“You know,” Mirabelle said as she reached the door, “Amelia asked me what would happen if you ever tried to leave.”
“What did you tell her?” Emory asked mildly but with a splinter of hope, as if Amelia had already devised some savvy scheme to set him free.
“The truth.” Mirabelle didn’t need to elaborate. The price of escape was as simple as it was severe. “Have you told her what you told me, everything you feel for her?”
Emory pressed his lips together and shook his head.For such a loyal and loving man, he had a tendency to bungle that part. He claimed to never have the right words, and yet he had a whole tome of them for Amelia.
“You should. She deserves to know how you feel but also how this ends.”
They both knew how love ended for him—locked in a cage without his companion. He always set them free. Emory slowly sat at the end of the bed. With his elbows propped on his knees, he hung his head.
Jack would call that progress and remind her that love was sometimes cruel.It’s for his sake.
“I have to wonder,” Mirabelle said, “if you never wanted this life, then why bring her into it?”
Emory lifted his eyes and crumbled with a resigned smile she knew all too well. When Ivan raged or their mother died or the rainy night they ran from home, he’d said,“I’m alright. I’ll be okay,”with pain in his eyes and a smile on his lips. When therewas nothing else to do, nothing else to say, nothing that could hurt him more than he hurt like this, Emory smiled.
Mirabelle left then and tearfully told Jack it was done. He celebrated the victory but didn’t ask why she cried. Alone in her room, she dried her tears and fixed her makeup. Downstairs, she greeted the funeral guests with bright laughter, tenderhearted hugs, and what felt like a gaping hole in her chest.
THIRTY-ONE
AMELIA
The funeral commenced in the sweltering heat of late afternoon. Beside Gio’s grave, the men baked in black suits, and the women fanned themselves with the memorial leaflet. Amelia slipped into the shadow of a holly oak and leaned against a pockmarked headstone. Lace-like lichen filled its inscribed letters—a poem perhaps—but she couldn’t decipher it.
The priest didn’t break a sweat. He had that frozen dispassion required of all Catholic clergymen. Amelia remembered it well. When she was eight, her mother dressed her like a little bride and sent her down the aisle to receive the Eucharist from icy hands. In his golden robes, the priest had stooped to hear the sins of a child.
“I’m not sure God is real,” she’d tearfully confessed with communion wine still sour on her lips.
That priest had had no comfort for a sinner like her. He’d frowned and sent Amelia back to the pew, hollowed in her shame.
Across the burial plot, Emory watched her from behind aviators that couldn’t temper his stare. A pair of oversized sunglasses sat on Amelia’s dresser at home, so she didn’t have the luxury of feeling unseen. She had nowhere to hide, not even from the sun that competed with the heat between her legs and excused her blush. A smile crept across Emory’s lips as if he divined her thoughts, and Amelia’s stomach flipped with a woozy rush.
Thatmorning, they’d had foreplay in the shower and sex in the bed. While the water rushed down her back, Emory had dropped to his knees and dove between her legs. Dizzy from an orgasm, Amelia pleaded to feel him inside, so he hauled her off to bed and tossed her to the mattress.
With his chest against her back, Emory had muttered in her ear, “I want you like this,” and gripped her thighs hard enough that Amelia knew to obey him. A soft sigh had escaped her as he pushed inside from behind. She’d never get over how he filled her up and already craved how he felt, how he moved inside of her, how he called her a good girl.Hisgood girl.
With hot kisses, Emory had savored her shoulder, neck, and cheek as he thrust slow and deep. It’d left her head swimming as their bodies melded together. Emory had been all over her, existing in every part simultaneously as his consuming weight settled on top. His hands had been in her hair, roaming her curves, palming her breasts.
Closer than they had been before, that was how he liked it, she’d realized. He’d been in control, and she’d submitted to his will, awash in pleasure at his ragged exhales that left her wetter and wanting more. Emory had even slid one hand beneath her to swipe between her legs as he fucked her hard into the mattress. Amelia had bucked against his movements until they’d fallen into a delicious rhythm.
As the pressure rose between her legs, she’d gripped the sheets and buried her face in a pillow while Emory’s breaths rustled in her ear as he panted her name. He might have said something else, but it’d been lost in the haze, just a rumble against her back. Amelia’s toes had curled and head fell back against his shoulder as she relished her release. Emory had come quickly after, his orgasms just as intense as everything else about him. And though he was ravenous in his lovemaking, his aftercare was just as sweet.
Burrowed against him, Amelia had traced the tattoos on his forearms, more iconography of light and dark, death and the divine.
Let us stay this way,she’d thought but mined for hope as theearth caved in.On the nightstand beside a loaded gun, the texts had poured in as soon as the sun was reasonably seated in the sky. With strong arms coiled around her waist, Emory had held on a little longer, as if letting go meant facing a cruel reality.
When the priest completed his sermon, the mourners filed past Gio’s grave and placed a white lily on his casket. As Amelia waited her turn, Liam Moriarty approached in a pristine black suit hardly wilted from the heat.
“There’s been a change of plans, my dear,” he said and offered his arm in a polite gesture. “Emory will ride back with Jack. You’ll be with me.”
Amelia knew better than to put up a fuss, so she accepted his arm. As they strolled between the graves, Liam reached into his breast pocket and handed her a prayer card. On it, the Virgin Mary stood amongst thornless roses with her hands lifted in prayer.
“From one former Catholic to another,” he said.
“How did you know?”
Liam grinned and patted Amelia’s elbow linked in his. “Guilt. All good Catholics are consumed by it.”
