And there it is, the whole architecture of him, laid bare in the dark.
I understand for the first time that the fortress I’ve been picturing was never built to keep love out. It was built to keep the lie out. He isn’t afraid of feeling. He’s afraid of becoming his father, of loving so loud and so false that the truth dies somewhere underneath it.
“That’s why the arrangement,” I say slowly. “Honesty up front. No performance. You thought if you just said it was nothing, plainly, to my face, it couldn’t turn into the thing your parents had.”
“Yes.” Barely a word.
“Loukas.” I turn toward him and lay my hand over the heart he keeps insisting is a column of figures, and it’s going hard and quick, all out of keeping with that even, careful voice, the most honest thing about him.
“Your parents didn’t lie because they said the loving words. They lied because the words weren’t true. That’s the whole difference, you beautiful idiot. It was never about whether you say it. It’s about whether it’s real when you do.”
He makes a sound in the dark I’ve no name for, the sound of something very old and very heavy shifting off its foundations, and then he reaches for me.
And what happens next is the one I’ll never be able to explain to you, the one I can’t dress up as a storm or a jealous quarrel or a tidy bargain gone briefly off the rails. There’s no anger in it and no excuse for it. He doesn’t take me apart this time. He puts me back together.
Slow, and wordless, and so careful it aches, his mouth and his hands learning me like a language he’s decided to be fluent in,the vow still kept, the line still uncrossed, but everything tender, everything given, everything two people do when they’ve quit pretending it’s anything other than what it is.
And somewhere in the middle of it I feel wet on my own face and realize, with a distant sort of astonishment, that I’m weeping, soundlessly, not from sorrow but from the sheer unbearable tenderness of being handled like something precious by a man who swore he hadn’t got it in him.
After, he holds me so tightly I can feel his pulse in a dozen places, and neither of us says the word, the actual word, saying it being the one thing that would make it a performance, and we’ve both just learned where that road ends.
But I feel him not-say it. I feel it in every place we touch.
And then I feel another thing entirely, one I don’t understand until it’s far too late.
I feel him go rigid against me in the dark, by degrees, the gradual stiffening of a man when a thought walks into the room behind his back. I feel the tenderness curdle into something stricken. I feel his arms, still wrapped around me, turn somehow into the arms of a man holding onto a thing he’s already decided he has to set down.
“Go to sleep,” he murmurs into my hair, and his voice has changed, pulled back and far away, the warmth banking itself behind a door I hear closing even now.
I should ask him. I know I should ask him. But I’m warm, and I’m wrung out, and I’m happier than a sensible woman has any business being, and so I make the only real mistake of the whole journey.
I go to sleep. I let him decide my fate alone in the dark, and by the time I wake the next morning the man who gentled me whole again has made up his mind to break me to save us both, and I don’t know it yet, and that’s the last good morning I’m going to have for a long while.
Chapter Twelve
HE’S GONE WHEN I WAKE, the side of the bed where he slept already cold, and that, it turns out, is all the warning I’m going to get.
I find him at breakfast being a stranger.
It’s a small thing at first, so small I nearly talk myself out of it. He’s polite. That’s all. He passes me the coffee and asks whether I slept well in the even, pleasant tone you’d use on a seatmate, and when Artie booms down the car wanting to know how his two lovebirds are faring, Loukas puts his arm around me for the performance.
And it is, for the first time since the platform, only a performance. His hand rests on my shoulder like a coat somebody asked him to hold.
The warmth has gone out of him so completely that I keep checking his face for the man from last night, the one who wept-adjacent into my hair and put me back together in the dark, and he simply isn’t there. There’s only this courteous, faraway version, watching me from behind a foot of glass, every pleasant word out of his mouth shutting like a door somewhere deep in the house.
“Have I done something?” I ask him quietly, when the car’s emptied and it’s only us and the cooling coffee.
“You’ve done nothing.” He doesn’t look up from his paper. “Why would you have done something?”
“Because last night you—”
And I stop, having no name for what last night was, only the shape of it, only the print of it still on my whole body. “Last night was different. And this morning you’re...I don’t know what this morning is.”
“This morning is a Thursday.” He folds the paper with two clean, deliberate movements. “We got carried away. It’s been a strange few days in close quarters, and we’re both adults, and I think it wise we remember what this actually is before either of us forgets and does something neither of us can undo.” He finally looks at me, and his eyes are courteous and black and absolutely sealed. “It’s an arrangement, Blythe. A good one. Let’s not spoil it mistaking the scenery for the destination.”
It’s the cruelest thing he could’ve said, and the worst of it is how reasonable it sounds, how grown, how exactly like the philosophy he recited over the eggs that first morning.
I sit there with the print of his tenderness still warm on my skin and listen to him explain that it meant nothing, and somewhere very far down a twenty-one-year-old girl in a tiered classroom hears a familiar voice tell her, all over again, that no one could ever love her.
