The morning of Jamie and Bex’s wedding broke as grey as the day before, melancholic and drear, the sun obscured by a single sheet of cloud. My own wedding day, some nine years earlier, had been similarly gloomy, even though we’d been in Southern California. Jocasta Cranford was incensed that she’d travelled all the way to our heathen state for her son’s wedding and I didn’t even have the good manners to ensure a sunny and warm December day she could brag about over lunch at the Lanesborough with her Benenden alumnae besties. The only saving grace for her was that we’d held it in Beverly Hills, giving her an excuse to stay at the Beverly Wilshire and ignore us in the days leading up to the ceremony in favor of some “light” (read: heavy) shopping on Rodeo Drive.
Of course, we were in Sussex, not SoCal, and there were no Ferragamo or Alexander McQueen shops to provide diversion. We had to make our own fun, and the sodden October countryside outside of Crowborough held little of it that wasn’t, as I grumbled that morning to Alex, a soggy walk in the High Weald or at the bottom (or middle, or top) of a bottle. (He gave me a condescending little pat on the head for that comment: “Quite witty, Mel.”)
Al had had a terrifically unsettled night of sleep, not surprising given his fight with Julian earlier in the evening, but which meant my night was punctuated by his movements. I know at one point, some time just after 3 a.m., I’d woken up to find him missing from the bed when I reached for him. He was standing in the middle of the room, tapping away at his phone, the bluish-white glare of the screen illuminating his face in the darkened room. The burgundy pyjamas he’d bought last minute from the Marks & Spencer in the City were a size too large and even in the dim light I could see them drooping from his shoulders.
Sitting up in the too-tall bed, I yawned. “Al, come back to bed. It must be the middle of the night.” I glanced at my own phone to confirm the time — he’d need to be out the door at 10 a.m. to join Jamie and the others for pre-wedding preparation over at the venue.
The tapping continued, his only recognition of my words a soft grunt.
“Rude,” I muttered. “Who are you texting in the middle of the night? Is it work?” That was the only scenario I could think of — it would have been around 7pm in San Francisco, and Dave might have been having one of his regular “someone get me Alex to fix this” meltdowns. (How he stays employed is beyond me — Dave’s screw-ups should have transcended the nepotism that got him in his job by now.)
Alex wiped his hand over his forehead and pushed back his hair, never taking his eyes from the phone. “Go back to sleep, love. It’s nothing. Just logistics for later today.”
“This couldn’t wait for later today then?” I said into the darkness. In the hallway beyond the door, I heard the heavy tread of what could only be Will stumbling to the bathroom, a guess that was confirmed when I heard him curse at the small table he must have bumped into. (“Sod off, you nearly had my nuts there.”)
Alex sighed as he tapped out another message. “If you really must know –“
“I do.”
“– Tom and Felix and I have been working on how to keep things calmer than tonight. None of us want another scene, so they’ve offered to keep Jules occupied, trade off duties as needed. As it so happens, both of them wouldn’t mind capturing some of his business for their own. And you know how much he loves to be flattered. Bit more worried about Tom not sticking his foot in it, but he’ll give it a shot.” Al looked down at his phone again.
“And what about you?” I wanted to believe Alex would give Julian a wide berth throughout the day and not snap at any of the surely tempting bait likely to be dangled by my ex-husband. As my father and sister were wont to remind me, who knows Alex and me better than Jules? He knows how to mount a surgical strike against us both, the weaknesses we try to hide that when brushed just right can cause us to fold.
“I’ll stick with Jamie when I can before the wedding, and whichever of Tom and Felix isn’t occupying Julian. And then after, I’ll be with you, sweetest, and I trust you’ll keep me in line, whether I want it or not.” He lowered the phone, and it cast an eerie radiance on his features, throwing his cheekbones into ghastly relief, a slightly terrifying effect leavened only by a gentle smile.
By this point, I was fully awake — the prospect of drifting back into sleep now elusive. If I hadn’t been wary of trying to get out of the bed on my own in the near-darkness, I would have slid out and marched him back into it to join me in its admittedly cozy duvet. Instead, I went for the big guns. “I know how to keep you in line, hmmm?” I asked. “Then here’s an order: Alexander St. Clair Carr, you are getting in bed, now, if you know what’s good for you.”
He turned off the phone’s screen, shutting the room back into shadow. “And what’s good for me, sweetest?” he growled.
“It’s after midnight now, if you’d like that first helping of carnal embrace I promised you,” I purred into the darkness.
“My mistress’s word is my command.” He clambered into bed, scaling its heights far more easily than I could. “How do you want me?”
“Just get those hideous pyjamas off. They’re the least sexy thing I’ve ever seen you in, and that includes the fancy dress party last year when you went as Poindexter from Revenge of the Nerds.”
Alex let me pull the unbuttoned top over his head while he scooted out of the bottoms. “Well, I did go as ‘Sexy Poindexter.’ No woman had the power to resist.”
I let him pull my chemise over my head (“sauce for the goose, little goose”) and we were soon cold skin to warm in the ludicrous bed, his lips upon my neck, pressing them down and down and down from my nape to my breast. He needed no costume at all to render me powerless.
***
Alex’s restless shifting and wee-hour texting abated after I’d helped myself to his body in the ways I preferred. My therapist has been encouraging me to be more forthright in taking the lead in bed — though I have no complaints about sex with Alex, I am a bit guilty of letting him choose how things… progress between us. “Why not tell him what you want, or just do what you want to him? Do you think he’ll be offended? Stop you? Feel emasculated? Take control, Melissa.” And of course she’s right — at $300 an hour, she should be right.
On the other hand, his disquiet was like a parasite that fled from his body only to find a new host in me. When I snatched moments of sleep, I fell directly into my dreams of keyholes and haunted rooms. Some were familiar: a Palo Alto hotel room where I sat alone, waiting for Josh, forcing myself to read À Rebours because he’d assigned it to me as reading, dreading his return but craving him nevertheless. Some I was aware of but had never known of their location: the week Minty had taken Alex back into her bed after she’d run away to Dorset, crushing my then-blossoming hope that he might help me escape from my beautiful prison of a marriage — in this little room I saw him loom above her in that bed, pleasing her in ways he had just pleased me, her face streaming tears, though I knew not whether they were of relief or sadness or remorse or joy. I knew their reunion wouldn’t last, but to see them in my mind’s eye, this brief snip of an imagined memory, gnawed at my vanity, reminded me I’d never be the only Mrs. Carr.
I gave up at 7:30 and padded down the staircase, down the fifteen steps and past the disapproving vicars on the walls with their muttonchops and drooping mustaches. As I’d hoped, Charlie had beat me to the kitchen and already had a pot of tea on the table with an empty cup waiting where I’d been seated the evening before.
“Morning, Mel,” he greeted me through a mouthful of toast. “Thought you might be down soon, but I’m taking on breakfast duties this morning. Don’t want to fall afoul of your man, if he’s still in that mood.”
I reached across the table and pulled a couple of slices from the toastrack. Charlie pushed two ceramic pots towards me — upon inspection, one held butter and the other jam. “Strawberry,” he advised. “Homemade, or so says the label.” I skipped the butter and slathered my toast generously with the jam, a gorgeous, glistening ruby spread, then filled my cup from the pot.
“Cream?” The little silver jug held what I wanted, but I passed and reached for the small plastic container of milk instead. (I have no idea what my wedding dress will look like, but I intend to fit into it.)
We munched in companionable silence for a while, reading news on our phones. I wanted to talk to Charlie alone about what had happened at the other house, but I couldn’t quite string the words together in a way that expressed my worries about the reception without making Alex sound the wrong side of the “unstable” accusation Julian liked to lob about. I trusted Charlie’s judgment about, well, pretty much everything more than that of any of the rest of us. We’re a clutch of unreliable narrators, dissemblers, cheaters, intemperate liars, boasters and self-deluded fabulists, myself included. Few of us could really be trusted with serving up the undiluted truth.
The notable exception to this probably impolite (but quite honest) sketch of my friends is the usually well-behaved Dr. Charles Fawcett, the only one of us with a house and a car and a profession. (When I point out to Alex that he has a difficult job too, he always reminds me that what he does is hardly professional — “It’s just gambling with other people’s money using recipes I make from code. It only seems respectable but it’s just a bunch of rip-off artists in cashmere half-zip jumpers.”) When I’d met him at Bristol, Charlie was… fussy isn’t the right word. It makes him sound prissy and stodgy, not adjectives I’d ever ascribe to him. Responsible? Dedicated? Yes, and clever and prompt and forthright and precise. And indulgent of the rest of us, even Julian, of the ways in which we didn’t fit his pattern.
He was, as Al had said to me on the first night I met them all, the “serious” one, hyper-focused on getting a first in his degree in medicine, a degree that was five years long rather than the three the rest of that lot had to put in. And that was before all the additional years of foundational and specialist training. By the time Lucy was born, Charlie was just about to start practising, finally, after 10 years of education. It was a real feat — “Much more impressive than what I did to make this little girl, but you should ask Min about that,” Al said at the christening, when we included Charlie in the toasts after the baptism. (Minty blushed deeply, and Miranda snorted.)
His self-control wasn’t like Josh’s — he wasn’t performing control of himself to tamp down any wild and vicious impulses that might otherwise push him to frenzy. Rather, he wanted to show the world he was nothing like his father, a trust fund baby who’d never had to hold a job, and who’d frittered away his life and much of the family money on cocaine and other women. “Dead of a stroke at 45. Best thing that ever happened to my mum, to be honest,” Charlie told me one afternoon at the White Harte over a pint of bitter. “One can always get more money — once your dignity’s gone, hard to claw that one back.” By focusing on his studies, Charlie Fawcett would never be the reckless, dissolute idler his father was.
Not that he was completely abstemious — he had always liked a few pints of an evening, but rarely tipped over from tipsy to trollied. Charlie didn’t disdain those of us who liked a few pints more, or a line or two of coke, even with his father’s history of indulgence in the stuff. “None for me, thanks,” was his usual reply, coupled with a hand over his pint or wine glass, but he’d gladly top someone else up. I even saw him roll up a twenty pound note once when Jules was looking around for something to use to snort a line.
I recall asking Charlie years later, at a cocktail party Miranda was throwing in honor of a London visit from Julian and me, how he thought it was possible that Alex allowed himself every overindulgence at university but still found time to study and manage a first in mathematics. From across the room, I could tell Al was still overindulging — he was letting Minty top up his tumbler of whisky as he lit a fresh Silk Cut from the embers of the one he’d smoked nearly down to the filter. It was at that party that Alex seduced Minty, though I wouldn’t know that until later, nor would I know quite how easy it was for him to convince her to come back to his flat after the party wound down. (“I asked if she wanted to come back to mine for another glass of red and she answered, ‘I haven’t had sex since 2009, so yes.'”)
“Not difficult to figure out.” Charlie cast a glance over at Al, who was holding court with Julian by his side. Whatever they were saying, whatever jokes they were batting between them, lit the others up with glee. “I worked harder because I had to. Al’s brilliant, a mad genius. It comes naturally. With me? Proud of what I’ve achieved so far, but I can’t help but think if Alex had worked even half as hard as I have, he’d be more than halfway to running his own fund by now.”
I swished the maraschino cherry around the top of my Tom Collins. “That’s a bit premature, don’t you think? Julian said it was, at least, when Al mentioned it was a dream of his.”
“All he needs is capital at this point and a few more years’ experience to give investors some confidence. He’s going to stall at Goldmans without a Ph.D. Times are different from when he started as a trainee, and he says he can’t afford to take time off now for a doctorate.” Charlie pulled a couple of smoked salmon hors d’oeuvres from the silver platter Miranda’s housekeeper had thrust between us. I declined, mostly because Jocasta had made a remark the day before at lunch that my calves were “looking a trifle… athletic.” When I’d looked over to Jules for backup, he’d just shrugged and said, “Mum’s right. You should really lay off the single cream in your tea at the very least, Liss.”
The maraschino slid off its stem into my mouth with the slightest resistance, a pop that I felt more than heard. “I don’t know where his money goes,” I said with a mouthful of cherry, the only food I’d eat that night.
“Nobody does. Clothes, I suppose. He is a bit of a clotheshorse, all those Ede & Ravenscroft shirts and Ozwald Boateng suits, the John Lobbs, the Japanese denim.” Charlie stuffed the second salmon mini-puff in his mouth. I took a big swig of my Tom Collins while I waited for him to resume. “His mum and Fenn. Balcraigie. And the E-Type, of course,” he continued.
Ah yes, the 1974 E-Type Jaguar he’d bought at the beginning of 2011 when he was on the outs with his mum and refused to hand over any of his bonus. (In fact, by not handing over the bonus to Cora that year, there was nothing to fix the roof thereby creating the marriage trap he found himself in at that party, trying to get in Minty’s pants for her money.) There was no denying the deep red Jag’s undulating beauty, possibly the most gorgeous car I’ve ever had a journey in. Just the day before I’d nagged Julian to let me have a pootle about Chelsea with Al in the car, but Jules relented only when Alex promised we’d only be gone for 15 minutes.
“I’ll take her for a quick turn, just down to the Embankment and back.” That was a complete lie.
We drove up the King’s Road for about three quarters of a mile, then turned down Radnor Walk. When he found a parking space, he took it as a sign. We ditched the car and ran into the Chelsea Potter, where we both slammed a pint of London Pride, and then sprinted back to the E-Type and munched on Altoids on the short jaunt back. We were gone in total 21 minutes, and while Julian grumbled about liberties being taken with his wife, he didn’t make much of it, nor did he bother to get close enough to me to sniff the mint and beer on my breath. Even now, Alex and I still get a kick out of our little subterfuge.
“You’d think Julian would make an investment in him,” I ventured, “but when I mentioned it, Jules just rejected it. He said real estate is a good investment, but a borderline-alcoholic is not, even a brilliant borderline-alcoholic.” That dismissive comment had stuck in my craw at the time. As long as I have known the two, Julian has mischaracterized Alex as a “near-drunk” or “probably almost an alcoholic,” when their booze intake has been fairly similar. It’s a nasty epithet he still trots out for my father, even though Al drinks far less in California than he ever did in the UK. It’s not to say he doesn’t overindulge from time to time, nor that when Minty left him he didn’t drink too much, every day, for too long. (“No job to go to, and no wife to come home to, so why should I give a toss if I get bladdered?”)
Charlie looked up from the bottle of Newcastle he’d been nursing for an hour and frowned. “Alex is drinking too much. I’m saying that as his friend, not as a doctor. I’m not going to diagnose him as an alcoholic, or even as flirting close to that edge. But he’s self-medicating, and he’s not been himself this past month, not since he dumped Kate. Miranda recommended OKCupid and dating again, but what Alex needs is more time focusing on making that fund of his own come true, and less time chasing women.” (Even a year into my marriage with Julian, I didn’t like to think about Alex chasing any women who weren’t me.)
In this Sussex farmhouse kitchen though, I had more concerns about Al than I had back in that Marylebone flat in 2011. “Charlie, can I ask you a question?”
“Ask away, as long as you aren’t asking me to inspect your moles.” He gave a little faux-shiver.
“No, no,” I laughed. “It’s about Alex. Well, what happened last night and Alex. You know how you mentioned to me the other day about how happy he seemed, and how suspicious that made you?”
Charlie nodded and poured himself another cup of tea. “Of course. And I see that I wasn’t far off the mark, do you agree?”
“Well, yes. But I’m worried that their… whatever you want to call it wasn’t enough to bring the little grey cloud back.” I listened for the sound of any of the others descending the staircase but all I heard was the sound of all four of them snoring in occasional harmony, with the occasional crescendo from Alex.
“I tend to agree with you, but there’s really not much we can do besides keep them apart. I presume Alex doesn’t want to go near him, so it’s a matter of sequestering Julian, no?” Charlie shoved the toastrack over to me and I hesitated before taking another slice, which I buttered in spite of my wedding dress worries.
“That’s the plan.” I told him about the scheme Felix, Tom and Al had cooked up in the wee hours, and he agreed it was probably workable, as long as everyone stayed on course and didn’t get distracted.
“However, I think there are a few variables Alex isn’t controlling for, Mel. They’ve probably occurred to you, too.”
“Go on,” I urged. He topped up my own tea with the comment that this was probably a three-cup problem for us both.
“Amanda, for one. She’s a perennial loose cannon, and just as likely to encourage them both on her own, purely for her own amusement. Set them off against each other. Half the reason she ever went out with Alex was to get back at Julian, you know, for dumping her.”
“The other half was probably the dinners at Club Gascon and Chez Bruce on Al’s tab,” I groused. Nearly a decade later, it still irked me that he’d thrown so much money away on indulging Amanda’s whims, which included a pink sapphire and diamond promise ring she’d demanded three months into their relationship. Alex had no reasonable explanation for why he’d bought a £2,000 ring for a woman to whom he had promised nothing, and who faked orgasms and nicked things from his family home.
Charlie leaned forward across the table. “I was genuinely pleased to hear she was behaving yesterday at the rehearsal. You never get to see it, but I’ve reason to be friends with her still. She may be a troublemaker, but she’s frequently quite funny and makes no apology for who she is. I admire that. Of all of the rest, she was kindest when Terry dumped me. But no matter how nicely she played with you yesterday, it’s best to be pleasantly surprised by her good behavior. She’s just as likely to turn on you again as take you into her confidence.”
“Nothing about Amanda will stop surprising me,” I confessed. Her confession of lost love for Alex was trumped only by our unexpected rapprochement in the church, even if that was under the influence of a significant amount of rum.
With a serious nod, Charlie ploughed on. “I’m also concerned that everyone’s good intentions to behave — ah ah ah,” he chided as I tried to interrupt. “For all we know, Julian might not want a repeat performance either, so I include him in ‘everyone.'” (I shut my mouth, suitably chastened.) “As I was saying, we can’t count on good intentions when there’s that much alcohol in the mix.”
I knew what he meant immediately. “You mean Alex.” It was the truth, but it still buzzed its stinger into me and left me smarting.
“Look, Mel, you know and I know Alex’s drinking isn’t the problem it once was. I’ve just spent every evening with him while he was working in London and if anything I was drinking more than he was. He told me you have him drink fizzy water at dinner now instead of wine, which I can barely believe.”
“For good reason — it’s not true!” I laughed, though I was proud to know he’d kept his promise to me to limit his alcohol in London, which I know from experience is not exactly the easiest pursuit. Booze is the merry and boisterous and poisonous sea on which so much of social life bobs along there.
Charlie smiled. “How much do you think he had last night? More than usual? More than, say, the pint or two of beer I saw him drink in the evenings while he was staying with me?”
It had been quite a lot, come to think of it. A glass of prosecco on arrival, check. Four glasses of wine, a very strong Amarone, check. (I had only one glass myself — after all that rum, it seemed prudent to rein myself in.) The grappa — two shots. And back at the other house, he’d necked a mug of Minty’s spiked cider right in front of me. I ticked all of this off for Charlie. “But he didn’t seem drunk or out of control or at all like he used to get. You saw him in the garden. Did he seem anything more than a bit tipsy to you?”
“To be honest?” Charlie scratched his head, causing the stiff cowlick he tried in vain to keep tamed to burst straight up like a ginger exclamation point aimed at the ceiling. “He seemed like a person hiding how drunk he was. You saw him fumble with the lighter. It wasn’t all nerves, in my opinion.”
I chewed on the side of my thumb for a moment, puzzling at how little I’d actually observed of his behavior at the table, even if I had kept track of his drinking. No, I’d been far more interested in watching Julian at the far end as he crammed pasta in Amanda’s mouth during the dinner service, and then as he crammed his tongue down her throat during the speeches. (Gross. But I still looked.) “It’s not over yet, is it?”
We both looked up at the sound of a door slamming closed upstairs. From above our heads, I heard Will’s heavy tread start clomping downstairs as Miranda yelled, “Why do you have to take everything so bloody personally, William? It was only a joke!”
“No,” Charlie rushed. “I’ll keep Amanda distracted, or at least with Julian, and you do your best to stop Al from emptying that open bar. Deal?”
It wasn’t a perfect plan, but it was better than handling it on my own. I shot my hand across the table to shake Charlie’s. “Deal.”
As Charlie dropped my hand, Will crashed into the kitchen. “Keep me away from that… that… harridan! She won’t leave me alone!” Will harrumphed his way into a chair and proceeded to clean his glasses on one of the napkins still on the table from last night. “Fix us a cuppa, will you, Chas? It’s not even 8 and I’m already exhausted from that monster of a friend of yours, Mel.”
Sheepishly, Miranda peeped her head around the doorway. “I’m not a monster,” she sniffled. “I just want Will to talk to me about Miss K and he won’t.” I was glad to see she’d come downstairs under her own steam that morning rather than on the shoulders of my husband-to-be. She was sporting the “SMASH THE IMPERIALIST CAPITALIST HETERO PATRIARCHY” t-shirt I’d given her for Christmas last year on top of pink silk shortie pyjama bottoms.
“Go away, Ran. I’m not talking about it with you.” His voice was muffled by the toast he was shoving in his mouth. Miranda scampered up behind his chair anyway and gave him a hug from the back, nearly causing him to choke on his toast.
Ahhhhhhhh, all might be right with the world anyway. I had my marching orders, and Charlie wouldn’t let me down. The bride was due down the aisle in six hours, and even with the gloom and the murk of the day outside, her march would bring at least some light and air to the day. I hoped so, as I felt like I was choking on the suffocating inevitability of a punch up some 18 years in the making.
***
When Alex didn’t make an appearance downstairs by 9:15, I went to rouse him. I’d spent the past hour with the others — Sasha had emerged shortly after Miranda had stopped trying to hug all the air out of Will and tickle the truth about Miss K from his lips. (“A gentleman never tells, Ran,” is all Will would say.) Upon nudging open the door to our room, I found Al awake and upright in bed, pounding away on his laptop. There was no point in trying to get into the bed without pulling over the chair, and I didn’t want to give him the impression there was enough time for Round 2 on carnal embrace, so I stood at the foot of the bed.
“Al, it’s 9:15. You should probably get up.” I didn’t mean for it to come out as a command, more of a suggestion, but even I could hear the trace of naggery in it.
Slamming his laptop closed with a fierceness that made me fear for the “D” key that was already loose, he faced me with a scowl. “What is it with you women and your orders? Don’t any of you trust me to take care of myself?”
“‘Us women’?” I repeated. “Who else is telling you what to do?”
He waved his hand dismissively. “My sister. Word travels fast from Julian’s shit-talking mouth to her ears these days now he’s her ‘patron.'” He made snarky little air quotes. “She asked me to be ‘kind’ to him today. Kind! I was telling her to fuck off when you walked in.” Al trailed off in frustration and fell back on the broderie anglaise bolster propping him up, bouncing his skull off the headboard. “Fuck! Aw, sweetest, I’m sorry, I was unfair to you. Come over here, lass. Let me make it up to you.” He patted the mattress, which looked as scalable to me as Everest.
I shook my head and approached his side of the bed, where he lay poking at the rising bump on his head. “I know we haven’t had much luck in showers this year,” I offered, “but why don’t we try again? Or maybe just you can get in the shower and I can sit on the edge of the tub and you can tell me about all the things you would have done to me if I weren’t afraid of a little concussion.”
“Tempting, very tempting.” Alex stared up at the ceiling and drummed his fingers on his chest. “Suppose there’s nothing to do but to be there for Jamie like he was for me.”
“Like he was for you,” I echoed back. “Like he’d be there again for you.”
I listened as the rain began to pat upon the window again, little spots then a rush of wind against the casement jostled the frame, spooking Alex with a jolt from his reverie. “I won’t need him like that again, love. I have you now, and I suspect you’ll do a damn sight better job keeping an eye on me than Min ever did.” His hand sought mine, gave it a squeeze, seeking the comfort I too seek — this time it will be different, this time I will be different.
“You know,” Alex mused, “your Mum said the daftest thing to me when we saw her this summer. It was a bit sentimental, but it stuck with me.”
“Hm? She’s not usually too schmaltzy.” This was something of an understatement. My mother regularly rants against the Hallmarkification of emotion, of mawkish indulgence of self-serving sentiment. She’s not harsh, and never cruel, but she did throw out the copy of “Chicken Soup for the Soul” my Aunt Jane gave her for Christmas one year before it even rested one night on her bookshelf.
“It was when you and Jenn and Caitlin were in the kitchen getting trashed, right after we got back from spying on Jen. I asked her how I could manage to be around Julian without thrashing him to a bloody pulp. She said, ‘The best way out is always through.’ I asked her where it was from, and she said Robert Frost. And Alanis Morissette, sort of.”
That did sound like my mother. “Time to pass through then, Al.” I reached up and, with what I hoped was a somber expression, tickled his side. His long, lean body spasmed and flexed as he tried to evade my attack.
“Uncle! Uncle!” he begged. “I’ll get up and go face that arsehole and keep my hands shoved in my trousers pockets if it means no more tickling.” Finally grasping my hand to stop the onslaught, he kissed it on the wrist. “Anything for the Princess Melissa.”
Swivelling my hand, I leaned forward and kissed the back of his. “And for the brave Duke Alexander as well. A kiss for you to take with you into battle… not that there will be any battle.”
Alex slipped out of bed, standing before me in nothing but his stocking feet. We’d both grown so much since we first met as hardly more than children, both fallen in love and married others (though not in the same order), both destroyed our marriages when we thought we were pursuing our hearts’ desires. Both flitted between continents and cities and lovers and each other, but once and again we looped back to each other, like mated swallows in flight reaching their evening roost. Yet before me he was still Al, still pale and dark-haired, still artless and beautiful and angular and odd and mineminemine.
(Greedy girl, you always wanted him for your own, and your eyes drift down and you recall this morning and how he promised you he would be yours forever as he pressed his body into yours again and again and again as much as you wanted and you took all you wanted and then some from him and all you could think is: of course you will be mine as if you ever had a choice.)
Flashing me a slightly wonky grin, he walked behind me and pressed himself to my back, tucking my head under his chin. The heat from his bed-warm body flowed into mine. “There’s not much more to it, then. I’ll behave, for Jamie’s sake, and yours. Grit my teeth. Shun the bait. Once more unto the breach and all that, sweetest.”
And from the past, slithering out from a keyhole, Josh’s voice reciting King Henry’s words as he reminded me of just how little Shakespeare I knew (“shocking, since you claim to be a writer”):
In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man,
As modest stillness and humility;
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger:
Stiffen the sinews, conjure up the blood,
Disguise fair nature with hard-favoured rage:
Then lend the eye a terrible aspect;
Let it pry through the portage of the head,
Like the brass cannon; let the brow o’erwhelm it
As fearfully as doth a galled rock
O’erhang and jutty his confounded base,
Swill’d with the wild and wasteful ocean.
Now set the teeth and stretch the nostril wide;
Hold hard the breath and bend up every spirit
To his full height.
I know Alex’s hard-favoured rage, the stiffened sinews, the cast of fury on his darling face, how anger changes his body from the rangy man who held me, into the thug Julian had claimed lived only just beneath the sleeker surface Al had refined for himself over the years.
“The best way out of that breach once you’re unto it, Al, is through,” I chided. “Promise me you’ll just pass through.”
He clasped me tighter — I could see his mind’s eye regarding how lush it would be throw Julian against a wall and sink a fist again and again into his face. Blows larded with a bitterness born of Julian’s love for his once-best friend, a love that had been warped by Jules’ drive to win at all costs, to control those he kept closest by exploiting weakness.
“Sweetest, I do.”
Twelve hours later, as I mopped the blood flowing freely from Alex’s face, as it dripped onto his wine-stained white dress shirt, I learned that sometimes when you’re going through, you still might meet a fist on the way there.
meandering again 