Oh. That.
The crowd’s started a chant I refuse to dignify, and Mellie’s making a noise behind me like a kettle coming to temperature, and his fingers have already found the back of my neck, gentle and certain, tipping my face up to his.
“Smile,agapi,” he murmurs. “This part was always coming.”
And then Loukas Karalis kisses me.
I expected, if I expected anything, a politician’s kiss, dry and brief and aimed at the cameras over my shoulder. What I get instead is his hand cradling the back of my skull like it’s the most natural place on earth for his hand to be, and his mouth coming down over mine slow and certain and unhurried, the way he does everything, taking his time as though we’ve the platform to ourselves and the train can wait.
A sound gets out of me that I’ll be denying for the rest of my natural life, low and helpless and nothing like the woman I’ve spent forty years being, and my free hand fists in the lapel of his coat instead of shoving him off it, which is what a sane woman, a woman with her defenses still up, would’ve done.
It isn’t a kiss for the cameras.
That’s what I understand somewhere in the middle of it, when my eyes have fallen shut without my permission and the brass band and the flashbulbs and eighteen years of carefully maintained loathing have all gone soft and far away, and his lips start to nibble at mine, unhurried, like a man who’s found something he means to take his time over. And there it is, rising in me low and bright and entirely unauthorized.
The exact thing I built the whole fortress against, the wanting that doesn’t stop to ask permission, the wanting I’ve sworn sinceI was twenty-one I was constitutionally above. A kiss for the cameras is a closed door. This one keeps opening.
This one asks a question, and the unforgivable part, the part I’ll take to my grave, is that some long-buried thing in my chest answers it before I can clap a hand over her mouth, in a voice I haven’t heard in so long I’d convinced myself she was dead.
He breaks it first. He’d want to be the one who decides when it ends.
Just a job, Blythe. It’s just a job.
I look up to find him watching me with an expression I’ve never once seen on him in eighteen years, something cracked open and caught off guard, gone again almost before I can name it, the shutter slamming down behind his eyes. The platform roars. Flashbulbs go off like applause. Mellie is weeping with professional joy.
“That,” I manage evenly, when I trust my voice, “was extremely unnecessary.”
“It was the job,” he says blandly, but his voice isn’t quite even now, and we both hear the lie in it, sitting there between us, plain as the ring on my hand.
And that’s when I catch her, just past his shoulder, beyond the velvet rope and the crush of press. A woman in a coat the red of a warning light, not photographing us, not cheering, simply watching the two of us with a small private smile that doesn’t go anywhere near her eyes.
I don’t know her. I’m certain I’ve never seen her in my life. So there’s no good reason for the look on her face to land in my stomach like a swallowed stone, no reason at all for the littlevoice that picks exactly this moment to inform me, with great calm, that whatever I signed up for on that porch, the kiss was the easy part.
Chapter Four
THERE’S ONE BED.
I want that on the record, the brochure having promised “a private stateroom appointed for two,” which I’d read on the platform purely to avoid reading Loukas’s face, and which I’d chosen, in my optimism, to interpret as a generous concept rather than a literal inventory.
But here we are. The porter’s bowed himself out with the discretion of a man paid handsomely not to have opinions, and here it is, this bed, this single regrettably beautiful bed dressed in linen so white it looks like an accusation.
And there’s exactly one of it.
“There’s one bed,” I announce accusingly, in case he’s somehow missed the central feature of the room he’s paying for.
“I can count,” Loukas says drily, shrugging out of his coat and hanging it as though the matter’s already been settled in a meeting I wasn’t invited to.
The stateroom’s paneled in a honeyed wood polished until you could lose a thought in it, with brass fittings and a window the length of the whole wall, and through it the country’s already begun to come apart into motion, San Antonio thinning into low hills and live oak and the long gold run of ranchland sliding by faster than anything that big has a right to move.
I’ve spent my whole life learning to read a piece of ground by holding still on it, by standing in one spot until the land forgetsI’m there and gives up what it’s doing, where the wind sets, which fencepost the kestrel favors, how the slant of things tells the hour. None of that works at speed.
The window hands me a hundred things I know how to read and tears each one away before I can finish it, hills and a hawk and a far stock tank gone again, and it leaves me with the specific unmoored feeling of a bird that’s only ever been carried and never once flown.
I make myself look away from the glass. Watching it too long does something to my chest I haven’t got a name for and didn’t pack for.
“I’ll take the floor,” I tell him.
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
