This Monstrous Thing(38)
“You shouldn’t keep it all tucked away.”
“I’m all right. Tell me about something else. Recite a poem or something.”
“I don’t want to recite. I want to talk to you.” She said it so quietly that I had to look sideways at her to be sure I hadn’t imagined it. Her shoulders were hunched as she braced herself against the fallen log, and the reflection of the first stars on the lake caught her face from below and freckled it with light. Even through my anger, I could feel her presence ringing inside me like a tuning fork struck against my rib cage. I had been dizzy over her all summer, but it wasn’t until that moment that I realized how badly I wanted her, in every way. Someone to talk to. Someone to hold and touch. It took everything in me not to reach out and touch her right then.
“It’s so quiet here, isn’t it?” she said. “Everything’s so loud at the house all the time. It was making me anxious, being shut up with all that noise. But I feel quiet here. I feel steady.” Her head was drifting onto my shoulder. I held my breath. “I feel steady when I’m with you.”
“You don’t like being at the house, do you?” I asked, and immediately wished I hadn’t, because she raised her head.
“What?”
“At your villa—you don’t like it there. You always leave like something’s chasing you.”
“I like it fine,” she said, though her voice pitched on the word fine.
“So why are you always out with me and Oliver instead of them?”
“Is it so hard to believe I simply like being with you two?”
“Both of us?” I could have kicked myself for how disappointed those words came out sounding. I knew Mary and Oliver weren’t interested in each other in any sort of romantic way—they’d both told me so, and always seemed so disinterested in each other beyond whatever antics they were daring the other into. But even knowing that, I still wanted it to be me—just me, for the first time in my life, just me and not Oliver—that she liked best.
She looked over at me and her mouth twitched. “Well, Oliver’s good for a thrill, but he’s exhausting. You’re different. You’re very . . . simple.”
I snorted. “Thanks for that.”
“Oh God, sorry, I didn’t mean that you aren’t clever. You’re very clever. Much cleverer than me.”
“Now you’re overdoing it.”
“Sorry.” She laughed, one short, sharp burst. “What I meant is that I sometimes feel as though everyone around me is trying so hard to be complicated and coy all the time, but you’re so sincere in everything. You make me remember people can mean what they say.” And then she put her hand on mine, and pressed her thumb into my palm.
A charge went through me, and when I turned and she was right there, so glowing and lovely that I almost closed my eyes again because looking at her felt like staring into the sun. And before I knew what I was doing, before I had time to think or plan or let the part of my brain that usually kept me from doing irrational things have a chance to speak up, I leaned forward and kissed her.
And as soon as we touched, I knew I was wrong to have thought that we’d been building to this boil all summer. It wasn’t what I expected it to be, not warm or splendid, no fireworks or poetry. Mary’s lips were cold, and the moment we touched, she went corpse rigid. Then she put her hands against my chest and pushed me away. “Don’t.”
I was so mortified that for a moment the most sensible thing to do seemed to be to let myself slide into the water and drown. “I’m sorry,” I croaked.
“It’s all right.”
“God’s wounds, I’m so sorry, I thought . . . I thought you wanted it too.”
“Alasdair, I’m married.”
It took a moment for her words to sink in, but when they did, I felt them deep and cold, all the way down to my bones. “What?”
“I’m married,” she repeated. “Well, not yet. I mean I’m going to be. Once his wife . . .” A crease appeared between her eyebrows. “He has a wife, but he doesn’t love her. We eloped when I was fifteen, and we’ve been traveling while things . . . calmed down a bit at home. That’s why I’m here in Geneva. We wanted to get away.”
“That’s . . .” I couldn’t think how to finish, so I just gaped at her, treading silence like it was water. My ears were ringing, the twilight rippling around me as though I were seeing it from below the surface of the lake. I stared at Mary for as long as I could bear it, then dropped off the log, landing up to my knees in the frigid lake, and splashed to shore.
“Alasdair!” she called after me, but I didn’t stop. I snatched my boots from where I’d left them and tried to yank them on over my wet skin as Mary skirted across the fallen tree like a tightrope walker and came to stand beside me. “I should have told you,” she said.
I flung the boots to the sand and raised my face to hers. She seemed so small, standing there on the shore with her arms wrapped around herself and her hair trailing in inky curls over her shoulders. “Yes. You should have.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t know you felt—”
“How could you not know?” I cried, my voice ringing across the empty shoreline. “I’m so bleeding sincere you probably read it all over me. And Oliver told you, I know he did.”