“Have you been completely honest withme?” he asked. “About everything?”
She looked away, avoiding his gaze. But her jaw hardened and she turned back to him. “Is Max your son? With Lennox?”
Rawlins took a deep breath, then nodded slowly. “Come have a seat, and I’ll tell you everything.” Ellsbeth wavered and he tried again, a tremulous crack entering his voice. “Ellsbeth, I’ve never told any of this to anybody. And I don’t just need to talk tosomeone.I want to talk toyou.”
Ellsbeth
She listened on the couch, her legs tucked beneath her, as Rawlins told the story of his undergraduate affair, of the decades of watching his son grow up anonymously, of finally becoming his mentor when Maxwell arrived at Newlyn. The only time Rawlins looked away from Ellsbeth, bringing his eyes down to the ring of red wine staining the bottom of his wineglass, was when he alluded to Max’s horrible mistake. A ritual that Max never would have attempted if Rawlins hadn’t encouraged him, hadn’t given him books and individual attention. “It was my fault those students died,” Rawlins said. “That their parents never saw them again. Never got to say goodbye. Their entire lives, their futures—gone in an instant. And it was my fault Max went to prison.”
“No,” Ellsbeth said, finding her voice for the first time all night. “Stop, no. That’s not true. You can’t think like that.”
He offered her a sad smile. “I pushed him. I gave him access to magic far beyond his capabilities. If I hadn’t encouraged him…”
“No,” Ellsbeth said. “That’s not how things work. You can’t go back and rewrite history. You have no idea how cause and effect might have played out. If you hadn’t been encouraging him, maybe he would have tried evenmoredangerous rituals to try to impress you, to get your attention. Maybe he wasn’t even trying to impress you! He could have been trying to get into a society or, I don’t know, to impress a cute girldown the hall. Maybe he was trying to get his mom’s attention. You just can’t know.”
“I suppose that’s reasonable,” Rawlins said, but he didn’t seem convinced. He stood. “May I?” He took his and Ellsbeth’s empty wineglasses back to the kitchen, a retreat from his vulnerability, which hung in the air like fog. He returned with two glasses of water.
“Does he know that you’re his father?” Ellsbeth asked.
Rawlins shook his head. “It’s possible he has some idea, but no. Now that he’s out, I think it’s time to tell him the truth.”
“Really?”
Rawlins just kept staring at the small fire burning itself down in his grate. He hadn’t taken a sip from his water, but he gripped the glass tightly in his hand.
“It must have been lonely for you,” Ellsbeth continued. “Not telling anyone all of that. For so long.”
“It didn’t seem lonely. It seemed like—” He paused. “—the way grown-ups are supposed to live. Holding on to things, hiding parts of yourself away in back closets, painting over the doors so that if you ever have company over, nobody is put off.”
She had taken his hand as he was speaking, running her fingertips over the rough skin of his knuckles, down his long, calloused fingers. And then, on instinct, she brought his hand to her mouth and kissed it. “I like your hidden parts,” she said. “And I like that you can tell me about them.”
“I’m not trying to make things more difficult for us, Ellsbeth. I know there’s no future here, for good reason, and that we had made an arrangement to keep things…simple.”
He was wearing a faded Yale T-shirt and no shoes. It was the most casual Ellsbeth had ever seen him dressed, and the hint of chest hair peeking out of his T-shirt’s stretched neckline made her heart race.
“Is it bad if I want to kiss you right now?” she said.
In answer, he pulled her against him and pressed his mouth to hers like a drowning man searching for air. His hands found the back of her head, her neck, her shoulders, and then she was pressing into him, too, shocked at how immediate and right it felt to fall into his arms.
After the initial rush toget their clothes off, their hands became slow and lazy. Rawlins lay facing Ellsbeth on the narrow couch, running a finger down the curve of her side. The finger left a trail of goosebumps on her flesh—her ribs, her waist, her hips. “I can’t believe you look like this,” he said.
“It’s because I’m twenty-four,” Ellsbeth said, trying to make her voice sound light.
“No,” Rawlins said. “It’s not. It’s you. It’s the impossible curve of you, the tiny hairs that stand up on your skin, the way you look right now. The way you look at me. It’syou.”
The image popped into her head unbidden. A small elopement, seeing his face beaming at her as she walked down an aisle in a white dress that he would pull up when they finally reached a honeymoon suite, too impatient to deal with the tiny buttons running down the back.
A lifetime of tangling in white sheets together, of ordering room service somewhere on a honeymoon and feeding each other french fries in bed while bad television played in the background. She saw herself moving into his house, fucking on the floor, in every room, waking up next to him, feeling the warmth of his sleeping body and kissing his eyelids until he woke up and smiled at her.
There would be pancakes, and singing in the kitchen while dinner cooked, and individual preferences for their favorite coffee mugs. There would be essays of each other’s to proofread, half-formed ideas to solicit advice on, and debates about mechanicals over bottles of wine that would descend into furious make-out sessions, lips stained burgundy. There would be dinner parties where she could touch his thigh under the table, see him glancing over at her slyly, secret codes of communication only the two of them knew.
There would be more nights together than they could count. Nights he could bind her with rope or writ magic, or play with new magic that hadn’t been invented yet, that they could invent together. Nights to spank her and make her beg, to leave her raw and needy in a way that she had never been with anyone before. And then mornings where he would kiss her and hold her and whisper words in her ear so soft andso kind that she would have to turn away from him so that he wouldn’t see her tearup.
But the longer Ellsbeth imagined that life, the more it began to hurt somewhere in the middle of her chest. It was like waking up from a dream where you had won the lottery, and being forced to reckon with the fact that you now had to live in the real world. There was no version of their story where their romance wouldn’t be tawdry gossip. She might get kicked out of the program. He might lose his job. Both of them would lose their reputations.
And then there was the simple fact that he didn’t actually know her. He wanted her, sure, for now, because she was young, and pretty enough, and smart. Because he had seen the version of herself she had shown him.
He didn’t know that she was a liar, that she could lie like breathing. He didn’t know that she had used obscuration.
