Page 36 of Bitter Burn
Mark wore it, and before that, Isolde chose it and gave it to him. It’s like both of them are there on my finger, bound into a talisman of all I’ve gained and lost here at Lyonesse.
Mark’s face is neutral as we reach the car and I open the back door. I didn’t expect anything different—we’re being watched from the lobby of course—but I still wish for…for I don’t even know what. Anything less than a stay of execution wouldn’t be enough. But it stings to part like this, in full view of the club, acting out the part of a disgraced bodyguard when the disgrace is a lot more complicated than mere infidelity.
Mark extends his hand for me to shake, and beggar that I am, I take the final chance to touch him, even if it’s calculated to look like a polite termination of employment and not a true farewell.
It’s only because I’m watching his face so closely, so hungrily, that I see the infinitesimal reaction as my fingertips slide over the palm of his right hand. I look down and see in the fading daylight what I couldn’t see in the storage closet—the angry red splotch of a burn. Mark quickly turns his hand so that I can’t look at it any closer, but it doesn’t matter. I saw.
Mark says, “Take care of yourself, Tristan,” and walks back to the club. The flurries catch on his shoulders and on the tops of his shoes.
I don’t have a chance to say anything else, but I don’t know what I would say to a man with an injury like that. To a man who’d held a candle in his hand and let it burn all the way down to the skin.
Fifteen
Isolde
“He’s gone,” comes a voice from behind me.
I turn from the glass railing and see Mark approaching the balcony from the shadows of his room. Even with his jacket off and his sleeves rolled up, he looks collected and crisp, an investment portfolio with blue graphs, an ad for leather luggage stitched by hand in Italy. His face gives me nothing of how he feels, and neither does his voice.
He is, however, holding a glass of scotch and not water masquerading as gin, so he’s not as collected as he might appear.
I look back to the river and the city beyond, the crouched stubbiness of it, barely softened by twilight and the glow of the streetlights deeper in. Only the Potomac’s bridges and the spires of Georgetown make the view bearable.
Sometimes I miss Manhattan so much it’s like a suppurated wound tucked away in my mind. Even London—the city that always felt more like my father’s than mine—I would take a thousand times over this place.
Mark joins me at the railing, bracing his forearms on it, the drink cradled between both of his hands. Tiny snowflakes flutter around us; they melt and die the moment they touch the amber liquid inside Mark’s glass.
I return my eyes to the grim, utilitarian city in front of me. “Did you tell him that my uncle would kill him if he stayed?”
“You know as well as I do that telling him such a thing would’ve only have made it harder for him to go.”
He’s right. It’s why I didn’t tell Tristan either, in all that time I spent curled in his lap, allowing myself a half candle’s worth of make-believe. Because Tristan would have felt compelled to stay at the mere hint of further danger from my uncle, even if the danger was directed toward himself. Because Tristan would hear about someone trying to kill him, say oh, only that? and think it a small trade for staying here at Lyonesse.
Because Tristan—for his medals and his combat badges, for that Bronze Star nomination still working its way through the cubicled guts of Fort Knox—doesn’t actually believe his life is worth very much at all.
“He’ll put it together soon,” I say a little tiredly. I’m not usually beholden to jet lag, but today has been about more than time zones. “Although even I didn’t think of it until your office. The ‘any more failures.’”
“I’d suspected your uncle would see Tristan as a distraction—or worse, as a liability, given what he might know. But if what you relayed about your conversation with your uncle was accurate, then it’s better for him to think of Tristan as harmless and forgotten and certainly not important enough for you to keep close or confide in. My other reasons for sending Tristan to Armorica were important too, but this was the most compelling one.”
He moves his hand toward me, and I realize he’s offering me his scotch. My hesitation is brief, an instant at most, but he notices. Of course he does.
“Poison’s not my style,” he says with amusement, and I cast him a brief glance so that he knows that I think that’s probably bullshit, historically speaking.
“Okay, okay,” he amends. “It’s not usually my style.”
I take the glass and treat myself to a long drink. I don’t actually think he’d poison me, at least not right now, but distrusting him is reflexive now. As it should have been from the very beginning.
It’s when I hand the glass back to him that I see it: the ring he’s wearing on his left hand. It’s not the ring I gave him at our wedding.
Mark sees me looking, but he doesn’t offer an explanation, and I don’t ask. And I don’t bother trying to straighten the deep, wrenching twist in my stomach. Whatever happened with the rings…they deserve that. The two of them.
But the memory of Samhain burns like a faraway fire on a hill, because there was a version of us that didn’t need rings or candles or glasses of scotch. There was a version of us that wasn’t atomized, blown apart, splintered with loneliness and spite. For one night, we had it.
For one night, we had everything.
“I’m having my things moved into Tristan’s apartment,” Mark says casually. “You may keep the use of this one. I thought it would be more comfortable for you.”
More comfortable…without chess games, without Mark deftly chopping aromatics under a canopy of copper pots, without waking up inside the heavy, warm, perfect circle of his arms.
