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Everything he did, everything he was, was a prison. This was a cell of many fine rooms and he little more than a prisoner of his own making.
He found himself standing stock-still in the center of the nearly empty great room his expensive decorator had assured him was the height of sophistication. Not that he’d cared either way. His only interest in sophisticated people and their elegant pursuits was in showing up to prove that anyone could buy the things they all held so dear.
That they could hate him all they liked, but he never went anywhere.
But he’d missed the fact that he’d made that...literally true.
This flat was a prison. His life was a prison. When he’d clapped eyes on Timoney outside that club, she’d been like a key in a lock he’d stopped noticing was there ages ago. She’d wedged open the door. And instead of finding his way out, he’d slammed the heavy bars into place again.
The wordprisonkept echoing in his head.
And it seemed perfect that he’d come to this realization while it was not quite daylight outside.
Because she had spoken of hope and light. It seemed he needed her to do that so that he could finally see all the bars around him. The ones he’d put there. Day after day, year after year. Building this cell and leaving himself here to rot.
Hope and lightwas a silly, soft sort of notion he would have laughed at, before her. He would have slept soundly, tossed her out the first time she’d left her things about, charged right on into the next project and the next and the next...
But now he understood.
Now he understood everything, and it was as if he was ripped wide open from the inside out, so that too much understanding poured into him, battering him.
Changing him.
Letting him know that truly, he had been changed for good long ago.
Outside a club, at a party he hadn’t wanted to attend, when he’d caught eyes with a girl who’d looked like a moonlight over the Mediterranean.
She’d smiled at him and he’d never been the same.
And maybe it was finally time he stopped fighting that.
Crete was finally ready when she woke again. It was light outside and coming up on ten o’clock, when she was meant to walk down an aisle out in the country and hand herself off to a man who would stamp out every last trace of light in her as if it had never been.
Whatever happened here, at least he had saved her from that darkness. He could take some solace in that, surely, for there was no one alive who deserved to wilt away in the darkness less than Timoney.
He knew the moment she sat up in his bed, so attuned was he to the sounds in this prison of his.Or perhaps it’s the fact you’ve lived here for years but have never truly moved in. If you had bothered to put rugs on the floor there would be nothing to hear.
Crete accepted that was true, little as he liked it.
He waited out in the great room, listening to the sounds she made as she moved around in the back of the flat. He heard the shower go on, then off some while later, leaving him with too many images of her lush body in hot water and slick with soap.
But today was not about his libido.
Or so he kept telling himself, until his jaw was so tight he was surprised it didn’t snap.
Sometime later she appeared, her blue eyes still sleepy and her hair wet, buttoning up an old shirt of his she must have liberated from his wardrobe as she walked. Along with what he thought were a pair of his boxer briefs. Her favorite uniform, as he recalled.
As always, his heart seemed to swell at the sight of her. But today he didn’t pretend that wasn’t happening. He simply stood there and watched her come toward him, letting his heart do what it would.
And maybe because she was still half-asleep, her eyes lit up when she saw him the way they always had, before.
The way, he promised himself, they would again.
Because he watched the way she pulled herself back as she remembered why she was here today, and he’d done that. Crete knew he had. He watched the shutters close down her expressive face and knew that he was the only one responsible.
And God knew he couldn’t bear the thought that any part of her should be dimmed.
But he didn’t have too long to contemplate that because her eyes widened again in the next moment, as she came to a stop beside him and took in what he’d done.
