Page 102 of Honey Cut
He reaches me, and of course there are no torches or cloak or ocean. It’s just Tristan with his tousle-ready but neatly cut hair, his professional black suit. It’s just us in the middle of DC, in the garden of a man who hurts people for fun.
Except it’s not evenus, not in a way that feels real, because Tristan and I are not the same. He is good and sweet, and his soul is clean of secrets; his intentions are available for anyone to read. I have lied to him and to Mark and to everyone aside from my uncle, and I am so full of secrets that I’m certain if you speared me through the heart, more secrets would come than blood.
I am not good.
I am not sweet.
Everything that everyone thinks of me is a lie. And if I kill Mark, I will kill the person who’s possibly seen me the clearest. If I kill Mark, I will have to leave Tristan behind too.
There can be no question of implicating him—and anyway, once Tristan learned that I’d been the one to kill Mark…
I shudder to think of his disgust then, his hatred. I don’t know if I could bear it.
No, it would be better for me to end things and to leave and never see him again.
The loneliness comes thicker than fog, deeper than cold, and Tristan must see it on my face, even in the dark, because he kneels in front of me and takes my hands in his. They’re so warm and big. A prom king’s hands, a hero’s hands. How can he stand to be so kind and so earnest? How did he get so lucky that beinggoodwas as easy as doing what he was told to do?
“Isolde?” he murmurs, looking up into my face. There’s barely anything to see with this little light and the fog, but my eyes have grown used to the dark, and I can make out the shine of his eyes and the suggestions of his features. A strong nose, a carved jaw. Eyelashes like dark wings. “Mark sent me to look for you. He was expecting you in the hall. Honey, what’s wrong?”
I can’t tell him. I can’t tell him anything, and I am so fucking tired of living like this, of being…this.
“Is it Mark?” Tristan asks. “Is he still mostly ignoring you too? I know how it feels—it’s been awful since Belgrade. But I think he’ll forgive us. I see him looking at you and I know he misses you. How things were before.”
I want so badly to be an Isolde whose biggest problem is loving two people.
I start crying again, hating myself for my weakness, my shallowness. Only a coward would ask someone to comfort them now, only a traitor would think their tears were worth drying. I’m like Judas trying to give back the thirty pieces of silver.
“No,” I say and push Tristan’s hands away as they try to wipe away my tears. “I’m fine. It’s fine.”
“You’re not fine,” Tristan says gently. “You’re freezing in the dark, alone and crying and missing a night in the hall, which you never do.”
“I’m just tired,” I say. Which is true in its own way. I’m exhausted down to the marrow of my bones. “Can you tell Mark that I’m not feeling well? I’ll be there tomorrow.”
Somehow. Somehow I’ll manage to be around him tomorrow.
“I’m not leaving you right now,” murmurs Tristan, and he pushes my hands away to wipe at my tears. I don’t stop him this time because his hands are so kind and so warm and I can almost pretend that I deserve the comfort, that I matter to someone no matter what I’ve done or what I’m planning on doing.
“Sometimes I wish I’d never been born,” I say, and I don’t know where it comes from, only that it’s true. “Sometimes I wish I’d died when my mother died. Or that I could have died instead of her, if God needed to take someone.”
“Shh, you don’t mean that,” Tristan says urgently. “You can’t mean that.”
I stare at him through my tears, at the shadowed suggestion of him. “I do,” I say. “The things I have done—the least of the things I have done—even before she died, I knew I was bad. That I wasn’t good like the priests said to be. And everything I’ve become since she died—I just wanted to be good, Tristan, I promise. I thought this was how. That if I couldn’t be the kind of good like you are, I could at least do the bad things that needed doingforgood. I thought that if I laid my desire to be good on an altar and burned itforGod, that would be atonement enough, but I?—”
I’m crying too hard to finish, and I know he doesn’t understand what I’m talking about, that he thinks the worst of my sins is adultery. And what does it matter? It’s very possible that he will know the worst things I’m capable of in the very near future.
“Please,” Tristan says, “please look at me.”
I do my best as he cradles my face. His thumbs rub along my cheeks.
“You are incredible and brave and intelligent?—”
“Stop,” I say quickly. “Don’t?—”
“Youare, and I won’t stop because I think you need to hear it.”
“I can’t bear to hear it,” I say desperately. “It’s hard enough loving you when you are so noble, but I can’t have you deluded into thinking the same about me.”
His thumbs stop rubbing. I think he doesn’t breathe for a moment. “You love me?”
