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He made a visible effort not to keep nodding. “Yes.Darkened Cities.”59
A London street, a tangle of buildings, and the shadow of cranes, all lightless beneath an ascendance of stars. “You always did have weirdly apocalyptic taste.”
That just earned me a shrug.
Had we always been this bad at communicating? I didn’t think so. I could remember wandering the labyrinth of his silences entranced. I could remember a time when hearing him had come easy. When knowing him had felt like knowing a part of myself.
“Edwin,” I tried, taking refuge in impatience. “For fuck’s sake. Is there—”
“D-d-d-di-didyoucheatonme?”
The words rushed over me in a borderline impenetrablestream. And even when I understood them, I couldn’t make sense of them. Didn’t want to believe them. “What?”
“Did you,” he repeated, with fragile defiance. “Cheat. On me.”
It was an outrageous, insulting, appalling fucking question. For once, I could have justified sharpness. I could probably have justified almost anything I wanted to say. But in that moment, all I had was a blunt and ugly sincerity. “Myszko. No. No, never.”
Edwin blinked, his chest rising and falling too rapidly. And I almost wished he’d go back to accusing me of shit because there was no way I was going to cope if he started crying. I’d always hated it when he cried. Partly because I was bad at comforting people in general but mostly because I was more hurt by his pain than I’d ever been by my own. Perhaps because I was responsible for such a lot of it.
“Why would you think something like that?” I asked, trying to distract him.
He glared at me like the answer should have been obvious. “Because you were obsessed with her.”
“Obsessed with who?”
“With that artist w-woman. With Coal.”
This was not something I could deny. Well, I could have, but it would have addedgaslightingto my extensive list of sins. Things were, however, a little more complicated than Edwin might be willing to acknowledge. “I’m obsessed with her art.”
“Did you fuck her, though?”
“Yes.” I sighed. This was not an area of discussion that would go well for either of us. “But not while we were together.”
“When, then?”
I could have lied. Maybe I should have. Maybe that would have been the right thing to do. But I was too tired. And I’d been holding too much back—or in—for too long. “The day after we broke up.”
“Oh. Well.” If nothing else, the truth had successfully flipped Edwin from sad to angry. “That makes all the difference.”
“Actually,” I said, “it does.”
“Are you sure? Because it looks like you were counting the minutes until you were s-shot of me.”
“I wasn’t.”
Edwin’s eyes were searching my face, but in the same way you’d rummage through a forgotten box, not really expecting to find anything of worth. “Are you even bi?”
“No. I don’t know. I suppose I’m just flexible if I need to be?”
“Flexible, you mean, when you need to hurt me?”
That, too, was not exactly a flattering question. As if I would put my sexuality to such petty ends. But I still couldn’t seem to muster spite or indignation or anything else that could have protected me.
“I didn’t do it to hurt you.” I put my head in my hands. At the time, it had been a sequence of events as logical as cutting my way through a fishing net. I had no regrets, but I saw retrospectively how frantic I’d been: stumbling steps in the dark. And I was still stumbling now. “I just had to make sure I didn’t come back.”
“And you took it as read I’d still want you? After you’d dumped me out of nowhere, for no reason, and immediately slept with someone else?”
I wondered if he’d carried this resentment, these things to sayto me, all this time. If I’d taken that from him, too, with our brittle and supposedly amicable breakup. “Would you not, though?”
