He sat up and thenstood up.
“You’re going?”
He walked back to the kitchen counter where he’d left his shirt. “I’ve excited you enough.”
I sat up and followed him with my eyes.
I… I didn’t want him to leave yet. But I didn’t know how to make him stay so I latched onto the only thing that my eyes kept tracing.
“Your tattoos,” I managed finally, watching the flames move on his back. “They're not what I expected.”
He put the damp shirt back on, hiding Eden from me. The tree, the snake, and the two lovers were a dead giveaway.
“There’s a fundraising dinner on Sunday,” he said, switching the subject. “Darlene will pick you up.” His eyes slid down my body, and I was suddenly reminded of how naked I was. And that not even five full minutes ago, his head had been between my thighs. “I think red would look good on you.”
“Red?” I frowned.
He came back. “It’s the opposite of green,” Judah said, matter-of-fact, and pressed a kiss to my forehead. “Lock the door after I’m gone.”
A minute later, hewasgone. But his toolbox remained, and so did his breath on my skin, and somewhere deeper besides.
The box arrived on Saturday morning.
No note. No name on the outside — just my address in handwriting I didn't recognize, which was a lie I told myself for approximately four seconds before admitting I recognized itfine. I'd spent enough time looking at his signature on church documents to become stupidly familiar with it. The loops andlines — you could read his entire mood in the way he wrote a name.
Myname.
Mercy,
Isaiah 1:18.
—J.
I reached for the Bible before I did anything else. Looked up the verse.
“Come now, let us reason together,” says the Lord. “Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red as crimson, they shall be like wool.”
I had to sit down after reading it.
The dress was burgundy. A color that you had to look at twice before you understood what it was doing. Heavy silk; it moved like water and cost more than my monthly rent had back in Hattiesburg. I held it up in the light from the window and the silk caught it and threw back warm and deep. I stood there for a long moment not thinking anything useful.
The dress would’ve looked stunning on someone… taller, I told myself. Which was nonsense because I was tallenough. 5’9” was taller than the average. It was tallenoughfor the dress.
The shoes were in a separate box underneath. Heeled, dark leather, simple.Bespoke. They fit perfectly, which I decided not to think about too hard — the fact that he'd known my size without asking, the fact that he'd thought about my feet at all.
I put the dress on Saturday evening just to see. Stood in front of the bathroom mirror in the small apartment with the ceiling fan turning overhead and looked at myself and thought:this is what he wanted to see. Not me dressed up. Me dressed as something specific. Old money. Earned rather than performed. A woman who belonged in a house like his without having to try.
The thought should have bothered me more than it did.
Darlene arrived Sunday evening wearing her good pearls and drove us out without asking if I was ready. I had done my best to be. I put on the dress, the shoes, styled my hair in loose waves — the kind that you saw in old Hollywood movies, and had looked up a YouTube tutorial — on a constantly dying network — for my make-up. I didn’t look like myself, but I think that was the point.
The road to the Beaumont estate was like any other road with the exception that it led past an old cotton plantation. There were no signs, only cotton and old Spanish moss hanging from trees, so low it brushed the roof of the car if you drove close enough.
The house at the end of the road wasn’t really a house — to say that would be to undersell it. The Beaumont estate included in it one of those antebellum manors sitting next to a vast lake, acres upon acres of manicured land, and all the Spanish moss you could wish.
I counted seven cars already on the gravel. Then I stopped counting because more were coming up the drive behind us.
“How many people?” I asked.
