Page 75 of The Bargain

A dangerous feeling. I try to push it aside, focus on the moment.

“St Dominic House Observatory,” I answer, leading her up the spiral staircase. “Watch where you’re going, some of these are a little uneven.”

“I’ve never heard of this place,” Desdemona mutters.

But she doesn’t complain about the damp air, the cold, the lingering smell of mouldy paper and dust and rust.

“It used to be part of the old Navy Board’s astronomical and navigational offices, in the early 1800s, when sailors used to calculate longitude by the stars.”

We’ve reached the top of the stairs, where Desdemona stops and stares at me through the gloom.

“Why do you sound like you used to work here?”

I laugh.

“I did, actually.”

Not the way she’s thinking, though. When I was sixteen, over the summer, I worked part-time sweeping floors after closing—scrubbing coffee stains, emptying bins full of programmes and crumpled flyers. The money wasn’t great—but the time alone was priceless.

We emerge into my favourite part of the building: the top floor, where an old auditorium sits beneath the domed ceiling. I’d tried working out how to open the dome wider, or how to operate the telescope, but both are too old. Even hours of research couldn’t help me find a way of operating the equipment.

For a moment, looking at the moth-eaten velvet seats, the sliver of sky through the dome allowing a ribbon of rain that tinkles over the worn metal of the astronomical equipment, I wonder if I made a mistake bringing Desdemona here.

But when I turn to look at her, she’s already drifted towards the telescope. I watch her, heart suddenly constricted, as she brushes her fingertips over the length of the optical tube, feeling the alternating smooth bronze and the patches of encroaching rust. She leans down and presses her face to the eyepiece, then moves away with a frown.

Raindrops tinted silver by the faint light coming from outside scatter over her hair, her shoulders, her arms, but she doesn’t seem to mind. She walks along the walls, peering at the astronomical maps, and then, finally, she turns back to me.

“Well?” she says. “Where should we sit, then?”

Mutely, I gesture towards the auditorium part, and we make our way through the rows of seats to the centre, right beneath the crack in the dome. The seats are slightly damp, but that doesn’t seem to bother Desdemona either. She sits at my side, leaning back against the headrest.

I do the same and gaze up into a night sky choked with clouds, every star completely obscured.

With a sharp sigh, I roll my head to peer at Desdemona.

“Shit. So much for showing you the stars, huh?”

She rolls her head, imitating my movement and gazing back at me.

“But it would have been very impressive, if it wasn’t raining.” She smiles, that now familiar edge of cruelty tilting the corners of her mouth. “This is where you bring all the girls, Lennox?”

For a while, I say nothing at all, soaking it all in: the sight of her smiling face in the darkened auditorium, raindrops glittering on her eyelashes like tiny crystal pearls, the gold of her hair dyed almost silver in the darkness, her expression, so unusually open.

I realise, suddenly, with devastating clarity, that I missed her.

Those weeks when I was too scared to go near her, when I avoided her for the sake of self-preservation. They didn’t make me feel less attached to her. They didn’t make the emotions between us fade or become less real.

They just made me miss her.

Maybe that’s what makes me answer with the truth, for once.

“You’re the first person I’ve ever brought here.”

I look away, facing the ceiling once more, the rolling clouds, the droplets of abating rain, so light they dance through the air even as they fall.

Desdemona says nothing at all.

When she finally responds, it’s in a thoughtful whisper.