I hadn’t meant to blurt out the sensitive subject. Fuck, that was stupid. Brought all the way out here, away from any prying eyes, and I’d said the one thing I shouldn’t have. Maybe my gut had thought it would be sweet to reminisce.
“Actually, yes,” Cassius said in a surprisingly gentle voice. Well. Maybe my gut wasn’t so stupid. “Well, not this house specifically. But this type of house, when we had good money but not the money we have now. We’d talk about what we’d do when we had the money we do now.”
He whistled, as if in admiration of how much money he had.
“VirgillovedWyoming, more than any of us ever did, and it’s not like we hated this place,” Cassius said. “He wasn’t quite like the rest of us. He was softer. Gentler. Preferred the slower pace of life to the hustle and the grind the other four of us went for.”
“Yeah?” I said, gradually realizing how I had turned my body to him, had put my head in my hand, was playing with my hair, and was looking only at him.
“Sometimes, I think he was ahead of us,” Cassius said. He paused for a moment, stood up, grabbed what looked like a bottle of wine from the fridge, poured us each a glass, handed it to me, and sat back down. Not once did I look away from him. “The end goal we’ve all had was riches and power, perhaps as a way to prevent what happened to Virgil from happening to us. But it’s going to happen eventually. Hopefully, in like sixty, seventy years, but it will happen. Maybe there’s something to be said for slowing down. For relaxing. For enjoying.”
This was a side of Cassius I hadn’t even seen when we dated while Virgil was alive. I looked at him expectantly, not sure what to say—if I needed to say anything at all. The topic of Virgil was sweet, nostalgic even right now, but it could go cold so very quickly.
“It’s something that my art gives me,” I said, hoping to tiptoe around the edge. “When I’m painting, all of the outside world falls to the wayside. Sure, for a few minutes at the start, maybe my mind is scatterbrained. But gradually, as I get into it, I enjoy it for what it is. Not what it can give me. Not what it might mean to me. But simply what it is.”
Cassius nodded.
“What you worked on at the photoshoot,” he said. “Tell me about it. The one with two people and one person overlooking.”
Right. I should have known he’d see on camera what I had done. Truthfully, it didn’t even feel like that egregious a violation of privacy. I was in the middle ofAllure.
It did, however, bring back the memory of the discussion I’d had with Delilah. I felt my body tense. This was going so well. I had to balance it carefully.
“It represents how no matter who I’m with, there’s always someone watching,” I said. “I could be with you. Someone is watching. I could be with my friends, my father. Someone is watching.”
“No one is watching here.”
“They don’t have to be alive.”
I meant it almost spiritually, in the sense that, for example, the legacy of my grandparents might be watching.
But immediately, Cassius’ right eye twitched. He took a gulp of his wine and stared me down, as if daring me to justify what I’d meant. But instead of pushing me to be vulnerable, it pushed me to further retreat.
“They can be a grandparent. Or, as I said, it could be like knowing you’re watching when I’m with a friend.”
“It’s my casino,” Cassius growled. “I have every right to watch what goes on in my art gallery.”
“Of course you do,” I said, “but that doesn’t mean I’m not aware of you watching. I?—”
“You mean to say Virgil is watching us, don’t you, Sarah?”
I felt my body go very cold. Cassius had flipped the switch, just as I had feared he might, at the topic of Virgil. I swallowed, not wine but fear, and took in a deep breath.
“Cassius, I?—”
But without a word, without letting me finish, he stood up and went upstairs. Seconds later, I heard a door slam shut. I was alone, downstairs with a glass of wine, as thunder rumbled closer and closer, the flashes of lightning growing more intense. The rain had not let up; if anything, it was pounding harder.
I looked over my shoulder to where Cassius had gone. It appeared there were two bedrooms; the one with the open door was obviously not the one he’d gone into. But it was one I could retreat to for a bit, unwind from what the hell had just gone awry.
As I climbed the stairs, leaving my glass of wine behind with his, inescapable conclusions came to mind.
Cassius would never let the memory of Virgil go. I wasn’t even sure it was a voluntary decision on his part.
Cassius would never let me be comfortable. Again, I wasn’t even sure it was something he deliberately chose so much as just a fact of his circumstances.
I was beginning to understand why he was the King of Hearts. Ostensibly, it was a cruel joke, a way that people said he captured hearts before smashing them. But what the articles never seemed to mention was how Cassius didn’t even seem to do this on purpose; that would have made him the Asshole of Hearts. But the King of Hearts was someone who was actually good underneath the gruff exterior… yet ultimately couldn’t get out of his own way.
Terrible, I thought as I reached the second floor.
