Total pages in book: 26
Estimated words: 24637 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 123(@200wpm)___ 99(@250wpm)___ 82(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 24637 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 123(@200wpm)___ 99(@250wpm)___ 82(@300wpm)
“Loukas.”
“They divorced when I was at university. Very civilized, for the cameras. My mother told a magazine they’d simply grown in different directions, and she was smiling in the photograph, and I remember looking at that smile and understanding I’d never once in my life been able to tell which of her smiles were real, the woman having spent twenty years teaching me that the realest-looking ones were the most expensive lies.” His breath goes out of him, slow. “She died six years ago. Pills. They called it an accident and I let them. My father followed her inside two years, his heart, though between us I think the man simply ran out of audience and saw no further reason to go on performing.”
The dark holds itself still around us.
“So you see,” he says, and now there’s something terrible and gentle in it, something that frightens me worse than anger ever could, “I’m not a man who doesn’t believe in love, Blythe, whatever you think of me. I believe in it completely. I watched it my whole childhood. I just learned what it costs, and what it’s worth, and that the loudest love in the room is the one rotting fastest under the table. So I decided I’d never perform it. I’d be honest instead. I’d say the cold true thing out loud, up front, and I’d never lie to a woman the way they lied to each other and to me and to everyone who ever envied them.”
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.