Page 111 of Honey Cut
I’m going straight to the room Mark and I have claimed, where Mark will meet me later, along with Tristan. It’ll be the first time I’ve seen Mark since last night, and I’m terrified. I’ve spent all day in the belly of a whale of my own making.
This was always the plan,Isolde.
Who are we to resist our own time to take up the knife?
I manage a weak smile for Tristan. He called to tell me what had happened last night—coming to visit me in the apartment alone seemed ill-advised—and I know he wishes he were here to hold me and tell me everything is going to be okay.
I wish that too.
“Isolde,” he says softly, seeing my thin attempt at happiness, and I just shake my head.
“I’m okay,” I tell him.
I’m not, but I can’t tell him the reason why. I can’t tell my husband’s bodyguard that I am supposed to kill him.
“He’ll forgive us,” Tristan reassures me, his expression earnest. “He might make us work for it, but he’ll forgive us, Isolde.”
His faith is sweet and touching. And ultimately pointless. Even if Mark forgives me, my uncle still wants him dead.Godwants him dead.
And I’m supposed to be the one to do it.
Unless…
“I’ll see you tonight in our room,” Tristan says. “You look beautiful already.”
“Thank you,” I whisper, and watch as the call ends on the screen. I pick up a tube of lipstick, but I don’t do anything with it. Instead, I think.
If I could deliver anything my uncle wanted from Lyonesse’s vaults, would that buy me time? Time to wait and see what Mark is planning? Time, even, to dissuade Mark from doing whatever it is that he’s planning to do to the Church?
I know my uncle, and I know he’s a reasonable man, a man who prizes strategy above all. If I can prove that there’s more strategic value in keeping Mark alive…
Yes. Yes, this is it.
I feel like I can breathe for the first time since I stood next to the reflecting pool watching the elm leaves skate across the water.
This fixes everything.
I’ll get the watch, get something of value to show to my uncle, and then he’ll realize I’m right.
I won’t have to kill my husband after all.
* * *
The playrooms look incredible.I see a haunted house, Pygmalion petting his living statue, a fake doctor’s office complete with slutty nurses, a gender-bent Dracula with a bevy of brides, and what appears to be a cat café with naked human cats.
I think of how I’d stepped into this place three years ago, of how unnerved I’d felt seeing glimpses of sex and punishment through the windows of the playrooms. Of how staggering it was to see sex not as I’d always thought of it—either sinful or stoppered inside a bottle of Church-sanctioned marriage—but as chaotic and playful and often queer, and how it had sung out answers to questions I hadn’t known to ask myself.
Maybe it’s like that for other people too, that they sometimes find the answers before they ask the questions. Or maybe I wouldn’t have known to listen if I weren’t already asking myself these things, just deep, deep down where even my own thoughts couldn’t listen.
Our room is the largest and at the very end of the hall. Dinah told me this is the first year Mark’s ever had a room of his own, that usually he sits in the hall overlooking the mayhem like Hades in the underworld. But she convinced him to take a room because she thought his kinksters would enjoy a chance to get close to the two of us. Maybe even receive little punishments or rewards from us, along with a moment of Mark’s attention.
Mark had agreed but had left the planning of the costumes and the themes to Sedge, who then told me to do it because he had enough on his plate, firstly, and also because he didn’t feel comfortable selecting a costume for someone he barely knew.
I’d been completely lost—growing up, I’d been a part of fundraisers and galas and dinner parties so boring they made me want to pull out my own eyelashes, but I had no idea what to expect for something likethis. And I understood Sedge’s reluctance to help because the idea of choosing a costume for Mark was incredibly stressful. What if he hated it? What if he found it embarrassing? I could no more imagine Mark donning a vampire’s cape or a fake doctor’s coat than I could imagine him willingly getting his face painted at a theme park.
Finally, the deadline to order the costumes had arrived, and I’d had no choice but to commit to a theme. I’d mentally flailed for a few hours and finally settled on a very literal interpretation of the Samhain party. Celtic clothes from the post-Roman era, a circlet of antlers for Mark’s golden head, and a matching circlet and veil for me. The room I had staged like an oak grove—or, at least, as much as any indoor sex room could look like an oak grove.
And when I step inside the room tonight, I’m not disappointed. Oak boughs hang from the ceiling, small torches burn in a circle, and shiny apples are heaped among piles of green and brown fabric made to look like mossy humps of earth. At one end of the room is an altar laden with bundles of rosemary and mugwort, bowls of fresh berries, and several burning candles. At the other are two wooden chairs, thronelike, the oak boughs coming to meet above them like a living canopy. Carmine strings of dried rowan berries are draped from the branches like a warning.
