Before Edie could take in what was happening, Cosima crossed the room in four quick strides and grabbed the forbidden book with both hands.
“Cosima!” Edie yell-whispered.
She sat down with it in the wing chair Edie had just vacated. The heavily gilded book took up the entirety of her lap.“What?”
“You can’t have that. Morag says.” Edie shuffled back into the lounge and reached for the book.
“Morag isn’t here. She’s sleeping. When I was watching my movie earlier, I could hear her snoring, even though her apartment is all the way at the back of the kitchen. Also, right here, it says ‘GUEST BOOK.’ I’m a guest.”
Edie glanced toward the entrance to the kitchen. She tried to listen for the sound of Morag snoring, but she couldn’t hear over the rain and rumbles of thunder.
“Are you afraid you’ll get in trouble?” Cosima creaked open the front cover. Edie saw marbled paper. A black-and-white photograph. Her heart wasracing.
“No! But am I afraid Morag will hex me? Yes. Yes, I am. She could live another three hundred years if she bound me to this place and drank my youthful blood.” She stepped closer to Cosima. “Seriously, though, that guest book is important to her. She won’t say why, but before you and I met and decided to be best friends forever, I tried everything I could think ofto get her to let me look at it. I mean, it’s obvious Ineedthis guest book. I need to have a very cheap English Experience where I sit by a fire and thumb through the pages of the past. Otherwise, what memories do I have to take back with me to the factory floors of northeast Wisconsin?”
“You didn’t try using me as your excuse. You might have suggested to Morag that we should look at it because it’s likely my mother’s stay is documented in this book. One might say I have arightto open it.”
Cosima raised one eyebrow and turned another page without glancing at it. She was making a compelling argument in favor of breaking Morag’s rule. Her point overruled the part of Edie’s moral compass that suggested Morag might have a good reason to keep the guest book private.
Edie peeked at the page Cosima opened to. She spotted something that looked like a poem.
She’d read a magazine article once about the Victorian scrapbooking craze, with girls trading their kid-leather-bound scrapbooks back and forth, painting watercolor floral arrangements onto rag paper to express sapphic longing in flower language. That article had made Edie feel like she was born in the wrong century. In the wrong country. To the wrong life.
She felt that way a lot.
“What does it say?” She swallowed.
“Do you want me to read it to you? Would that keep you safe from Morag, or is even knowing what’s inside enough to get you demerits? Maybe I should take it up to my room and peruse it privately. Remove the temptation.” Cosima laid her hand flat over the first page.
“Why is it that the only time you’ve come down to the lounge, it’s to be mean to me?” Edie sidled even closer to where Cosima was sitting.
“I came down because I couldn’t sleep and wanted to watch a movie.” Cosima turned another page, but she tipped up the cover so Edie couldn’t see.
Craning for a better view, Edie bonked her hip into the end table next to Cosima’s chair. “Fuck!” She rubbed the spot on her hip. “Listen, I have been exceedingly patient with your”—Edie waved her hand in a circle around Cosima—“needs, but—”
Cosima shut the guest book. “Needs? You’ve been patient withmyneeds?”
“I have. Look, I get that you are mourning your mom, but if you and I were the type of people to know what to do with our feelings, we wouldn’t be on an English vacation,here, inFebruary. Maybe we can help each other.”
Cosima’s mouth firmed, and the architectural feathers of her brows furrowed. “Is that so.”
“That’s so, princess.”
Edie would not have guessed it was possible for Cosima to sit up even straighter, but she did. Her hands gripped the sides of the guest book as though she might lift it over her head and cudgel Edie with it. “You can’t call me that.”
“Princess?” She stepped closer. “Princess. Princess.Prin”—Edie pointed—“cess.”
Cosima narrowed her eyes, and at that moment, lightning shot across the sky and lit her face up and made her pale irises seem like they were piercing Edie’s soul.
“You don’t scare me,” Edie said. It was a lie, but also, there was no particular reason why Cosimashouldscare Edie. She was just a woman. A very hot, rich, prickly woman, but also, hedgehogs were prickly, with pointy little teeth, and all those quills and teeth were for one thing and one thing only. To keep everything they were scared of away.
“Ishouldscare you,” Cosima said. She made a sound in her throat.
“Did you growl at me?” Edie stepped to another lamp and turned it on to better peer at Cosima, whose face was stormier than the weather.
Cosima smacked the cover of the guest book. “I don’t fucking know! I have plenty of reasons to be angry. What of it?”
“You can growl because you’re angry,” Edie said, leaning in to study Cosima more minutely. “But I don’t think youareangry.”
