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He wouldn’t mind. They had been dating for months now; they were a couple. Everywhere Kate went, people asked, “Where’s Julian?” and their heads would swivel around, scanning the room. She’d roll her eyes and say that they were not joined at the hip, but secretly she’d feel a warm little glow at the association. Julian was somebody, not like most of the men from Telluride. He came from generations of money, but when she asked him where it all started, he was vague. Investments, he said, not looking at her, bored as if she’d blundered into some obvious question he’d answered a hundred times before.
That was the problem with Julian. It was so easy to irritate him and set his attention wandering.
It hadn’t always been this way. When they first met, it seemed that Julian wanted nothing more than to make her happy. She wanted the same, or thought she did. They treated each other cordially. Never argued or took a stand on principle, never made demands, as if they were both afraid one really ugly fight would tear the whole thing apart. They built a careful stockpile of goodwill, as if saving it up against some future calamity.
It used to be fun, being with Julian. Sophisticated fun. She was always aware of her age and his, like when they stood side by side in the bathroom mirror, or when he pulled out his wallet and paid the tab in cash, always in cash, his long fingers beautifully manicured with nails like polished rock. His age was one of the things that made him interesting. His age, and his name.
After all, this was Julian Moss, who’d brought home the bronze on what turned out to be a fractured tibia, only five-hundredths of a second out of the lead. Julian Moss, whose calf swelled so badly afterward that he wasn’t able to put on a boot and had to sit out the rest of the Games from the broadcast booth, the start of a new career.
Julian was wonderful. Everybody thought so. He’d put his fingers to his temple and lean in confidentially, as if the conversation you were having was the most important one he’d had in years. He gave you a full-on spotlight of attention, dark brows furrowed, his eyes moving slowly over your face as if memorizing it as part of some crucial inventory.
In return, he expected to be listened to. Early on he had told her, with that slow, half-pleading smile of his, “I like my own way, you know, Katie.”
Well, that was all right. She always tried to give in, agreeing automatically and without complaint. And for a while that seemed to work.
Sweet little Katie, he called her. That’s what she tried to be.
But lately he seemed to feel they had enough goodwill to last them. He began to spend it on cheap shots, unguarded glances, eye rolls that stopped just shy of full circle so that she could never be sure whether he meant them in anger or loving impatience. His lips had taken on a permanent sneer of amusement—or disdain, it was hard to tell. He said cryptic things that he refused to explain, as if it didn’t matter what Kate read into them, only what he meant to himself. His moves in the bedroom were less playful, and he seemed constantly distracted, like Kate was in the way. Yet he used to be a considerate lover. Even the first time, hushed and hurried in a frigid stairwell, he had taken the time to make her come. He was experienced, patient, dominant. He’d bought her lingerie and sex toys, said it was all a game he wanted to play with her, that some women took it too seriously but he was glad to see that Kate was not one of them.
Now nothing she did was right. Last night was awful. Awful! The things he wanted her to do...
Tears of self-pity sprang to her eyes. She wiped them away with the heel of her hand.
It could be nothing. Could even be the start of something good. Maybe this was a last line of defense in what Kate’s mother called “terminal bachelorhood.” Maybe Julian just needed a little push, something from Kate to let him know that she would agree to whatever he had in mind. She told him, offhandedly, in the course of conversation, that she loved to travel, though she was perfectly content here in Telluride. She thought marriage was great but was also up for cohabitation. She didn’t mind his age. She liked children, though she didn’t think her life would be incomplete without them. Loved sex but was happy to give an unrequited blow job. She laughed at his jokes; she sang his praises.
Really, thinking about it, she was perfect for Julian Moss. Why, then, did she get the feeling he was slipping away?
As she got to the back of the drawer and the last handful of clothing, she stopped, staring at what she’d found.
She stood that way for several seconds, her pulse pounding in her throat. Then stiffly, methodically, she began to put his clothes back into the drawer, exactly as she’d found them. She let herself out of the room and closed the door behind her.
* * *
The lights kept flickering on and off.
Celia lifted her face and let the hot water stream down her neck, rinsing away the soap and shampoo. She screwed her eyes tight shut. She didn’t want to think about what new problem might have arisen with the wiring in the past thirty minutes, what new task she’d have to lay on Rory and Eric. She laid her hands against the walls as if the Blackbird might be soothed and stop its twitching.
The lights flickered again, and the room fell into darkness.
“Really?” she said.
She’d been looking forward to a few extra minutes to work out the strain in her shoulders and legs, the knotted bruise-like ache in her thumb that flared at the end of any long day spent with a paintbrush in her hand. But the old claw-foot tub was oddly shaped, treacherous even with the lights on, and the steam felt dense and pressurized in a darkness as complete as this.
She turned the faucets and pushed back the shower curtain. Water streamed with a metallic patter around her feet as she reached blindly for a towel.
The lights came back. Celia flinched in surprise and nearly fell, grabbing at the towel rack to steady herself.
Eric had come into the bathroom. He was leaning against the chipped tile counter, one hand in his pocket and the other on the light switch.
“Jesus,” she said. “You scared me.”
“Sorry.”
She stepped over the edge of the tub, wrapped the towel around her body and tucked it under her arm. Eric took a second towel from the rack and started to dry her hair, gathering it in one hand to squeeze the water to the tip. His face in the mirror was thin and haggard, a specter moving through patches of fog. Over his fingers, the four tattooed letters he’d gotten years before:
, now sideways and reversed by the mirror.
.
A moment later his reflection was swallowed completely by the steam.
She turned to face him.
“Tell me what’s wrong,” she said.
His eyes shifted to meet hers—wide, beautiful black eyes, the whites as pure and smooth as milk. He opened his mouth and closed it again, deciding what to say. There were harsh lines like cuts running down between his eyebrows.
“Eric—”
“Tell me something. I want you to tell me something and be honest.”
She nodded. The steam burned at the back of her throat.
“I want to know if you’re happy here,” he said. “With...with all of this.”
“Of course I am. This is what I always wanted.”
“What you always wanted. I thought you promised me an honest answer.”
“Maybe it’s a little more—”
“A lot more. What I’m asking is whether you’re happy.”
“I am.”
The steam had gathered along his eyebrows and beaded at the tips of his lashes. He tilted his head.
“I can’t tell,” he said. “I just never can tell whether you’re telling me the truth.”
“Do you want that to be a lie?”
“Maybe.”
“It isn’t.”
“Whatever you say.” He plucked a strand of wet hair from her face. “I notice you don’t wonder why I’m asking. Don’t you want to know whether I’m happy?”
A suffocating weight pushed at her chest. She wished they could go outside, where the air was thin and light.
“I...I thought...”
Eric ducked his head to get closer to hers.
“You thought what? That if you’re happy, everyone else is, too?”
“No, no—”
“Yes, yes. I think it hurts your tender little heart to imagine anything else. Easier not to look too close. That’s what I think.”
“That’s not fair.”
“No. Maybe not.” He laid the towel aside and reached for her hand. His thumb traced a small nervous pattern on the inside of her wrist. “But you have to see that this place is no good for us. I think we should leave. Just leave, right now. Tonight.”
A lump of panic rose in her chest.
“What are you talking about?”
“I just think, all of this, it’s too much.”
“You’re tired,” she said. “We’re all tired. We knew it would be this way at first. Probably jet-lagged, too...”
She drew her hand away, fussed over an open drawer and found a bottle of sleeping pills. She shook out two tablets. But Eric curled her fingers with his palm and held them closed.
“I don’t need another pill,” he said. His words, which had started uncertainly, tumbled out. “I need you. I need it to be just you and me. We can go someplace warm, someplace with palm trees and sand, where we can listen to the ocean every day, lay under the stars every night. We can get one of those big hammocks, baby, we can live someplace new, and you wouldn’t have to work so hard, and there wouldn’t be so much goddamn snow...”
His voice raced on, a current of words sweeping him far away from her. She looked at him, light-headed, as if some crucial underpinning had come loose; they could be sliding right now, down the Ridge as so many others had done before. She gripped the edge of the sink.
“I like the snow,” she said.
He drew back as if she’d struck him.
A slow anger bloomed in her chest. How like Eric to throw down something this impulsive and expect everyone else to follow.
“You want us to leave here after all this work?” she said. “Leave the hotel half-finished. Just walk away, with no reason and no explanation—”
“Oh, I’ve got my reasons.”
“No,” she said.
He dropped her hand. The sleeping pills clattered to the floor. He backed away a step.
“You won’t come,” he said.
“How can you even ask? This is our home. This is what we’ve always talked about. You and me and Rory. How can you think of leaving him behind?”
“Easily.”
“Look, I don’t know what’s going on between you two—”
“Because you don’t want to know.”
“Because I don’t need to know. It’s not my business. If you and Rory had a fight, go to him and work it out, because I sure as hell am not going to leave in the middle of the night and go off to sip mai tais on the beach with you.”
“I see,” he said. “You choose him over me.”
Celia sighed. She reached up to stroke the hard line of his jaw, as though it might soften if she were patient enough to smooth it away.
“I choose us,” she said. “The Blackbird. Like it always has been.”
He shook her off, his mouth set in an unhappy line. His gaze traveled down her body, and he reached for the towel she had tucked closed against her chest.
She caught it first. Her fist curled across the knot of terrycloth.
“Let’s rest tonight,” she said.
He laughed bitterly, peeling off his shirt as he turned to start the shower.
“And so it begins,” he said.
* * *
Celia changed her clothes, pulled her damp hair over her shoulder and opened the door. Julian was standing just outside the bedroom door, in the dim hallway. His shoulders blocked the light from the staircase and cast his face in shadow, but even so she could see the smile creep across his lips as he bent toward her.
“Trouble in paradise?” he said.
His voice was low and rich with amusement, as though they were sharing an inside joke at the back of a crowded room. He propped his hand on the wall behind her head. She couldn’t look him in the eye without stepping aside or craning her neck; either choice felt like a concession, so she willed herself not to move, not to lift her face to him. She stared past the shadowy bump of his collarbone at the wall sconce near the end of the hallway.
“Let me by, Julian.”
He leaned in closer, lowered his head to speak from just above her ear. His breath was warm on her temple.
“What are you going to do when they leave you—tell me that. Do you even know?”
A shiver crawled up her neck. Don’t speak. He doesn’t know us; he doesn’t know what we’re about. But the question in her mind bubbled through the tarry silence and burst from her lips before she could stop it.
“Why do you hate me, Julian?”
For a moment she imagined a flash of surprise in his expression.
“I’ve been nice to you,” she said.
The surprise, if it had been there, was gone. His face hardened. He pushed back from the wall and turned away.
“You haven’t been,” he said. “You haven’t been nice at all.”
Two Days Earlier (#ulink_462134b5-47c0-5d35-965d-a1dc7e417103)
“CLOSE YOUR EYES.”
