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)
I forget on purpose. That’s the part I can’t forgive, that for one second I let myself stand on a train platform and pretend a man like this had chosen a woman like me and meant it.
He holds my hand a beat longer than the photograph requires, pressing the ring home against my knuckle like he’s sealing it there, and when I look up to make some remark that’ll save us both, his eyes are already on my mouth.
And here’s the thing I’ll never admit to another living person, the thing I can barely admit to you. The crowd’s gone up like a struck match, all of them pressing the velvet rope, calling his name and now mine, Blythe, Blythe, show us the ring, and a hundred cameras have turned the pair of us into the only thing worth looking at in the whole bright roaring station.
And I’ve spent forty years as the one in the muck boots at the back, the practical one, the one who keeps the birds alive while somebody prettier gets photographed, and I’d made my peace with that. I’d genuinely made my peace with it.
And now a man the entire state wants is holding my hand up for the cameras like he won me, like I was the one he couldn’t do without, and the awful mutinous truth is that some starved thing in me I’d left for dead steps right into that lie and stretches and basks shamelessly in all that borrowed adoration and refuses, point blank, to come back out.
“Don’t,” I breathe.
“They want a kiss.” He says it lazily, in the tone of a man reporting the weather, except his attention has gone heavy and dark and entirely on me.
Huh? Who wants a what?
Give them a kiss! One kiss! One for the road!
Oh. That.
The crowd’s started a chant I refuse to dignify, and Mellie’s making a noise behind me like a kettle coming to temperature, and his fingers have already found the back of my neck, gentle and certain, tipping my face up to his.
“Smile, agapi,” he murmurs. “This part was always coming.”
And then Loukas Karalis kisses me.
I expected, if I expected anything, a politician’s kiss, dry and brief and aimed at the cameras over my shoulder. What I get instead is his hand cradling the back of my skull like it’s the most natural place on earth for his hand to be, and his mouth coming down over mine slow and certain and unhurried, the way he does everything, taking his time as though we’ve the platform to ourselves and the train can wait.
A sound gets out of me that I’ll be denying for the rest of my natural life, low and helpless and nothing like the woman I’ve spent forty years being, and my free hand fists in the lapel of his coat instead of shoving him off it, which is what a sane woman, a woman with her defenses still up, would’ve done.
It isn’t a kiss for the cameras.
That’s what I understand somewhere in the middle of it, when my eyes have fallen shut without my permission and the brass band and the flashbulbs and eighteen years of carefully maintained loathing have all gone soft and far away, and his lips start to nibble at mine, unhurried, like a man who’s found something he means to take his time over. And there it is, rising in me low and bright and entirely unauthorized.
The exact thing I built the whole fortress against, the wanting that doesn’t stop to ask permission, the wanting I’ve sworn since I was twenty-one I was constitutionally above. A kiss for the cameras is a closed door. This one keeps opening.
This one asks a question, and the unforgivable part, the part I’ll take to my grave, is that some long-buried thing in my chest answers it before I can clap a hand over her mouth, in a voice I haven’t heard in so long I’d convinced myself she was dead.
He breaks it first. He’d want to be the one who decides when it ends.
Just a job, Blythe. It’s just a job.
I look up to find him watching me with an expression I’ve never once seen on him in eighteen years, something cracked open and caught off guard, gone again almost before I can name it, the shutter slamming down behind his eyes. The platform roars. Flashbulbs go off like applause. Mellie is weeping with professional joy.
“That,” I manage evenly, when I trust my voice, “was extremely unnecessary.”
“It was the job,” he says blandly, but his voice isn’t quite even now, and we both hear the lie in it, sitting there between us, plain as the ring on my hand.
And that’s when I catch her, just past his shoulder, beyond the velvet rope and the crush of press. A woman in a coat the red of a warning light, not photographing us, not cheering, simply watching the two of us with a small private smile that doesn’t go anywhere near her eyes.