Page 70 of Honey Cut
“Lunch, I think.”
“Tristan,” I say as Mark walks into the kitchen. Tristan—who ended up picking up a spy thriller that Mark informed him gets almost everything wrong—is looking at where the waistband of Mark’s linen pants hangs low on his hips, and swivels his head guiltily when I call his name.
“Come play chess with me,” I say.
Tristan sighs, put-upon, and sets down his book. He’s taken off his jacket, tie, and shoes at Mark’s behest and looks casually delicious in rolled-up sleeves and socks. The top button of his shirt is unfastened, showing off the knot of his throat.
“I’m no good at this,” he tells me as he sits down, as heavily as a person sitting down to read someone else’s family genealogy.
“He has no strategy,” confirms Mark from the kitchen, pulling things from the fridge.
I’m moving the pieces back to their places on the board. “I think you just don’t like anything you’re not immediately good at,” I tease, and Tristan’s face gets a little sulky.
“That’s not true,” he protests in a mumble, and maybe to prove it, he straightens up in his chair to play with me.
I try to walk him through my decision-making as we go, but Mark’s right: all strategy is lost on Tristan.
“You don’t have to boost the morale of your pieces with heroic sacrifice,” I attempt to explain after the third pointless piece he’s lost. “It’s not going to make them fight harder.”
Even Mark gets involved, coming over from the kitchen with a towel draped over his shoulder and several sprigs of thyme in his hand. “Tristan, you have to stop protecting the king at some point, especially in the endgame. Let the king protect himself while you go after the queen.”
It’s a bloodbath, and I almost feel bad for wiping him out until I remember that Tristan really is good at everything else he tries. The prom king turned war hero who can sing like an angel and screw like one of Mark’s demons. It’s a righting of some heavenly scale somewhere that he’s terrible at chess.
Mark makes us veal tartare with hazelnuts and figs, served with a side of mushroom risotto with truffle butter and thyme. We eat, the three of us, at the dining table while the skies finally open. Rain rolls down the floor-to-ceiling windows and speckles the river.
“I was thinking that you should accompany Isolde on her trip to Belgrade in a few weeks,” Mark says to Tristan.
I had hoped, when I’d mentioned the trip to Mark earlier, that he would agree with me that I didn’t need any security, that it was the kind of boring antiquities trip I’d be taking often with my new job, and that it would be a waste of employee resources if I stole away security staff every time I needed to hop on a plane. I see now that Mark’s thoughtfulhmmhadn’t actually been an agreement.
Tristan’s eyes meet mine. “If that’s what you think is best, sir,” he says to Mark.
“I do. Antiquities isn’t always a clean business.” Mark takes a drink of his gin. “And I know Isolde will submit to me in this.”
I hear the challenge in his words. Will I gainsay my own pledge of submission so quickly? Not that I could without inviting unnecessary curiosity as towhyI would want to travel alone…or avoid being alone with Tristan.
“Yes, I will,” I murmur, and take a drink of my own.
“Why don’t you sing for us, Tristan?” asks Mark suddenly.
Tristan looks as startled as I feel, his forehead furrowing. “Sing?”
“It occurs to me that it would be very nice to hear, with the rain around us.” Mark sips his gin on the rocks and leans back in his chair. “And I haven’t heard you sing in some time.”
Tristan’s eyes move to me and then he quickly looks away. “Okay, sir,” he says. And he straightens up a little in his chair and begins to sing.
It’s a Catholic hymn, adapted from the prayer of St. Francis, and it’s beautiful against the rain, the notes melancholy on their own, but even more melancholy from the lips of someone who has not been a channel of the Lord’s peace, who was not able to sow love instead of hatred.
I realize Mark is watching me as Tristan sings, his face less open than it was earlier. I check my own expression, my own body, instantly terrified that I look how I feel: like I adore Tristan. Like I want to kiss the sadness off his full mouth and shield all that hopeless goodness from the evils of the world.
No, Mark can’t be suspicious. That’s my own guilt and worry tugging on me; I look like anyone would look like listening to Tristan sing, which is to say impressed and grateful.
Then Tristan finishes, and I help Mark clear the dishes away, and he says, “Have either of you used the spa in the grotto yet?”
And the moment is gone.
twenty-six
TRISTAN
