgust framed her words. Perfect.
She was perfect. I hadn’t realized how much. Leading her to judgment was intentional. All I had to do was nail it into place.
“Good,” I said. “It won’t change your opinion of me. You’re the only one who knows better than to give me any credit. Hold
on to that. I don’t want to lose any respect I have for you.”
I assumed she’d pull away in aversion. Who wouldn’t?
And all that’s best of dark and bright, Meet in her aspect and her eyes.
Olivia didn’t run from fear. She sped to meet it.
“Why this?” The wind blew a leaf into her hair. It stuck there, an imperfection in part that served to emphasize the perfection of the whole. “Why do you need me to hate you?”
My hand rose to remove the flicking leaf, but I caught myself. “It’s better that way.”
“You weren’t always like this.” She twisted to put her knee on the bench, denying me her profile and gifting me her full attention.
“Like what? Honest?”
“Mean. Broken. Self-loathing. No, this isn’t you. I saw the pictures from your childhood. You were a happy kid. I bet your mother doesn’t own a picture of you where you’re not smiling. And I’m not saying it matters to me one way or the other, because we’re not a permanent couple, but it’s a little frustrating watching you put on this performance.”
“I’m not a performance. You’re seeing more of me than most people ever see.”
“What changed?”
“People don’t change. They get real.”
“Nope.” She popped her P, daring me to argue my case.
She could go to hell. I was trying to help her. I didn’t have to convince her of anything.
Then I did anyway.
“Look, sure, I was happy.” I shrugged. “I had a painless childhood. Everything I wanted. You know what that does to a person? It makes them too weak to handle the real world and too oblivious to know it. There’s nothing more precarious than being a snail without a shell.”
“And now you have a shell?”
All I had to do was nail her doubt over the places I was split, and it would all be fine. “So do you. Your shell’s thicker than mine, and it suits you. I’m glad you have yours. Now be glad I have mine.”
Her mouth tightened, and her shoulders dropped. I’d hammered the last nail perfectly.
“You’re a confusing person.” She folded a piece of wax paper over the camembert, then stood to clean up the rest of the food. “Just when I think I can know you, you push me away.”
I grabbed her wrist. She stopped. Her forehead was tense and jaw was set.
“They’re the same thing.”
“Yeah.” She pulled her hand away and gathered bits of food as if the existence of an unwrapped lunch offended her. “You’re some unknowable entity. All alone forever. Boo-fucking-hoo.”
She had it wrong. I didn’t want pity.
“It’s not—”
“Why do you want this child? Is it just another temporary obsession? You want to possess it until you get bored? The way you want to possess me?”
“It’s different.”
“How?” she asked the canopy with her paper-filled fists banging the table. “What’s the difference?”
“Just… trust me. It’s different.”
“No. You tell me. Now.”
“Olivia. It’s just my problem, not yours.”
She scoffed, and when she finally looked at me, her eyes were floodlights of defiance. “I can make this not your problem very easily.”
The threat was unstated but clearly made. She had the baby, and she could do with it whatever she wanted. She had authority over me. The ultimate power.
“Is this your game?” My question came out in a growl. “You’re going to hold that over my head?”
“You bet I am.” She crunched empty paper into a ball and stuffed everything into the bag. “You’re the one playing a game. But for me, this is everything. It’s my life, and I will not trade it for an unknown. If I can’t sort out your motives? Motives I believe?” She flipped the top of the bag closed. “I will not hesitate to cut you out.”
Snapping up the last of our lunch, she went to the horses with her hips swaying and her ponytail in tatters. The leaf that had stuck in her hair came loose and floated behind her.
How much to tell? I asked myself as I chased after her.
What does she need to hear? I asked as I grabbed her elbow.
What do I need? I asked myself as she jerked away, so angry I thought she’d spit in my face.
“I can’t love you,” I said. “If that’s what you’re worried about.”
“Samantha was the last?”
What was the proper response to that?
I looked for doubt in her face, but there was none. Just cold, gray stone.
“You want to know my last words to her?” I asked, erecting my own wall from the tiny bits of rubble she’d left me. “I told her I loved her.”
Olivia’s eye twitched with a question she wanted to ask but wouldn’t.
I answered it anyway. “She didn’t believe me.”
She only offered a slight nod that made words redundant.
Her nod said, I don’t blame her.
That hurt. She’d aimed her arrow and hit the bullseye.
“When I first saw you,” I said, “I wanted you. That’s the truth, but it wasn’t a big deal. I knew I’d have you. But up on the hill, when I found you jogging…and yes, I admit I looked for you because…”
How much to tell?
What do I need?
All of it.
“I wanted you, and seducing you would have made it harder for you to get in my way. I could soften you. Fuck you into a mistake. At the very least, you’d have to withdraw.”
“So that was all fake?”
“I warned you. At the Stock Hotel, I warned you.”
“Let me repeat you back to you,” she said. “You lured me into sex with a total disregard for my feelings. You thought I was so weak you could fuck me into a mistake. You thought the fact that you gave me some vague warning at a party absolved you of guilt, and now you’re telling me this? Why? So I’ll forgive you?”
“Yes, but… listen.” I felt as if I was chasing a leaf around a windy courtyard. “On Runyon. Talking to you. Just talking… I felt like I could listen to you forever, and it was dangerous. I shouldn’t want to talk to you. You’re the enemy. My job was to fuck you to destruction and leave you there.”
“I wouldn’t have minded that.” She swung herself over the saddle, suddenly seven feet tall with the sun spotting through the ficus leaves behind her.
“I couldn’t. We weren’t even done, and I was finding reasons to see you again. To be with you. Give you your abatement or whatever. I didn’t care. When you said you were dead—”
“It was a joke.”
“I know.” I laid a hand on her thigh and the other on Brontë’s neck to steady her. “I can’t get involved. I can’t. I’m not safe for you.”
“But for a child, you are?”
“Yes.”
“What happened with Samantha?”
The question was precision-timed to her calculation. She was fitting the pieces of my behavior to the scraps of my story.
What does she need to hear?
What do I need?
“I was cruel,” I said. “I was cold. I treated her as if she didn’t matter. She was fragile, and I thought I could make her strong. But I didn’t. I never did, but I kept trying. We had a fight. She cursed me and called me a monster. I thought… if she was coming back at me, that meant she was getting tougher. I slept like a man content with a job well done. I slept so well that night I didn’t hear anything.”
She waited as if she knew there was more.
When it was clear I didn’t have the strength for another word, she finally spoke. “I don’t know whether to be sorry for you or frightened of you.”
“Fear is your friend.”
She took the reins. “We should get back.”
She tugged the strap and turned Brontë away from me, walking in beauty. Like the night.
* * *
We rode back in a silence I was grateful for. At the stables, we spoke in practicalities. Where to put the horses.
Which stable hand would manage the brush-down.
Lyric had gone back to Los Angeles with her friends. Logan made enough small talk to soften the hard edges we pointed at each other. My mother fussed over Olivia’s dinner preferences while my father made drinks she wouldn’t touch.
The pressure of the passing hours increased over dinner, and the night signaled the inevitable rise of morning. It was unbearable. She felt it too. After my parents went to bed and my brother went to the office to prove he was worthy of his inheritance, Olivia went to the back patio and leaned her elbows on the railing, leaning into the black stretch of the invisible sea.
She walks in beauty.
“Beautywalker.” I stood beside her with a white paper bag in my hand.
She smiled. “Lord Byron? What brings ye?”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right. I get it. I mean, it was an asshole plan.”
“I like to think it was an excuse to see you.”
“Doesn’t matter really. I have to either forgive it or not. I’m not going to be your conscience. It’s not my job to needle you or nag you. I’m not getting any more information than what I have now. Either you’re going to run your life in a way that makes you a good example for the kid or not.”
“I will be.” I fidgeted with the paper bag as if I could test whether or not I’d allow myself to drop it in the ravine. “I wish I could be more for you.”
“I don’t know what I wish.”
“I do. You said you could take a test tomorrow morning?”
“I’ll do it when I get back on Monday.” She shrugged. “It can wait.”
I handed her the bag.
She opened it and peeked in, sighing before she crunched the top closed. “This is the most thoughtful gift ever.”
“Figured you’d enjoy pissing on something I gave you.”
She smiled, and though I’d caused it, I didn’t own it. Its light was directed inside her.
“If this is positive…” She let the thought hang and started a new one. “Once I make a decision, I’m sticking to it.”
“What if it’s negative?” I asked.
“You can breathe a sigh of relief, and… for me?” She slapped my chest with the box. “I guess it’s just another month gone by.”