Page 95 of Salt Kiss
“Everyone except for me,” she agrees.
It’s starting to make sense now. The reason why she and Mark barely talk, the reason why they haven’t seen each other in two years. Why Mark never spoke about her.
What he did with Strassburg and Isabella Beroul.
And me.
I sit next to her, pressing my back to the cool wall. “Mark never said anything about... I had no idea. He spoke about it like it was real.”
“We want as few people as possible to know the truth,” she explains. “It’s more effective that way.”
Betrayal is a pinprick right to the heart, slipping between membranes and muscle fibers to puncture some vital inner mechanism.
Why wasn’t I immediately one of those few people? Why would he let me believe it was real? Why didn’t he say anything when I told him things had to end between us?
Would I...would I still have ended things between us if I’d known his marriage was arranged?
And then I look at Isolde, at the hair tangled around her shoulders and at the soft creases of her lips, wet with tears, and know the question is infinitely more complicated than it would have been two weeks ago.
“Isolde,” I say slowly. “You should—you should know that he’s been with other people.”
I can’t decipher her expression when she rolls her head along the wall to look at me.
“It’s not a real marriage,” she says woodenly. “It doesn’t matter.”
“So he can just fuck whoever he wants while you wear his ring?” It’s absurd that I’m being defensive of her given my history with Mark, but still. It doesn’t feel fair.
“No, he—” She stops, lifts a hand, drops it in her lap. “He doesn’t want any perceived gap between us. No lover or affair that could be used as a wedge because it would make leveraging each other’s power and connections less effective. So he wants me to be faithful after we marry, and he’s promised to be as faithful as I am. And as far as our agreement is concerned, the wedding day is Day One. The beginning of fidelity.”
“So nothing before the ceremony counts?”
It still feels enormously unfair that Mark has been indulging himself without reserve, and here’s Isolde miserable in a pile of crumpled taffeta.
“He asked me once if I wanted him to stop playing with other people,” she says. “I told him no.”
I watch her. The defeat in her curled shoulders, in the limp nests of her hands.
“Did you want him to stop?”
She rolls her head back so that she’s staring at the ocean again. “Yes.”
“Then why didn’t you ask him to?” Mark is many things, but he’s also the most direct person I know. He wouldn’t have asked if he wasn’t ready to hear whatever answer she might have given him.
“I’m already not going to be a real wife or a real submissive, and it felt selfish asking him to stop when I wasn’t going to be giving him myself in return, at least not in the way he wanted. And I wanted to hate him! I didn’twantto want him to stop playing with other people. I didn’t want to feel anything about him at all, but...”
She stops. There are so many tears spilling now.
“He infected me,” she says after a long minute. “None of it mattered because he infected me anyway.”
Recognition comes, dizzy and certain. Because I know this, don’t I? The torment of having Mark Trevena inside your mind, your body, twisting you into someone you barely know.
I know this because Mark infected me too.
“I thought I was ready this time,” Isolde murmurs. “I thought that two years away was enough to make me strong. Impervious. But here I am, lost all over again. A week and a half, and I’m completely,stupidlylost. And he’s not evenhere.”
I close my eyes. The waves slap against the hull, pushing and rocking the yacht. I try to shove away the fresh, puncturing pain that Isolde has fallen for her future husband. Knowing the marriage is arranged should make it better, right? So why doesn’t it?
Why does it feel worse?
