Page 81 of Honey Cut
It’s not enough for her though, and she’s wrapping her arms around me, canting her hips, impaling herself, slowly, so slowly. The angle is wrong, and this is wrong, and every muscle in my body is trembling, straining with the effort to stop myself, stop her.
We’re not real in the dark, she told me once.
What does that make us in the morning light? Under the soft gilding of the sun? Realer than ever before?
It doesn’t matter, and maybe it never mattered because somehow this is the only thing that makes sense right now. I can’t change killing Sims, and I can’t fall out of love with Mark, but this?—
This I can have. This I can take.
She seems to feel the same way, her eyes troubled, her mouth open, and when I break and shove her on her back, thrusting in with one thick stroke, there’s as much unhappiness on her face as there is lust.
We don’t tell ourselves it’s just this one time. We don’t tell ourselves that it’s just in Belgrade, that we’ll stop when we get to Lyonesse again.
We don’t tell ourselves anything.
We fuck.
And when I come so hard my back nearly breaks with it, when she contracts around me with a cry and everything between us is wet and filthy, we don’t bother speaking at all. I gather her into my arms and pretend I don’t feel her tears dripping down my chest.
thirty
ISOLDE
We have sex once more,after I’m done crying.
Because it hurts, loving Tristan.
And I’ve always craved things that hurt.
* * *
Tristan takes a nap that afternoon,which is unlike him, but I suspect that fucking the wife of the man he loves is also unlike him. I won’t argue with any coping strategy he needs, and anyway, he looks so achingly sweet stretched out on his stomach, his lips parted, heavy limbs tangled in the sheets.
I go up to the rooftop terrace and watch the sun sink into the west, wishing I could make my hands stop shaking. I didn’t want this—I mean, Idid, but I wasn’t going to act on the wanting. Not only because this marriage is important and I need to make it work but because I’vecommittedto making it work. Because I love Mark, and I’ve reiterated my promise to be faithful over and over, andI meant it.
Because the last three weeks of being called into his office to suck him off, of skipping dinner to play chess and then ride his lap, of waking up in the dark with his hot mouth between my legs have been paradise. My cunt is always sore, I’m speckled with bruises and bites, and I’ve never lost so many chess games in a row in my life. I’ve never been happier.
But it’s hard here, so far away from my husband, alone with Tristan and his sad eyes and his soft, surprised smiles. His goodness burning like a high, clear star, fixed and strong enough to reach across any abyss of darkness.
I look down at my still-shaking hands.
I have to kill someone this week.
I don’t want to do it. I know that makes me a coward—insufficiently devout maybe because, above all, saints are supposed to be devout. But it’s been months since I’ve killed someone, since before the yacht, and the time away from it has felt like a relief. I don’t lose sleep over the people I’ve killed, not truly, because all of them were gross, horrible, or callow—buthavingkilled, being a killer…
Yes. That I lose sleep over.
Filip Drobny, though, I might take some satisfaction in killing.
* * *
My uncle needsDrobny dead because he is almost single-handedly responsible for arming the Carpathian rebels and destabilizing the presence of the Church in Carpathia. I’d like him dead because he tried to kill Mark.
I remind myself that these are all good and important things as I lie to Tristan and tell him that I want to see the city at night, that I think what we need is to get out of the penthouse. It’s the last thing I want to do, and I can tell it’s the last thing he wants to do. We’d both rather stay here and have guilty but inevitable sex.
But my best chance of killing Drobny is at his brother’s nightclub, according to the contact I met in the café the other day, and even though I’ve acquainted myself with the outside of the building during walks and runs through the city, I still haven’t seen the inside.
Which is why, once the sun has properly set and night has truly come, Tristan and I are in a nightclub, Tristan scowling at everyone who happens to look at me longer than he’d like.
