“You think this is love?” he asks.
“Yes, Andre. I do.”
He stills. He didn’t expect that. He doesn’t think I know him. But I do. And for the first time in my life, I know myself.
He’s stripped me bare, not just of my clothes and freedom, but of my inhibitions and insecurities and filters. I’m only myself.
His right hand leaves my thigh. He lifts his mask, pulls it away. I stare into his searingly blue eyes. His wavy dark hair is combed back, laying bare his gorgeous face with all its chiseled planes. All of that is familiar, but I see him for the first time, all the pieces put together, all his masks blended into truth.
He’s obsessive and controlling and cruel, and he does want me. He has from the beginning. But, unlike me, he’s angry about it.
Then he says, “I know you too—Elio.”
Ice water spills through my veins.
That name makes me into someone else. It makes him into someone else too.
“How …?” Once again, I can’t finish my thought, my question. But this time, it’s because I don’t want to.
“Did you think I wouldn’t find out?”
“I …”
“Are you spying on me? Is this to blackmail me? Were you passing information to someone last night when you went to the Bronx?”
What is he doing? Why is he twisting everything like this? It was so pure and simple a moment ago. But this—
He pinches my inner thigh, making me yelp and jump in the chair.
“Answer me,” he demands.
My chest starts heaving. My mind is blank. I don’t remember the question.
He asks, “Is this revenge for Peter Grange? I don’t remember your father, so I don’t remember if he was connected to Grange.”
Utter confusion loosens my tongue. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
His lips twist cruelly. “You’re good at this. Better than Grange was. As soon as he was in this chair, he started begging.”
I can’t make sense of any of this, so I focus on the part that has nothing to do with me. “Peter Grange killed himself.”
Andre’s hands withdraw from my thighs. He says coolly, “It wasn’t easy to spend six days making him cry instead of making him bleed. But it was the only satisfaction I could allow myself, since I needed a suicide rather than a murder on record. I couldn’t be investigated while I was buying his hotel—with his own money, which I had extorted from him over several years. But you must have figured that out.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Don’t expect me to think you’re innocent just because you’re too young to have been involved … there.”
“Involved inwhat? Involvedwhere?”
“The Island.”
It’s the way he says it, the simplicity and awful weight of it. It connects instantly to a memory. I don’t quite know why because it’s not a memory of a place but of my father. Rather, a collage of memories.
Paradise had been ruined, he kept saying. The Island had been raided. Shut down. He talked about it for months. On the phone. To men who came to the house. So often that it became a kind of mythical place in my mind, almost an escape. I would imagine green and blue and sunny beaches.
Whatever Andre sees in my eyes makes his eyes grow colder, the blue icier.
He says, “None of them changed. It’s not hard for men like that to find … what they want. And the people around them, they fucking know. Just like Rebecca Grange.”
