Page 59 of Salt Kiss
“I killed my best friend,” I blurt out. So that he knows. So that he can’t mistake my clear and pretty shell for something good, something nobly tragic or whatever. The shell, if it’s for anything, is to protect myself from what I have done.
“I know,” Goran says, and I guess he would. It isn’t a secret—the news stories about me saving the next prime minister of Carpathia are the first things to come up when you Google my name, all of them heavily layered with quotes and descriptions about the doomed friendship between me and Sims.
“But being here...” I let out a breath. There’s music playing from somewhere, a dark, elegant cello. “The shell feels different.”
“Because of Mr. Trevena?” Goran’s voice is gentle but direct, and I can’t help but be direct in return.
“I think I love him,” I say quietly.
There’s a pause, filled with cello notes and clinking glasses, and then Goran says, “I’m sorry.”
It probably means something that an apology is his first response.
“So you’re filling Strassburg’s shoes now?” he asks after we both take a drink.
Is that what I’m doing? Is that what Mark thinks I’m doing?
The idea of that is worse than jealousy, worse than unrequited love. I’m suddenly miserable. “Yes.”
“But you love him.”
“Yeah.”
He looks down at the bar and then over at me, like he’s trying to decide whether he should ask what he wants to ask. “What—” He pauses, tries again. “What will you do after the...” He makes a strange gesture with the fingers of his left hand, like I’m supposed to fill in the blank, but before I can ask him to elaborate, his phone rings.
He answers and then makes a face as he listens to the person on the other end. “A little fuckery happening downstairs with a Sybian a guest refuses to abandon,” he explains after he hangs up. “I better go handle it. But, Tristan, you can talk to me anytime.”
His hand lands on my shoulder, heavy and comforting. Not a fatherly gesture, necessarily, but something solid and reassuring all the same.
“Thanks, Goran,” I say. He smiles and then goes to rescue the Sybian, and I finish the rest of the bourbon and ask for another.
I think he really does mean it, about coming to him. And it’s nice to have a friend who gets it. All my friends are civilians from high school or from the same group of West Point cadets that McKenzie and Sims had also been in. And while I don’t think any of them truly judge me for what I did, it also makes casual conversation a little difficult. Hard to go to them with a problem like being in love with my boss when Sims will never have the chance to love anyone ever again, and I’m the reason why.
I drink until the room glows and it doesn’t hurt to breathe. I check my phone after every swig, every exhale, hoping—
I think I love him.
I’m sorry.
I go upstairs and get ready for bed, stumbling a little, my thoughts full of hot wax and flickering candle flames. And as I fall asleep, alone for the first time in weeks, I remind myself that I survived a war. Four times.
I can survive Mark Trevena.
Twenty
This open houseis stressing me the fuck out, but so far, everything is whirring along with perfect, purring dispatch, and everyone who isn’t paid to keep the building’s occupants safe is having a great time.
The rooms are full of members, guests, and spectators, doing everything from impact play to having full-blown orgies; the bar upstairs is crowded and congenial; and the hall is like something from a movie—packed shoulder to shoulder, lights flashing, music filling the space with soaring synths the way that hymns fill up a church.
There’s plenty of sex and kink happening in here too, but at the edges, in the booths and nooks, not on the dance floor. This kind of dancing—all sound and light and sweat—is its own kind of kink practice, just as important to some members as cuffs or paddles, and club etiquette is to leave the floor itself to dancing and dance-adjacent foreplay. Anything more involved should happen along the edges or up in the balconies.
At least Drobny never showed. One less headache tonight.
About fifteen minutes ago, Mark gave a welcome speech that was met with cheers and applause, and now he’s at the far edge of the room, caught in a chain of people who want his time and attention. He looks the part of the underworld lord tonight, in an all-black tuxedo with his collar open and the bow tie undone, customary glass of gin in his hand. Only the small earpiece he wears signals that he’s something more than a devil at his leisure.
I watch him a moment, as he smiles lazily at a young man I vaguely recognize as being famous. The celebrity is flushing at Mark’s attention, and presumably also at Mark’s night-sky eyes and the small lock of hair that’s broken free and is now hanging dashingly over his forehead.
I have to tear my eyes away over and over again, and I’m no better than this flushing celebrity because just being near the knot of his Adam’s apple or the slice of his jaw makes me fumble for my own thoughts. And I spent my morning on my knees between his planted feet as he took phone call after phone call, sucking him quietly the way he likes while he’s working, only to be hauled over his desk when the calls were done and fucked until I came all over its glass surface of his desk.
