He hadn’t seen the way Officer Marcos’s eyes had gone flat and empty. That life, of pancakes and soft kisses in the morning, would only ever be a façade, because the moment she showed Rawlins the truth at the heart of her, he wouldn’t want her anymore.
Rawlins had been able to show her his true self, to untwist the calcified knot he had kept in a clenched fist, and as she ran her hand up his neck and into his thick hair, she realized that she loved him for it. But she would never be able to show herself to him.
“I love you,” she said before she realized the words were coming out of her mouth and not just echoing in her head. “Please don’t say anything back. Please. I didn’t even mean—I just…” She turned her body away from his so that they were both lying on the couch facing the same direction. “I just want you to hold me. I didn’t mean it.”
I love you, too.He breathed the words so faintly that Ellsbeth wasn’t certain whether he said them at all, or whether she had imagined them. She didn’t ask, she just let him hold her for long enough that the candle he had burning on his mantelpiece sputtered out.
By the time they wereeating chicken cacciatore, the food was cold and it had begun snowing outside. Rawlins popped her plate inthe microwave and delivered it to her at the table. “It’s better when it’s fresh,” he said.
“It beats cereal, which had been my dinner plan for the evening.”
Rawlins smiled and brought his own plate to the table, taking the seat next to her. “Bon appétit,” he said, his accent halfway between joking and pretentious.
Ellsbeth lifted her fork with a bite of chicken on it, but she let it drop before it reached her mouth. “I have something to say that I fully realize will sound insane, but: I’m jealous of Dean Lennox,” she said. “Just from hearing that story.”
“It was decades ago.”
“I know!” Ellsbeth said. “It’s notrational.I know that. And for the record, she took advantage of you.” Rawlins opened his mouth to protest, but Ellsbeth didn’t let him. “I’m just jealous! I’m jealous of every other woman you’ve ever touched. Let aloneloved.I can imagine you, in that hotel room. Her: so smart, soimportant.How impressed you must have been. I don’t like the thought of you impressed with anyone except me.” She had drunk more wine than she had thought, and was talking too much and slightly too loud. “I’m sorry, forget I said anything. We should go back to the fun part of this. No neediness, no feelings.”
Rawlins wiped his top lip with a curled finger. “I don’t know where you got this idea in your head that you can’t need anything from anyone else, but it’s not true. You’re allowed to need other people. And you really should eat. You’re looking pale.” Ellsbeth took a large bite and lifted her eyebrows as she swallowed.Happy?
“Needingother people just isn’t something I’m interested in,” she said. “You need someone, and then what? When you don’t have them anymore, you’re helpless.”
“I doubt there is anyone on earth who would ever call you helpless.”
“Maybe because I never need anything from anyone!”
Rawlins laughed at that, his tongue pressed against the bottom of his dog teeth, and Ellsbeth thought it again—I love you—but this time she managed not to say it out loud. Instead: “What’s that?”
She gestured toward a photo framed on the kitchen shelf that was taken by the Newlyn gates. She stood to examineit.
It must have been from a decade or so earlier, a group of people with their arms around one another. Ellsbeth found Rawlins, his face slightly rounder, his sideburns longer, smiling with his mouth closed. Dean Lennox stood at the far end of the group.
“Oh,” Rawlins said. “New faculty orientation. My first day here at Newlyn.”
Ellsbeth scanned the photo. “Lennox, obviously. There’s Professor Gaines—she was blond! And…Professor Gallway.”
“Paul, yeah. We started at the same time.” They were the only two men in the group.
“He’sbarelyaged. It’s weird!”
“Good genes, I suppose,” Rawlins said.
“Or a vanity ritual,” Ellsbeth said, and Rawlins snorted. Vanity rituals were largely a joke in the world of arcane mechanicals—expensive, impractical, and only ever temporary, sold to the desperate by arcanist hacks and has-beens. Vanity rituals were the type of thing you saw poorly designed ads for as you scrolled on social media, or advertised in bad neighborhoods on billboards promising low prices for whiter teeth and fewer wrinkles.
Ellsbeth stared at the photo, trying to imagine what Rawlins was thinking as it was taken.
He was the most famous person in the group at the time, riding the success ofThe Arcane and the Ordinary.Was he still in love with Lennox then, trying to stand up straight to impress her? Was he cocky in the way that twenty-something prodigies must be, certain that their continued success was inevitable and upward progress the only plausible future? She couldn’t read anything in his tight face. Paul Gallway, on the other hand, was grinning madly, his arm thrust jocularly around Rawlins and his blazer flapping open in an invisible breeze. There was a pin in his blazer, right on his lapel.
Rawlins had risen to stand behind Ellsbeth, his hand hovering over the small of her back as if he wasn’t certain whether or not he was supposed to put it there.
“What’s that?” Ellsbeth asked. “The pin or button or whatever Professor Gallway is wearing? Do you recognize it?”
Rawlins picked up the photograph to get a closer look. “Heattended Newlyn as an undergraduate. I think that’s from one of the societies. Banestooth.”
It was a pin featuring a wolf with teeth exposed, a smile and an attack at the same time.
Paul Gallway was wearing the same button as the one that Ellsbeth had seen in the photographs of Bertie’s bathroom floor.
