The day Mellon brought back his first A+ paper, we didn’t travel anywhere or anywhen, but stayed the night in my room. I double locked the door and put my desk chair up under the doorknob in the extremely unlikely event that Colleen would stop by – even she had given up on me, and now none of my old friends remained in my life. We ate turkey sandwiches by starlight with the window open, and the oboe player regaled us with something slow, sad and sweet, like Debussy blissed out of his mind on opium.
When I let down the window shade and took the clips out of my hair, the music seeped into my veins. The room was full of shadows; Mellon’s face shone like the moon. Mellon unlocked my body and my heart like a garden gate, and his loving caresses were the key.
Afterwards, we lay together on the bed, so close that the twin bed was plenty big enough for the two of us. I sighed and rested my cheek on his narrow, muscular chest, and I revelled in the calm cadence of his heartbeat.
“Why did you talk to me that day out by your beat-up Mercedes, Mellon? It was no accident we met, was it?”
I could feel that Mellon was holding his breath. He exhaled with a slow and ragged sigh, held me even closer. “You have a scent of magic, Mireya. I found you irresistible. Did from the first moment I laid eyes on you.”
He rolled me on top of him, arranged my bare limbs to twine all around him like a climbing trellis of roses. “And I intend to never resist you again.”
The night passed slowly and with a blooming sweetness. It was the purest, most uncomplicated bliss I have ever known.
Which only made the note nailed to my door all the more horrible when we discovered it the following morning.
The door itself was scored with scratches and deep grooves, and it looked scorched, like someone had tried to burn their way through it as we slept.
The paper pinned under the nail smelled rank, like piss and beer and smoke. It was ground in dirt. It smelled like Riverside Park in late September.
My body went cold as I reached up and ripped it off the door. I forced myself not to flinch as I turned the packet of paper over in my hands and opened it.
A small bundle fell into my open palm, and I heard Mellon mutter a foreign curse under his breath. It was a lock of my hair, matted and burned.
The note itself was written in that uncanny neat handwriting I had seen before, and it said only:
YOU ARE MINE
I handed the note to Jonathan and went back into my room without a single word to say. My fingers ached at their tips, and at every point where they had touched the paper.
“The words are a lie,” Jonathan said, his voice clean and clear and strong. “You belong to me. And to yourself.”
I sank to my knees and sat by the window facing the courtyard. A flock of starlings chattered noisily in the branches of the gingko tree.
“No, that note tells the truth, sweetheart.” The strength flowed out of me and into the floor under my feet. I sank to the ground, curled up on the floor, and covered my face with my hands. Focused on breathing slowly. In, out. Focused on the fact that I still breathed.
Jonathan knelt next to me, still wrapped in my sheet, and his hand traced a soft pattern on my back. “It was true once, perhaps. But not any more.”
“But the – bundle.” My words were as heavy as rocks in my mouth. I wiped at my eyes and lifted my head so I could look at him, the closed door looming over us like a gigantic tombstone. He was sleek and golden as a young stag in the springtime.
“It is a curse bag, my love. Do you know what that is?”
I swallowed hard. It hurt. “No. But it means I’m not free. All that time underground . . . none of it means anything. He’s still got a claim on me.”
“I must have called attention to you. It found you because of me.” He sat back, let the sheet fall from his shoulders. In the soft light of early morning, the pain in his eyes pierced me, sharper than the rusty nail driven through the paper on my door.
Suddenly, he shook his head, as though he were making up hismind about something important. “No. You will be free, my love. I’ll explain as we go. But we have to hurry.”
I knew what he meant. Whoever – whatever – had left me this note, he had gone back to hide at the bottom of the stairs under the chapel. I knew it, as surely as I now knew that I loved Jonathan Mellon with all my heart and soul.
Jonathan took an old-fashioned iron key out of a strange little leather fob he had strapped to his belt. He leaped up the stone staircase and fiddled with the enormous locked wooden doors until they silently swung open.
“Who attacked me that day, Jonathan?’’
He looked down at me, reached to me with an open hand. “You know the saying, I am certain. ‘Ignorance is bliss.’” And with a strange smile, he bowed and escorted me over the threshold and into the hot darkness of the chapel.
We headed at top speed for the back of the chapel, to the stairs leading to the Postcrypt, and I decided to get the truth out of him, before it was too late. “Ignorance is not bliss, though. It’s deadly.” I half-hurled myself down the stairs after his swift, retreating figure.
He paused at the top of our stairs, his eyes like dark sapphires. “Sometimes things aren’t what they seem. And the illusion is more pleasing, it can lead you to your strength better than the naked truth.”
