“I was faking it, most of the time,” she admitted.
He frowned. “Surely not.”
“I wanted you to put your arm around me so I wouldn’t fall, and I wanted you to carry me to the bedroom. So, I faked it.”
He leaned forward so that his elbows rested on the table. “I would have done that anyway.”
“But you didn’t, not unless I pretended to be wasted.”
“I was on duty,” he said. “I needed to watch for anyone who was looking at you.”
“Not after we were inside the grounds of Kensington Palace.”
Dieter looked up at the corner of the room and squinted. “You did seem to suddenly get drunker when we were walking from the car to our apartment every night. Once we were inside, you were astonishingly able to walk straight and were competent to make decisions. I chalked it up to metabolism.”
Flicka grinned at him. “Startling, in retrospect.”
“Certainly is.”
She looked straight at him. “It was almost as if my level of drunkenness had little or no relationship to the amount of alcohol that I drank.”
Dieter ripped off a hunk of French bread and ate it, not commenting.
“Let’s say this bottle of mineral water is vodka.” She gestured with the green bottle. “However drunk I got, whether I needed you to steady me or carry me to bed, might be the same, no matter what’s in it.”
Dieter toyed with his green bottle of water. “Why would you want to get so drunk that I carried you to bed?”
Ah, excellent.He had picked up on her wording perfectly.
“Let’s say I did.” She took a long drink of sparkling water. The water moistened her mouth and throat with a bitter trace of copper. “Let’s say, maybe it happened again. Maybe there were several reasons.”
“Maybe just to forget,” he said, shredding a piece of bread. “Maybe just as a way to not have to think about the last day or so.”
“Never really had a blackout drunk,” she said. “My liver is more proficient than that. Far more proficient. So trying to forget wouldn’t really work for me.”
His pale brown eyebrows dipped. “If you got drunk, you might do something that you would regret later.”
“That’s never happened.”
“Oh?”
“Of all the things I’ve done that I regret, I can’t say that any of the decisions were made hastily or under the influence of alcohol. Indeed, sometimes alcohol has cleared things up for me, made me focus on what was really important. I own all my poor decisions.”
“I’ve made some bad decisions when I was wasted,” Dieter said. “Maybe I shouldn’t get drunk.”
“You appear to be drinking mineral water,” she said, again lifting her green bottle. “Not straight vodka, like me.”
“I wouldn’t want to take advantage of you, if something else were skewing your judgment.” But even in the reddening sunlight streaming through the sheer curtains, his storm-cloud gray eyes were taking on that intensity that made her damp between her legs.
She pressed the base of the sweating green bottle on the beat-up table, overlapping the watery rings in a haphazard pattern. “Let’s say something was skewing my judgment. Let’s say that there was something in my rearview mirror that, every time I glanced at it, nearly killed me. Let’s say that it made me weak, and angry, and I was constantly on the verge of crying. Let’s say that I can’t even think straight with that thing right behind me, right there, that last thing that happened to me. Let’s say that, if I got absolutely smashed on this bottle of vodka here,” she shook the green bottle, and the mineral water hissed as it released its fizz, “and somethingelsehappened, something took the place of the stupid thing that made me weak and angry and crying, maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad thing.”
Dieter nodded. “I’m not a psychologist—”
“Then don’t try to psychoanalyze me.”
“—but I wonder, if such a thing had happened, if something else happening might not make it worse for you, later.”
She sucked down another long swallow of bubbly water and held down the bitter burp in her throat. “If it did, I would deal with it later. Right now, I can’t stand that it’s right there.” She flapped her hand at something just behind her shoulder. “It’s like I feel everything, still. It’s like it’s still hurting me. But maybe, if I drank enough of this rotgut vodka and had a little while where I didn’t have to think about it so much, maybe if there were someone I could trust, someone who was there for me, maybe it would be better.”
Dieter held out his green bottle of mineral water. “Then, cheers.”
Flicka clinked her green bottle against his.“Salut.”
