Scent is evocative. It awakens memories and recalls events. It digs up emotions that may be buried and entrenched in boxes in our minds. It has a power that’s underestimated, like so many beautiful things.
Ben is everywhere and nowhere in this room. Personal effects are put away, if they exist. Clothes aren’t draped anywhere and I suspect they’re hung up, regimented, in the wardrobe.
He doesn’t live here. He stays here. Because Ben doesn’t believe in a home.
The cold is ignored as I stand at the sash window, looking across the unploughed paths towards the Trossachs and the direction Ben took when I saw him leave in the night as a thief.
There are no returning tracks. The heavy snow continued overnight and covered the footsteps that he’d left, erasing the evidence of where he’d gone.
I turn back around and see Blair stirring, about to wake.
In my thirty-four years I’ve never broken a heart.
Today will be the first time.
Blair sits up, her eyes immediately on me, blankets wrapped around her body. I’m wearing the sweatpants and T-shirt I had with me last night and for some reason she appraises them.
“What’s happened?”
She’s out of bed, her hair falling over her shoulders and over her breasts, nipples puckered with the cold in the room. Her pussy’s bare and she’s all porcelain skin and delicate strength. I want to tell her she’s beautiful. I want to take her back to bed and fuck away the pain that I know’s going to erupt but I have more self-control than that. More sense.
“Where’s Ben?”
It should hurt. Ben is her centre, the mooring point she circles. He’s her gravity and her air.
I’m just the watcher who sometimes joins in and it. Should. Hurt.
But it never has done.
“I don’t know.”
She pulls on a robe, moves her hair out of the way. “Isaac…”
I saw him leave this morning before dawn, saw him walk across the deep snow and leave prints that are no longer there. He was wrapped up in a coat and boots, a hood pulled over his head and I only knew it was him because of his walk and that someone who had shared my night and my body wasn’t there.
He didn’t look back.
“I saw him leave this morning.”
She paces towards me, blue eyes that range from frozen to warm cinders now on fire.
“You need to explain what you mean by leave.”
“He was in a coat and boots and he walked away from here in the snow.” Facts. Always start with the information that’s indisputable.
“Where was he going and what time was it?”
She doesn’t touch me. She stops a foot away and looks over my shoulder out of the window.
“Just after four. I don’t know. I knew he’d gotten out of bed but assumed it was to use the bathroom.” And I’d been drunk on the sex we’d had and the warmth of the bed.
“Maybe there was something going on somewhere.” Her eyes are bereft.
“Maybe.”
She inhales, wraps her arms around herself and I want to offer to hold her.
“He’ll have his reasons. He’s probably had to see to something, like you said.”
