Page 86 of Salt Kiss
Aaron Sims.
Dinner isa delicate affair of things like crustacean foam and olive oil powder, and when we finish dessert—light, cloud-like farófias with tangerines—I finally accept that I’ve barely tasted any of it.
My mind is on Sims, just as it has been since Mark’s call this morning, my memories sawing against each other in the same jagged grooves for hours and hours.
His death, and the usual memories of his blood, hot and wet against my fingers.
His burial.
I didn’t mean to go to the service—it wasn’t right for me to go—and yet I’d found myself outside that Pennsylvania cemetery anyway, white-knuckling a bottle of bourbon I planned to leave at his grave once everyone had cleared off.
Andeveryonehad been a small group. There was no uniformed detail for Aaron Sims, Traitor, after all. No flag, no “Taps”. Just a handful of family and friends staring down at the rectangular hole in the dirt that I had no small part in making.
Had both his sisters been there? Chloe had been there, but had Cara been?
No, Cara wouldn’t have gone. No one had heard from Cara in years; last Sims had known, she’d gotten herself tangled up with some Mob-adjacent boyfriend and skipped town. It had made him sick with worry. No, it must have only been Chloe.
Sims had wanted me to date Chloe when we were at West Point. He was the kind of person who wanted everyone in his life connected, and he was especially determined to see his sisters married to his friends. Whether he thought that would make his sisters safer or make it so his friends couldn’t drift away from him, I never figured out. Either way, I hadn’t dated Chloe, had only met her a few times. Last I heard, she was a kindergarten teacher in Erie.
Imagining quiet, unassuming Chloe standing at the glass gates of Lyonesse is impossible. God, what she must think of me, working at a kink club...
And then I want to stab myself in the eyeball with my farófias spoon because of course she doesn’t give a shit where I work now. She’s got bigger things on her mind when it comes to me. Like that I killed her brother.
What could she want?
She’d be right to scream at me, hit me, cut me into pieces and drive those pieces to the National Aquarium in Baltimore to feed the aquarium sharks. If this were biblical times, she’d consider herself within her rights to kill me.I’dconsider her within her rights.
I’m very close as it is, because even though Mark was right when he told me I’d done the necessary thing, it still doesn’t make it themoralthing. It doesn’t erase the hole in the world that used to be filled by Aaron Sims.
I scrape my hands over my face, shame and foreboding filling me, a heavier dinner than actual food could ever be, and look up to see that Isolde’s no longer at the table but at the prow one deck below.
She’s wearing a white jumpsuit tonight, rolled up at the sleeves, cuffed above her ankles, fitted so well to her body that I can see the slope of her waist and the wings of her shoulder blades. Dressy sandals have been abandoned in favor of bare feet; the relentless breeze is tugging her hair from its habitual braid, but she doesn’t reach up to brush it away from her face.
There’s this way she stands when she thinks no one is watching her, so different from her usual erect posture. Shoulders pulled in, head bowed. Like something injured trying to protect itself.
A shell of glass.
Goran had said it about me, but I see it in her, around her. Snow White in a glass coffin, a priceless jewel in a vitrine.
A heart behind walls.
Her awareness, though, that’s still there. Like me, like Mark, there is no sneaking up on her. By the time I make it to the railing next to her, her shoulders have straightened and her head has lifted and she’s back to looking like a ballerina waiting in the wings.
A soft mist sprays up from the sea. I can taste it when I breathe.
“Do you regret killing them?” Isolde asks after several minutes of us standing there together, and I know it’s not the subtle pitching of the deck that has me off-balance.
How could she know I was thinking of war, of death, of Sims—
“The people who attacked Lyonesse, I mean,” she clarifies when I don’t answer right away. “The ones trying to kill Mark.”
“Oh,” I say, thrown for a moment. “No. At least I don’t think so. Wait, are you withdrawing your reassuring words about Cain and Abel from the other day?”
I know I manage some kind of smile, but she isn’t looking at me to see it. She wraps her hands around the railing and stares at the water.
“No,” she says. “Not withdrawing. Just...it’s been on my mind. Killing.”
Oh no.“Isolde, Lyonesse is safer than ever, and if you’re worried about—”
