“Then that’s—that’s against the law, right? We should do something. Something real. I can’t smash every phone on campus.”
“I mean, it was impressively swift damage, but she’s right,” Laura says. And of course, she’s here, too. “We have to do something. This is so awful, I’m so sorry.”
The pity emanating from the faces around me is so thick I’m suffocating. It’s too stuffy in here, and I can’t breathe. I need…I need…
“Thank you, sorry.” My words aren’t making sense. “I need some fresh air.”
I stagger outside, where the air is cooler. It helps and it doesn’t. I can’t organize my thoughts, and suddenly the swell of dread and shame is cresting. It breaks over me and I’m drowning. I’m drowning and I don’t know which way to swim up. And so I let myself sink.
My sister is beside me and I don’t know when she got there, and I’m on the ground, and my phone is in my hand, calling Luca’s number.
“Natty,” Claire says, “you’ve got to breathe.”
And she’s right. I’m panicking, gasping and gulping, chest heaving.
She takes the phone from my hand—five consecutive calls to Luca with no answer—and places an arm around my shoulders. With great effort I close my eyes and try to see a way out of the hole I’m in. There’s a sliver of light within me, of hope, but it’s nestled in an ugly place. I snake my fingers toward that light and grip it tightly, ignoring the dark, oily sheen that covers it. And as my fingers take hold, I feel my despair and my shame and my dread sink into a leaden ball, and I feel that leaden ball sharpen into something white-hot. Something sharp enough to cut someone with.
10
Then
Light pours through the crack left in the heavy curtains, dust motes dancing in the sunshine. This house seems to gather dust like treasure, memories of birthdays and Christmases past held in little specks that gather in corners. The ghosts of old photos remain in pale rectangles on the walls, frames removed when the seemingly permanent decor evidently changed. James is stirring beside me. He has this magic ability to sleep almost indefinitely, whereas my body wakes like clockwork at the crack of dawn no matter what time I go to bed. No matter where I am. It’s as if I’m trained to be on high alert, to not allow myself to sleep while others are prowling awake.
James’s lashes ruffle against each other as his face comes to life, eyelids slowly drawing apart. The youthful smile that breaks across his face when he sees I’m awake is instant.
“Morning, gorgeous,” he says, and kisses me. I’ve always sort of hated this, the vulnerability of being kissed first thing, teeth unbrushed, face unwashed. It’s always made me feel exposed, like the naked flesh of a tortoise without its shell. But it’s nice to imagine that James’s kiss is my shell, my home.
“Hey,” I say.
“Sleep well?”
I nod, pushing my face into his neck. Our limbs are entangled like pretzels. He feels warm and smells good. Yesterday’s aftershave still sits on his skin. It smells so familiar, comforting. With my face entombed in his body, the forgotten-bedroom-smell surrounding us fades.
We’re in the room he grew up in, tucked away in his parents’ house in Surrey. It’s clear that they have never used this room for anything else, never will use this room for anything else, despite James’s no longer needing it. The room is all dark wood and faded carpet, in the same vein as the rest of the house. There’s something about old-money folk and slightly shabby homes. I don’t quite get it.
In case it isn’t already immediately obvious, it’s worth clarifying that my plan to not get attached to the man whose body is currently warming mine has failed spectacularly. And worse, it’s failed publicly, too. There’s been a zeal and excitement in James over the past few months that I’ve not previously seen. A zeal that’s made him dogged about pursuing things between us, full steam behind the engine of his desire. I suppose I should be flattered that I’ve had such an effect on him, but suddenly, life was “too short” for a lot of things. When it came to things like not making me his girlfriend, I was delighted. But with things like “keeping us a secret,” I found my anxiety spiking.
My track record with relationships meant keeping things quiet suited me incredibly well. Should things end poorly, better for there to be no audience to swivel accusing fingers my way. But if there was one thing the Thomas brothers shared, it was their ability to sweet-talk their way into anything, and so it was that I found myself ducking out of the office early on a Thursday afternoon while James prepped an all-staffer to the company explaining the new relationship to his staff. With it, he announced Will’s new lead responsibility on internalpromotions, to dissuade anyone from believing James was metering out preferential treatment influenced by our new relationship. I’m still not sure if James was naive to his brother’s affairs or simply just believed the company to be. When it comes to Will, I remain stuck with the feeling that I shouldn’t ask too many questions. I know how sensitive sibling relationships can be.
In any case, within a matter of weeks, Will admitted he wanted to wash his hands of the business, as James had predicted he would, and the responsibility moved back to James. No one seemed prepared to comment on this, although distinctly cooled temperatures toward me following the initial relationship announcement only seemed to cool further when Will went. I’m sure they thought I was attempting to sleep my way to the top, although there was nowhere to go in my role; I had no aspirations to trade James’s affections for inflated titles. No doubt I’d have been sorely disappointed if I had tried to leverage sex for any kind of bonus. After all, James wore his nobility front and center like a second tiepin.
What was bizarre, however, was the continued change in Will before his departure. James had sat the three of us down in his office after hours one day, the shutters drawn. James had just been returning to the seat behind his desk, Will looking churlish in his navy suit and smelling faintly of whisky beside me, when Will blurted out,
“So you’re fucking her?”
James stopped halfway into his seat in a comical freeze. It only lasted a split second, James sitting down and leaning forward on his forearms, but Will’s arrow had evidently landed true, a smirk playing on the older brother’s lips. Will cast an unreadable look at me with those blue eyes of his, then looked back at his brother, smirk widening into a smile. Sometimes, I worried that Will saw me more than I gave him credit for.
“I wouldn’t put it like that,” James began, irritation hitching his broad shoulders up to his ears. He shook them out. “Look, I set this meeting because yes, the nature of the relationship between myself and Natalie has changed, and I wanted the three of us to…discuss how to best navigate that within the business.”
Will licked his teeth, looked at me again. His lips were pressed together now, mouth shut, although there was something distinctly lupine about his lingering smile. We fell into an uncomfortable silence as he studied me, eyes sketching my face as if he could see behind the mask, see into the damage I hid.
“Will?” James.
Attention turned back to his brother, Will simply said, “I don’t care who you shag, James. Let’s not make a whole song and dance out of this. Deal with it how you want.”
With that, he’d stood up and sauntered out of the office, not bothering to look behind him.
This was now several months ago. And this last piece, the parent piece, I’ve avoided for as long as I could manage. Almost a year since James and I shared our first kiss. The avoidance was bringing James to a breaking point, and seeing as the rest of the world knows about us anyway, I’ve relented. With some logic behind it, of course. Meeting the family only increases my motivation to be good, and having been good for so long, if James wants to integrate me into his life, I should let him. I just have to hope to god that his family doesn’t want to go digging into my past. Both they and James can never know what I’ve done.
