Total pages in book: 79
Estimated words: 73372 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 367(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 245(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 73372 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 367(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 245(@300wpm)
But I keep trying. Because trying is all I have.
ANTON
The jealousy is eating me alive.
I don’t have the right to feel it. I know this. I chose not to believe her. I chose to treat her body like evidence. I chose to kiss her forehead and call her remarkable and drive to her apartment and prove my thesis with my hands on her skin, and the consequence of those choices is that I don’t get to feel anything about the architect on her floor who brings her soup and makes her laugh in the lobby and touches her elbow with the casual intimacy of a man who has never had to earn the right to be near her.
I don’t interfere.
This is my penance. I stand at my window and I see them on the harbour walk, she’s six months now and her belly rounds against her coat and he adjusts his pace for her and carries her water and the distance between them shrinks with each walk, and I grip my phone and I don’t call, I don’t text, I don’t go downstairs.
Andrei comes.
He lets himself in. He takes one look at me standing at the window in clothes I’ve been wearing since yesterday and his scar catches the afternoon light and his expression carries the particular blend of love and pity that only a twin can deliver.
“You look terrible.”
“I’m watching the mother of my child fall in love with someone who deserves her.”
Andrei is silent for a long time. He crosses to the window and stands beside me and we are two men in a penthouse looking down at a harbour where a woman is walking with a man who isn’t us, and my brother’s silence is not empty. It is the silence of a man who once believed himself a monster, who once stood on the wrong side of a door while the woman he loved wept on the other side, who knows something about the particular agony of believing yourself too ruined for the thing you want most.
“And what makes you so certain you don’t?” he asks.
I turn to him. “Don’t what?”
“Deserve her.”
I have no answer. Andrei doesn’t wait for one. He puts his hand on my shoulder, the same hand, the same shoulder, the same single squeeze, and he leaves, and I stand at the window and the harbour burns and Daisy and the architect have disappeared around the bend of the coast road and I’m alone with my brother’s question and no answer that doesn’t terrify me.
DAISY
The pool area is warm. Late afternoon. The water is still and turquoise and the sun is low enough to gild everything in amber and Jeff is sitting beside me on a lounger and we have been talking for an hour about nothing and everything and his hand is resting on the arm of his chair, close to mine, and I know what’s coming before it comes.
He turns to me. His face is open and kind and carries the particular tenderness of a man who has thought about this moment and decided to be brave, and I like his face and I like his bravery and I wish, with a desperation that borders on grief, that liking were enough.
“Daisy.”
I could stop him. I could turn away or change the subject or mention the baby or the weather or the sustainable marina project or any of the thousand things that would redirect this moment. I don’t stop him because stopping him would be a kindness to me and an unkindness to him, and Jeff Peterson deserves to be heard.
He leans in. He kisses me.
His mouth is warm and gentle and tastes like the coffee we were drinking and his hand finds my cheek, the same gesture, the same placement, the same tender cupping that another man performed in a penthouse a lifetime ago, and I wait for my body to respond.
It doesn’t.
My mouth stays closed. My hands stay in my lap. My heart, which should be racing or fluttering or doing any of the things a heart does when a good man kisses you in golden light by a turquoise pool, beats at its normal pace, undisturbed, as if the kiss is happening to someone else and my body is merely observing.
Jeff pulls back.
He searches my face. He searches it for a long time, nothing like how Anton searches, not calculating or cataloguing, but with the open, hoping gaze of a man who wants to find something and is already understanding that it isn’t there.
“You have your answer, Daisy.”
His voice is gentle. Not bitter. Not hurt enough to turn angry. Hurt enough to accept, that nods, that understands something the other person hasn’t said and doesn’t need to.
I cry.
I don’t mean to. I don’t want to. But the tears come because Jeff Peterson just kissed me beside a pool in Monaco and my body refused to feel it and the refusal is the answer to a question I’ve been asking myself for weeks: can I want the uncomplicated thing? Can I choose the man with clean hands? Can I build a life on liking when loving has already ruined me?