Page 37 of Honey Cut
I’m not even trying to control my voice now, my face, the burning in my eyes. Let him see; it’ll sell the story even more.
It helps that the story is the complete and utter truth; he broke me into shards that day. I’m merely omitting the rest of the tale, where I reforged the pieces and hammered them into the Isolde I am today.
I take a drink to steady myself and realize he’s moved his knight and it’s my turn to play. I’m very close to puncturing his defenses now, close to the hinge where the game goes from a beginner’s exercise to an aggressive drive right to his king. But I’ll castle first.
Mark watches me, having already castled, and his long fingers pluck up his other knight, setting it down next to my bishop. For a moment, the only sound is of the moving piece against the quartz board and the steady fizzing of the champagne.
“You are dangerous,” he finally says. “After that night, I was ready to throw away years of plans, of meticulously building my little kingdom, just to have you underneath me. You say that you feel lonely; I had been alone for so long by then that I had forgotten whatnot lonelyeven felt like. I had forgotten that there was any other way to be. And then here is this girl ingoddamn college, too young, too rich, so ready to hate me, and she was practically begging for the one thing I’ve always wanted and never had. A girl so willing to be everything for everyone else that she hadn’t even realized that she could take the entire world for herself if she wanted.”
Our eyes meet.
“I tasted that girl’s cunt,” he goes on, “and I made it come, and then I listened to her breathe in her sleep, and I thought,This could be it. I thought,You don’t have to use her. You don’t have to do anything other than keep this knife-loving princess for your own and spend the rest of your life doing every depraved thing you can think of to her until that sadness leaves her eyes for good.”
My breath has stalled somewhere in my throat, and my hand is frozen over the board. I can’t tear my eyes away from his face, from the emotion tightening his jaw and roiling in his stare.
And I have questions. So many questions. How could he have been lonely if there was a husband before me? How long ago had that marriage been?
Had he really held me that night and thought of spending the rest of his life making my sadness go away?
“And there are not many things I’m scared of, Isolde, but I was scared of you that night. I was scared of what you could make me into. A man who forgets his past and his future. A man willing to set aside an entire world just to play with you.”
His voice is so rich, so layered with appetite. I don’t doubt that he means every syllable. That he would have forsaken every obligation and goal and instead devoted his life to tearing me apart. I am dizzy listening to him now, and my skin is buzzing and my heart is skipping.
We could be sparring, that’s how alive my body feels.
I force myself to move my next piece as he continues.
“It frightened me. I somehow ripped myself away from you, got out of bed. I walked the length of your room for hours, watching you sleep, hoping for something to change inside myself. For you to diminish into something lesser, a normal little heiress with perfect grades and a shitty father. But you didn’t, you couldn’t, because even though they have meant for you to be made of gold, you are made of shadows and glass instead, and I am too. I hadn’t ever met someone else so much like me—and I still haven’t—and I knew if I didn’t find a way to sever my attachment to you then, I would lose…”
A ragged sigh, frustrated. “How can I describe what I’d lose, Isolde? My focus, my dedication to Lyonesse. My neutrality. My invulnerability—my God, my invulnerability. It terrifies me to this day, even now, to think that the price of having you might be baring my throat to a callous world.”
I duck my head. I almost can’t even listen to him, to this, to this litany that is so much more intimate and powerful than the vows he pronounced before God earlier today. To this revelation that feels like being blisteringly down-to-the-entrails seen.
“So, yes, I chose to leave you, to redraw the curtain between us. The alternative was annihilation. I know that sounds hyperbolic. Believe me when I say it wasn’t. I have been lonely but alive. Had I stayed past dawn, I eventually would have been destroyed.”
Silence reigns. There is almost a ringing in my ears.
All this time, I thought Mark could barely tolerate me, that his physical desire for me was the same desire he’d feel for any available body.
“Do you still feel that way?” I ask, not daring to look at him. It makes me a fool, and a weak one, but I can’t endure his face along with his voice, this confession. I don’t know what it will do to me.
“That you will destroy me? Yes.”
It’s like the world has pitched sideways; my heart is somewhere wrong in my chest, and my stomach is in my throat.
“Oh.”
“I hope it will take longer now,” he says. “I hope that Lyonesse’s work will outlive my destruction. We shall see.”
I look up just as his eyes drop to the board—and despite everything, a swift kick of triumph thumps between my stomach and my ribs as Mark’s eyebrows push together.
“Fuck,” he mutters, realizing that I’ve really been playing chess this entire time.
I take a drink as he considers the pieces, and for the next three moves, we don’t speak, him assessing the entire game anew and me watching strategies and possibilities play through his mind with each aborted lift of his fingers, every narrowing of his eyes.
It’s just as well because I don’t know what to say to his explanation. It isn’t anything like a declaration of love; there is nothing of goodness or joy in it. And yet I feel it humming through my bones like a church organ. Like a prayer that I could etch into stone.
It is somehow more honest for its darkness, more uncorruptible for its possession. The near-violence of it is as sweet as incense to me.
