I’ll own that one most of all, having spent this whole story telling you I’m the careful one, the locked one, the woman who gave up wanting.
The truth the storm pries out of me is that when it came to it, when it was dark and the rain was loud enough to swallow the world and his breathing had gone rough and shallow beside me in a way I could feel along my whole left side, I was the one who turned. I was the one who reached. I was the one who found the open collar of his shirt and the hammering pulse at the base of his throat and pressed my fingers there, against the proof of him, and said, into the dark, in a voice I didn’t recognize, “You promised a line. You didn’t promise the whole map.”
He comes up onto one elbow above me.
In the dark I can’t see his face, only the shape of him blotting out what little light there is, and for a moment the only sound is the rain and the two of us breathing.
Then he reaches for me, careful, learning my face like a man reading something by touch alone, finding the parts of me nobody’s ever bothered to learn, and when he finally kisses me it’s nothing like the platform and nothing like the dining car. There’s no one to perform for now. No cameras, no Bettina, no investors, no version of this that counts as the job.
There’s only the storm, and his mouth, and the slow astonishing patience of a man keeping a promise while he unmakes me by degrees.
And unmake me he does.
I’ll spare you what I can and tell you only what I have to, you having come this far with me and earned the truth, which is that I had forty years of theories about what this would be and not one of them survived contact. I had no idea. None.
That my own body had been keeping this from me my whole careful life, this rising, this unspooling, this place he takes me with his promise still scrupulously intact and his low voice at my ear telling me in two languages how long he’s wanted exactly this, and when it breaks over me I turn my face into his shoulder and make a sound I’d have been ashamed of yesterday and am not, now, even slightly, there being no one in the whole roaring rain-loud world to hear it but the one man who swore he’d never use it against me.
After, in the quiet, with the storm gentling itself toward morning, I lie with my cheek over the place where his heart is finally slowing, and I wait for the shame to come. The way it always comes. The bill that follows every good thing I’ve ever let myself have.
It doesn’t come.
That’s the part that frightens me. Not what we did, not the line we walked right up to and the thousand smaller ones we didn’t trouble to spare. What frightens me, lying here in the storm-dark with his hand moving slow through my hair like I’m something worth gentling, is that I feel no shame at all. Only a vast and ruinous peace, the peace of an animal that’s finally,after a lifetime of sleeping with one eye open, found somewhere safe enough to close them both.
“Don’t,” I whisper, to the dark, to him, to myself.
“Don’t what?” he murmurs, half-asleep, the accent thick and unguarded.
“Don’t make me used to this. I can’t afford it. I’ll have to give it all back at the coast, and I can survive a great many things, Loukas, but I don’t think I can survive learning how this feels and then teaching myself to live without it again.”
His hand goes still in my hair.
And in the dark, in a voice I’ve never once heard him use, stripped of every weapon he owns, Loukas Karalis says the words that topple the last wall I’ve got standing.
“Then don’t give it back.”
Chapter Nine
I WAKE UP RICH.
That’s the only word for it, and it’s nothing to do with money. I wake up in a bed worth more for one night than I clear in a month, the storm blown through and the train moving again under me and a man’s arm heavy and easy across my waist, and for about four seconds, before the day catches up to me, I’m the wealthiest woman in the state of Texas, and not one penny of it the kind you can bank.
Then the day catches up to me.
It catches up as a discreet knock and a cart wheeled in by a steward trained to look at nothing, a breakfast laid out under silver domes that he lifts away one by one like a magician with no particular need of applause, and the look of it nearly does me in. Eggs folded soft as a confession. Fruit cut into shapes that took somebody real effort. A little silver pot of coffee.
And beside my plate, unasked, a small dish of cut lime, somebody on this train having decided that the way I take things is worth remembering.
I sit up clutching the linen to me like the last shred of my dignity, which it roughly is, and Loukas watches me from the other pillow with his hair wrecked and his guard down and an expression I’ve no precedent for, and I understand we’ve reached the part of the morning where we decide what last night gets to mean.
He decides first. He would.
“We’re not children,” he says, reaching past me for the coffee, pouring two cups with the ease of a man who’s never once spilled anything in his life. “That’s the advantage of doing this at our age, Blythe. A pair of twenty-year-olds wake up after a night like that and start picking names for the future. We know better. We know a night is a night. We’re far too old to confuse what our bodies got up to in a storm with anything that has to answer for itself in daylight.”
He hands me the coffee. It’s exactly how I take it.
I could throw it at him.
“How wonderfully mature,” I say sweetly, taking the cup. “How very grown. You’ve thought it all through, I see, the whole philosophy, somewhere between the coffee and the lime.”
