Page 49 of Salt Kiss
“Hard to forget,” I say dryly, and he laughs as he squeezes the other half of the lemon.
“Just wanted to make sure. Now, what about you, Tristan Thomas? How is it that you’ve made it to twenty-nine without some monster like myself claiming you for his own?”
I watch as minced garlic, olive oil, and grated pecorino are whisked together with the lemon juice and then tossed with the kale ribbons. “I—it wasn’t on purpose,” I mumble, looking down at my hands. “I wanted to. But it’s like I said before, I get attached.”
I’m embarrassed to say it again, in the context of what we’ve shared today, because I don’t want him to think I will get attached to him.
And yet I almost do want him to think that because I alreadyamattached.
Stop. Don’t imagine he’ll feel the same way about you.
The salad is set aside and the steaks are put on the pan to sear.
“I still don’t understand how this is an impediment to fucking,” says Mark, and that’s the thing, that’s what’s so hard to convey about it.
I remember being interviewed once after the ceremony for my Distinguished Service Cross—the reporter had been more interested in me as an eligible army bachelor than in McKenzie’s death or even in what I’d actually done to merit the award. The reporter had asked why I was still single, and I had no way to answer that wasn’t honest because I’d never been good at lying. I told him that I was ready to fall in love at a moment’s notice, and what he wrote after quoting my stupid little answer was that I was aromantic at heart. Something that was and is true, and yet is such an easy phrase to bat around, like it doesn’t come anchored to an anvil of hammered infatuation.
“I guess it was more that I craved something from a connection that I couldn’t seem to find. Not love or anything like that,” I say quickly, a total lie, but I don’t want Mark second-guessing taking me to bed. “But justsomething. Respect or a shared intensity. I needed to know that we were”—the words feel colorless and clumsy in my mouth—“together in something. Wanting it as much as the other. I didn’t think I would like to share a bed with someone and find out that they’d only said yes because they were bored or I was an easy option or because they felt bad for me. I don’t like being alone in a feeling. I want to share it.”
I shut my mouth, abruptly feeling like a jackass. But Mark’s face after he puts the steaks in the oven and turns to study me doesn’t seem like he thinks I’m a jackass. He looks thoughtful.
“I would say that the army did a number on you, but maybe it turned out that the army was ready to place all of that exactly where they wanted it—directed at itself. It was happy to be your lover, and dare I say—”
But he doesn’t dare say, it turns out.
He presses his lips together. Shakes his head. “Never mind. But I’m honored it was me.”
“I’m the honored one.”
It’s too honest, maybe, my voice too rough, speaking less of honor and more of that blood-simmeringrightnessas Mark held me down on the carpet, left welts and bites and everything else on my skin.
His eyes change at my words, going bluer. There’s something else mixing with the fond lust in his expression now. Something rigid and haunted.
I think it’s grief.
“The steaks should be done,” he says, and indeed, within ten minutes, we are eating the best steak dinner I’ve ever had in my life.
We dine in the conservatory as the long spring twilight darkens around us, a light rain still pattering on the glass ceiling. The valley is beautiful in the wet twilight, but it’s the shirtless man next to me who steals all of my attention. His long fingers on the fork, the flex of his jaw as he chews.
“This is amazing,” I say, holding up a potato chunk like it’ll explain something to me. “How did you get so good at cooking? Surely not in the army or the CIA?”
He cuts a piece of steak and then nudges it critically with the tip of his knife. “Itwasin the CIA, actually. A long assignment in Vienna. My SAC partner and I were posing as businessmen with ties to mercenary groups—positioning ourselves to be courted by what was then the nascent rebellion against the new Carpathian government—or perhaps I should say, a rebellion hoping to push the government into a more extreme stance. People who wanted to go even further than Melwas Kocur but still idolized him.”
Melwas Kocur had been the leader of the Carpathian separatist movement, and the first president of the new country...althoughpresidentimplied he’d been a more benevolent ruler than he was. He hadn’t been too interested in the democratic process, to put it mildly, and had instead been more interested in murdering dissidents, hoarding resources for himself and his top supporters, and agitating to start another war. And then an old video from the first war had emerged of him sending children out to die on a burning boat in a lake—a ploy to divide the American soldiers’ attention, which had worked at the time. The soldiers sacrificed a village to save the children, and it had been a severe blow to both morale and strategy. But years later, it had finally become Melwas’s undoing. He’d been exposed, deposed, and imprisoned. It had been hoped his legacy would end there, but the radicals who had continued to fight and raid in his name grew emboldened, their small conflicts flaring into a cohesive resistance against their own government that no one could douse the flames of no matter how hard they tried.
“Anyway, they wanted what all groups like that want,” Mark goes on, “money and weapons and friends in high places, and so it took some time to establish ourselves as those people. You’ve got to start slow, you see, if you really want to manipulate people. It’s no good just to appear like a mirage and expect things to go the way you want—you have to be subtle. Let them think all their ideas and feelings are their own, slowly twist things up so that they unwind in precisely the right way. And then as everything is falling apart, your hand is nowhere to be seen.”
He takes a long drink of scotch, sets the glass down as his throat moves. “All that to say, the first few months of the assignment were hardly movie material. It was mostly being seen, making introductions, planting stories about my wealth and my connections, and my mission partner and I didn’t overplay our hands. We went slowly, creating a depth to the identities, a history to the stories, something you can only do with time. And so we had a fair amount of free hours in those days. It was either learn to paint watercolors or cook. I hate cleaning paintbrushes. So I chose cooking.”
“Did you already like doing it? Cooking?”
“I like good food, but I went straight from making ramen in my college dorm room to eating cafeteria food at basic training. I never learned how to cook much beyond spaghetti.” His mouth twitches. “I think I went through about fifty pounds of butter in those early days, just trying to figure out stuff that middle schoolers learn how to bake in school. I was truly bad at it.”
I try to imagine Mark fussing with measuring spoons and internet recipes. The legendary spy in his expensive suits and perfect hair looking down at a tray of ruined chocolate chip cookies in dismay. “It’s hard to imagine you bad at anything,” I say, and it comes out sounding besotted. I want to punch myself in the mouth.
“I could say the same about you, Mr. Prom King and Distinguished Service Cross,” says Mark mildly.
“Oh, that’s—” I don’t know what I want to say. Just that all of my achievements are socontextual, so caveated. Sure, I was prom king, but that’s because the other guys were dicks that year. Sure, I have that cross tucked under a roll of socks in its new drawer at Lyonesse, but it might as well be a plastic toy sheriff ’s badge for all the good it does McKenzie and her family. “I’m bad at lots of stuff.”
