Page 36 of Honey Cut
“Should we play then?” he finally asks.
“Yes.”
“Should we have some stakes?” A kind of mischief is folding around his well-shaped lips. “A prize, maybe? For the winner?”
I have tried and tried to stamp out my competitive nature—it’s hardly a godly thing,vanagloria et superbiabeing some of the worst sins—but whether it’s grades or sparring or vying with my fellow saints to see who can work the quickest, the hardest, the most viciously, I cannot seem to stop it. Perhaps it’s why I’ve craved corporal penance my whole life—it’s both a battle with my own flesh and fully a surrender to God. The fight and the defeat all in the same moment.
I try not to think of my submission to Mark in the same way.
“Yes,” I say, trying not to sound too eager. I thought of proposing such a thing when I first arranged to have this board made as his wedding gift, thought even of what I’d ask for as my trophy. “Perhaps the winner gets to ask for anything they like.”
Mark thinks for a moment, a finger tapping on the rim of his glass. “Anything that can be given in this suite,” he negotiates, and I nod my agreement. Because, yes, that would fit my needs perfectly.
“Wonderful,” he says, taking a drink and then considering the board once again. “Would you like a drink yourself? There is chilled champagne along the bar.”
Deciding it can’t be a bad idea to take the edge off the restlessness in my belly, I get the champagne and one of the waiting flutes, and after opening the bottle with a fearless twist, I return with the bucket, setting it on the floor next to my feet.
“White goes first,” Mark says after I take a sip and set the flute next to the board. “Fitting, as you’re the bride.”
There is very little point in trying anything too elaborate at this stage in the game. I’m not trying to impress him, I’m trying to win. I opt for a simple opening with a pawn moving forward two spaces, and then after Mark responds with a pawn of his own, I move my king’s knight forward. He narrows his eyes, moving his queen’s knight forward, and when I move my king’s bishop, he sits back and gives a little pout.
“The Italian Game.” He sounds disappointed. “Fine.”
I just smile at him. It’s a beginner’s opening, but there’s a reason it’s been around for five hundred years, and there’s a reason I’m doing it now. I want to coax him into battle, into the center.
“Your move,” I remind him, and he takes a drink, his lips still curved into a lush moue. On his rugged face, it’s incredibly striking, a fusion of those brutal, classically masculine features and then a pout that Michelangelo himself could have painted.
Without leaning forward, he presses a piece to the next square with the backs of his fingers. He’s already written me off as a novice. Excellent.
I respond a little innocuously, but still directly, into the center.
“What do you want out of this marriage, Isolde?” he asks after he nudges another piece forward without really looking at what I’d done with my own.
“To help my family and the bank.” I move another piece, choosing to keep my bishop covered for now. I’m fond of bishops. Probably a Catholic thing.
Mark studies me over the rim of his glass. “That’s why you agreed to the marriage when it was first posed to you by your father, but it’s been four years since then. Why are you doing it now? What are you hoping for?”
I guessed that he would ask me something like this. And I can’t tell him the truth—that it wasn’t my father who’d convinced me to agree but, instead, my uncle. That I needed every atom of information that passed intentionally, casually, or illicitly inside Lyonesse’s glass walls.
I can’t tell him that I want to begood, devout, sanctified, that I want to carve out a bloody spot in heaven next to King David and Paul the apostle and every other holy person who knew the bitter taste of murder. That I want to feel like I’ve finally,finallyearned the love of my god.
But lies are flimsy things. Just like the lingerie I chose for tonight, just like my answer about being shared, this has to be at least partly the truth, and it is very dangerous to give Mark the truth. I might as well hand him that honeysuckle knife and hope he doesn’t slice me to death with it.
“I don’t want to be lonely,” I say. “I don’t want to be alone anymore.”
I want to say it with steadiness, like my loneliness is a neutral thing, like I’m strong enough inside that it doesn’t matter that no one really knows me. Not my best friend, not my uncle, not even the earnest hero I spent three weeks at sea with. No one knows all the parts of me, all my sins, all my inchoate terrors and joys.
Sometimes I think even God himself doesn’t know me.
Mark is studying me, his unmoving hand on a knight, a very faint line between his brows. I think I’ve surprised him, although with Mark, it’s hard to be sure.
“I’m not asking for anything,” I promise when he doesn’t respond. “I don’t mean that I expect us to be close or intimate. I don’t know if you want that from me. But I hope to be less lonely, I guess. Or at the very least, lessalone.”
He lifts his knight, and there’s movement around his mouth, at the corner of his jaw.
“Why,” he says after a minute, his voice layered with some kind of tightness, maybe irritation, “would you think I wouldn’t want that from you?”
I’m so astonished by the question that I can’t even think of any response other than raw, historical fact. “Mark, you broke my hymen on top of my father’s desk while spinning me the filthiest, most intoxicating lies I’ve ever heard. You broke me open, and I loved it, and I could haveloved youfor it, and I thought it was the beginning of something real between us, something true, because it was truer than anything I’d ever known aside from God. Except you left, you stopped talking to me—I only saw you once after that, on the night of my collaring ceremony, and even then you couldn’t even look at me. And when it was time for the wedding, you didn’t even come get me yourself, you had your employee do it, like I was a task, an errand, an errand that you deflowered and then dropped. When you promised—you promised—that you would hold nothing back until it was written on my skin and scratched onto my bones how much you wanted me.”
