“Why?” he’d asked, stepping back from her in the shadowy dark hall, and she had responded, rather harshly, “Because I want to.”
Hadshe slept with him that night because she pitied him? As he surged between her thighs beneath that ghostly sculpture, with the marble steps leaving divots in their flesh that became lilac bruises worn beneath their clothes, had she already been thinking about when she would leave?
“God, I don’t think I can move,” she had said afterwards, her hair a tangled smudge against the stark white marble. “You haven’t been that rough with me since that night at the pool.”
“I didn’t realize you paid such close attention to how I fuck.”
Jay rolled on one arm to look at him. “What’s gotten into you?”
You, he thought, but he knew better than to say that, so he said nothing as he played with her hair, so focused on the rich texture of it that Jay frowned and pulled his hand away. Her expressive eyes traced his face with a familiarity that was scalding, sloughing away all but the sorry core of his being. He looked away with a frown as she touched his face.
“Are you all right?”
She doesn’t want you.The words in his head were his father’s voice, cold and amused.Drink it in, boy. This is all you’ll ever have.Unwillingly, his eyes dropped, taking in the moon-bathed contours of her body, her full breasts. “Yes. Let’s go to bed. I’ll carry you.”
“Okay, but be carefu—oh my god! Nick!”
She grabbed onto his shoulders in alarm as he swept her upeasily, and the sensation of all that warm, bare skin against his own zipped through him like wildfire, leaving him bereft.
She doesn’t need to love me to give me what I want.
It didn’t matter that she was in his bed. They might as well have been separated by glass.
As she fell asleep, and and all the stiffness melted from her limbs like glacial ice, he pulled her against him, burying his face in her hair with a sigh.
“Don’t leave.” There were still some things he wasn’t ready to say to her face. Not with the phantom scores of old hurts still blistering on his heart. But he could say it to her now as he breathed her in, drowning in her sweetness. “Please, stay for me. Love me. I want you to love me.”
She hadn’t responded, which was fine. He told himself he didn’t need an answer.
But he did. He needed “yes.”
Shaking his head at his foolishness, Nicholas left her room, making sure to close the door behind him. His eyes went to the swinging jellyfish that they had made love under the night he proposed. Here or not, there were traces of her everywhere, and now that he had freed her from their bargain, his need for her throbbed like an infected wound.
If she left again, it would destroy him.
???????
Birds chirped to one another as they swooped and swirled over the little blue tents that had been set up to provide shade to the farmers and small business owners selling their wares on Main Street. Both sides of the street had been closed for the day,lined with kiosks and food trucks. The sun was shining through the haze of pollen in the air.
It’s much too beautiful to feel melancholy, thought Jay.
A man cleared his throat noisily and she realized she had been standing in front of a table filled with bottles of raw milk and plastic-wrapped wedges of cheese. “Sorry,” she said, scooting out of the way. An all-too-familiar flutter of anxiety asserted itself as people bumped up against her shoulders, making her cardigan stick to her skin.
She had grown up here and yet she had never felt more like a stranger. She kept seeing faces turning her way. Not quite staring but looking long enough to make her wonder what, exactly, it was that they thought they were looking at. Had they read about her stepfather in theHollybrook Herald?Pulled up chairs to see if any dust would rise from the fallen rubble?
How many of them were living off of Nicholas’s largesse, like serfs paying fealty to a fickle young lord, each thinking that they were getting the better of him, not knowing that he would let them all burn in a heartbeat?
(You’re the only one in this fucking town worth more than the air you breathe)
Troubled, she walked over to a less crowded stall advertising itself as vegan and dairy-free. There were plates of macarons made with aquafaba and filled with coconut cream, applesauce banana bread, and big wheels of cake glossed with shiny layers of glaze. The woman behind the counter watched her closely. “See anything you like? Prices are on the board.”
Jay followed her manicured nail and was nearly shocked, until she remembered that she could afford this now. “The vegan chocolate cake is forty dollars?”
“We also sell it by the slice if you can’t afford the wholecake.”
That wasn’t what she’d meant, and color rose in her cheeks. Resisting the urge to look down and check her outfit, she kept her smile pasted on as she fished for her credit card in her purse. Nicholas would like it. The candied raspberries were basically fruit sprinkles, and in all her life, she’d never seen that man turn down anything that had sugar on it.
“I’ll take a whole one.”
