“What happened?”I ask her.It’s hard to get the words out.My mouth feels like somebody’s disassembled it, and then put it all back together with everything attached at slightly the wrong angle.Jaw and tongue and teeth all a few degrees off from where they should be.I probably look like some fucked-up ventriloquist’s dummy.One of those wooden ones.
One that’s been punched in the face.
“After we…” She hesitates, then swallows, drawing my gaze to the achingly perfect column of her throat.“Afterwards, when I was in the bathroom, the porter brought you water.Do you remember that?”
The fucking porter.He’d slipped to the back of my foggy brain again.Aurora’s words drag him from the depths.Young guy.Dark hair.Italian, maybe.
“When I came back from the bathroom, you were slumped over the table.I thought…I thought you were just sleeping.”When she blinks, I see glimmering moisture, beading her pale lashes and threatening to surge down her cheeks.Then, the choked whisper of, “I’m so sorry.”
I stare at her, uncomprehending.Not understanding how this perfect fucking creature, this woman who’s always been more heaven than human, could have anything to apologize to me for.
My astonishment must register on my drug-numb face, because she swipes furiously at her eyes and starts rapidly explaining herself, as if she somehow owes me that.
“I can’t believe I thought you were asleep,” she cries.“Elio called your phone and when I picked up, he knew something was wrong right away.I was just too stupid to realize it.I was standing there being mad that you were sleeping.Mad that my water had spilled.Meanwhile, my water was probably drugged, just like yours!”She shoves the heels of her hands hard against her own eyes.“You could have died because of me!”
“No.”
That’s all I say.One single word to shut her up.I’m not going to stand here and listen to her self-flagellate for my failings.I don’t even know why she does it.Pretty sure she’s halfway to fucking hating me.Pretty sure she told me she was looking forward to never seeing me again on that train tonight.And yet here she is, crying her precious fucking tears, the tears that slaughter me, and apologizing.
There’s this ever-present guilt in her.This sense that she’s unworthy, that she’s a burden, that she’s slowly bleeding poison from some unseen wound inside.I don’t know where it came from and I don’t know what it means.All I know is that I do not fucking like it.
“No,” I say again.And then, because she seems to need more than a monosyllabic reply from me, I add, “I wouldn’t have died because of you, Aurora.”
Thing is, I would die for her.Without a moment’s hesitation.I know it as plainly as I know the letters of my own mamma’s name, tattooed into my skin.I don’t kid myself thinking that I might have something like a soul, but all the rest of it – the blood, the bones, the heart – I’d lay at her feet like an offering without her ever having to ask it of me.
Even if I know she’d never ask it of me.
Even if she doesn’t think she’s worth it.
“Can’t die yet,” I go on.“Gotta marry you first.”
The words seem to startle her out of her bout of tears.She lowers her hands, her eyes wet and red, her cheeks pale, damp, salt-stained.Even exhausted she’s flawless, a fact so confounding it’s nearly infuriating.
“Why?”she asks shakily.
I can’t get my head around her question.She knows why – at least, she knows what I have told her.She knows that I’ll marry her so that I can take Buffalo, transfer it all away from her, and give it to my brother.I made that perfectly fucking clear to her when we were in Montreal.So clear that it finally seemed to shake whatever childhood hold I had on her, finally seemed to make her see me for what I was.But then she goes on.“On the train…On the phone…Elio said-”
She’s interrupted by Leo returning with the bags and, a second later, Morelli reappearing by stepping through the elevator doors.
“Enough about the train for now,” I say as Morelli grasps my arm.I shake him off, though, feeling like I’ve got my feet mostly under me for the moment.Whether I’ve got control over my guts will be another question.Nausea writhes as my muscles quake.It feels like somebody’s taken a meat tenderizer to every inch of me.All I can think as Morelli directs us to the palatial living room on the main floor is about what would have happened if I hadn’t managed to knock over Aurora’s water while clinging to my last, looping shreds of consciousness.She’s so much smaller than I am.I imagine her, pale and still on the train instead of me, and finally lose the battle against my own stomach.With a muffled grunt, I turn from the others, grabbing at some big, expensive vase on a side table and puking into it.
“What’s happening?”Aurora asks anxiously.“What’s wrong?”
She’s probably asking Morelli and not me, but I answer anyway.
“Nothing much,” I rasp after spitting into the mess.“Just thinking about a catastrophe.”
Wordlessly, Leo drops the bags and takes the vase from me, like he’s some kind of big, tattooed chamber maid.I blink, a groggy slide of skin over my eyes, and then he’s gone.
“A catastrophe?”Aurora presses as Morelli grasps at either side of my jaw, examining my face closely.
She doesn’t know what the fuck I’m talking about.Of course she doesn’t.I’ve just been drugged within an inch of my putrid fucking life.I’m probably incoherent as shit.
But her being drugged like that, her potentially dying...
I’ve never recoiled from death.The only one that ever truly touched me was my mamma’s.Since then, death has been something I have dealt with my own two hands, like cards in a game.Something I’ve delivered, bestowed, bathed in like blood.Death has run, a dark and guiding river, throughout the entire course of my life.It has never led me astray.
It has never made me afraid.
