Total pages in book: 26
Estimated words: 24637 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 123(@200wpm)___ 99(@250wpm)___ 82(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 24637 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 123(@200wpm)___ 99(@250wpm)___ 82(@300wpm)
“He wanted you.” It comes out low and rough, the accent gone thick, the brandy color still high on his face. “He sat there and looked at you the way I won’t let myself, and you let him, you touched his arm, and I—”
He stops, his jaw working, a man at the edge of a confession he’s spent eighteen years refusing to make.
“You what?” I’m close now. I’ve crossed the cabin without deciding to. “Say it. For once in your miserable buttoned-up life, say the true thing instead of the safe one.”
“I couldn’t stand it.” Wrenched out of him, raw, and his hands come up to frame my face the way they did in the storm, and there’s nothing sound or arranged or mature about him now, nothing left of the man with the cash-box where his chest should be. “I watched a stranger get the version of you I keep telling myself I don’t want, and it made me want to put my fist through the paneling, and I know, I know what that means, Blythe, you don’t have to say it. I know exactly what it means, and I can’t afford to mean it.”
“Then don’t mean it,” I breathe, my mouth already a half-inch from his, both of us furious, both of us breathing like we’ve been running, both of us lying through our teeth. “Just for tonight. Mean nothing. Mean nothing all over me, and we’ll call it the arrangement in the morning.”
It isn’t tender, what happens then, the way the storm was tender.
This is the other thing entirely, the jealous angry uncareful thing, his mouth hard on mine and my hands fisting in his shirt to drag him closer and a sound torn out of him I’ll keep forever, and he holds his promise, holds it scrupulously, the one line he swore he wouldn’t cross standing untouched in the middle of all that wreckage like the eye of the storm.
But everything else, every other line, we obliterate together in the dark with the rails clattering underneath, and he takes me to that high broken place again with his name in my mouth and mine in his, like an accusation, like a surrender, like the truth we’ve both agreed not to have said come morning.
After, he doesn’t move away.
That’s the tell. A man conducting a sensible agreement rolls over and goes to sleep. Loukas stays exactly where he is, his arm locked around me like he’s expecting someone to come take me in the night, his heart slamming against my back, and he doesn’t say a word, and neither do I, the pair of us having reached the place past which we can’t say a single thing without saying all of it.
And in the morning, just as I predicted, neither of us mentions it.
But I catch him at breakfast watching the door of the lounge car like he’s daring the young rancher to walk through it, and I understand, with a lurch that’s equal parts triumph and terror, that whatever Loukas Karalis told himself over the eggs yesterday, he’s stopped, somewhere between Amarillo and here, being able to believe a word of it.
Chapter Eleven
HE TELLS ME ABOUT HIS mother on the third night, and he doesn’t mean to, and that’s how I know it’s true.
We’ve reached the slow part of the country, the long empty stretch where there’s nothing out the window but dark and the occasional far-off ranch light, and the train has the hushed late feeling of a house where everyone else has gone to bed.
We’re not doing anything. That’s the truth of it. We’re just lying there not touching, a careful few inches apart, as we keep ending up, two people who’ve run clean out of reasons and haven’t admitted it.
I ask him an idle question about Greece, whether he misses it, and he’s quiet for so long I think he’s asleep.
Then he says, “My parents were the most in-love couple anyone in Athens had ever seen.”
I don’t say anything. I’ve learned that much about him, that he talks the way a wild thing comes to the hand, only if you hold very still and pretend you don’t want it.
“In public.” His voice is level and even, the voice of a man reading off a ledger he’s read a thousand times. “At parties. In the papers. My father would kiss my mother’s hand at the opera and the whole box would sigh. They were a performance other people aspired to. And then we’d get in the car to go home, and the second the doors shut, the temperature would drop forty degrees, and by the time we reached the house they wouldn’t be speaking, and some nights it was worse than not speaking.” A pause. “I used to think the house had two climates. The one with guests in it, and the real one.”