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“It w-w-was—”
“But as I said, I’m just checking in.” And that was the first time he’d cut over me. “The waters are still rising, so you should see to your defences and take precautions if you haven’t already.”
“Thank you. I’ll be fine.” I sounded a little hoarse, but I was proud of the delivery.
His head came up instantly. “Edwin, are you all right?” His gaze skated down my neck and across my collarbone, then past me into the hall. “What are you doing in there?”
“Moving my sofa.”
“By yourself?”
I blinked. I wanted to say something sarcastic that would protect me from the mortifying vulnerability of those two little words, but for once the problem was that I simply couldn’t think of anything.
“I mean,” he rushed on, “obviously. Can I help?”
A tight knot of sorrow lodged itself in my throat. For his sweetness, his steadfast compassion. The fact that I craved them like his hands upon me, these gifts from a stranger who had no reason to give them. “I d-don’t need your help.”
“It won’t take a minute between the two us. It’s what I’m here for.”
“It’s not w-what you’re here for.” Anger now, rushing to my rescue. And shocking me a little with its suddenness, with the fact it was there at all. “Helping me isn’t what you’re h-here for.”
His eyes widened. “That’s not what I—”
“No. I’m n-n-not your f”—no, just no, I wasn’t fucking upfucking—“fuckingcharity project. You d-don’t have to be nice to me.”
“Edwin, do you really think that?” He looked so genuinely appalled. Helplessly wounded. “I just…like you.”
I closed the door.
Crouched on my ruined carpet and cried again.
Because Marius had left me. Because my house was flooding. And because the universe had dropped a wonderful man into my lap right when I felt least worthy of having him.
I just wasn’t ready.
Another day, another week, another month. Why now? When everything was still too close and hurt too much, and I was nothing but the pieces of someone Marius had wanted once.
On the other side of the door, Adam’s shadow wobbled, wavered, faded away. I heard the water closing over his footsteps.
He was gone.
Later, oh much later, not really thinking very clearly but weary of tears and watching the flood breach my house, I went up to the attic. It was Marius’s space, empty now but for the one picture he hadn’t taken with him.
On our first viewing, the estate agent had warned us that the stairs didn’t conform to building regulations, but Marius had climbed that rickety spiral and gasped. Until that moment I thinkperhaps it had only been a house to me, but I remember the way he turned his face into the light, hands held open as if to catch it like rain. He had looked so beautiful that day, so happy, a man of shadow and gold. And I had thought him mine.
We’d slept up here for a few weeks after we moved in, on a mound of pillows and blankets because the bed I’d ordered had arrived in good time but the mattress hadn’t. It had felt strangely magical, ascending to the attic together every night, clinging to Marius’s hand because his night vision was terrible, and I’d been so afraid he’d blunder into something, or fall. Safe in our makeshift bed, I’d lain in Marius’s arms, and we’d watched the stars through the skylight. We’d made love like we hadn’t done for years, slowly, as though we didn’t know exactly how to touch each other. In the mornings, I would wake to the softest light, the bluest sky, and the scarlet leaves of the sycamore tree.53
The canvas Marius had left was propped against the far wall. It was me. His painting of me.
Unabashedly naked, I look young, languid, and unexpectedly sensual, my eyes dark with recent pleasure, the suggestion of sweat drying on my skin.
My sex life, until then, had been an adolescent business. Blowjobs and hand-jobs and fumbling frottage. But Marius had claimed me with a skill and a certainty that nothing in my previous experience had prepared me for. And, afterwards, he’d painted me. I was astonished at this vision of myself: a fey creature of unabashed passions and sated appetites. How could I not have loved the man who saw me so?
Until he lost sight of me entirely.
I waited for the pain to come, but my heart was as empty as the room I stood in. I found myself imagining a different scene. One where I attacked the painting in a storm of grief and rage, wood splintering as I tore it apart. But the gesture felt too dramatic, the sort of thing Marius would have done, and would have been able to do without hesitation or self-consciousness. It wasn’t me.
I didn’t want to destroy anything.
