Chapter Twenty-Four
Natalie
He was troubled by something so deep I knew I couldn’t penetrate it, and I was afraid to. Maybe I didn’t even want to. When he came back to me, we made love again, and at moments I could feel the same connection that was there after he saved me from the lifeboat, but he would retreat again inside of himself. The distance between us could not be bridged, no matter how intimately we entwined our bodies, no matter how deeply we looked into each other’s eyes.
He made love to my body gently, but there was something forceful in the way he did it, like he wanted to empty something inside of me and make me see what it was. And then, after I was exhausted and fell asleep, he crept away, leaving me alone and afraid to follow him, afraid to see where he went, afraid to break the beautiful snow globe that had existed for the briefest of moments.
I loved him, I knew that I loved him and that I could not control it. Ifeltthat he loved me, but there was something terrible in his love, and it poured into me like tar, blackening everything, remaining even after he left. What it was, I wondered if I could ever know.
I pretended to be asleep when he returned to his room and his weight moved next to me on the bed. He brushed my hair from my face, and it took everything in my power not to respond to his touch, to hold back the hot wet tears that threatened to break through the dam of my eyelids.
He pressed his lips to my temple and kissed me for a long time, before his weight disappeared just as suddenly.
When I opened my eyes, he was gone.
I lay there in the dark, wondering what to do, what was happening. My chest felt like I had swallowed a huge lead weight, so heavy that I couldn’t rise.
When at last I did, as I threw the covers off, I heard the sound: the faintwhump whump whump, almost silent, nothing more than a low change of air pressure.
I ran to the door and threw it open. “Alaric!” I called, running out to the staircase.
The black of the helicopter moved like a ghost above, the sound following on its heels, the lights in my eyes as the air rolled over me. I clung to the balcony and watched them disappear in the blackness of the sky.
I ran down the stairs, through the empty house. “Alaric!” I yelled again and again. I was crying by the time I reached the living room, because I had known all along that he was gone.
In the living room, silhouetted against the gray sky, illuminated by the lights from the patio and the stairs to the beach, was a figure much like his.
But I knew, without seeing his face or hearing his voice, that it wasn’t.
Fear gripped me, and my heart stood still. I stopped so suddenly that I almost fell, and I stood there, the only sound now the waves in the distance and my heart pounding in my chest.
The figure turned and said nothing. A light came on and illuminated his face.
Eric.
“Alaric has gone somewhere,” he said plainly.
“Why areyouhere?” I managed to whisper. Nightmarish ideas occurred to me, each one more horrifying than the last, and I clutched my womb and backed away instinctively.
“I’m not here. I was never here. The less you think of me, the better,” he said coldly. “The man before you is here to see to it that it doesn’t occur to that pretty little head of yours to go on any more boat trips.”
