Page 32 of Bitter Burn
I set the candelabra down on the kitchen counter and follow Isolde to where she’s drifted to a small table near a window framing choppy water and ruffled gray sky. Her fingers light on the chessboard on the table, the quartz and crystal practically glowing in the silver light and the obsidian glinting darkly. She drags a finger to the empty square where the queen used to be; Mark hasn’t replaced it on the board.
There’s a large armchair by the window, and I take a seat. Isolde comes to my lap immediately, sliding an arm around my neck. She reaches up with her other hand to toy with my hair a little—it grew out at Morois, and it’s started to curl at the edges. I’ll need a haircut when I get to Montreal.
Our eyes meet, and I know we won’t need words for this. What more can we say that we haven’t already said? We love each other, and it’s hopeless.
She shifts so that she’s got her head against my chest, and I stroke a hand down her back, feeling the subtle interplay of her muscles. I found her so strange when I met her, this princess who pretended violence in her dojo, and now I find her stranger still, because she’s more like violence that pretends at being a princess.
Blood and death, the burbling, foamy hell of it, the chemical change from the quick to the dead—I tried so hard to run away from it. I left the Army, took a job in a building where hurt and harm were separate things, and none of it mattered, because death found me anyway. Blond-haired and lethal and secretly tender, destruction both tall and short, a husband and a wife.
I wish it felt worse to hold Isolde knowing what she’s done. I wish that it bothered me more knowing what Mark plans to do.
But now all I feel is my old sickness, an obsession marrow-deep.
We’re arranged so that we’re both facing the door, and I know we’re both hoping for the same thing. That he’ll come in, that he’ll sweep his frigid ocean eyes over us and then make the farewell that we truly want. That he’ll take his still burning candle and drip his name onto my skin with scalding wax.
The idea of it, the hope, makes me thicken and swell. I know Isolde feels my response underneath her, and I can guess that she feels much the same, given the careful way she presses her thighs together…but neither of us do anything more. To thwart Mark’s obvious assumptions or to silently cajole him in, I don’t know, but we don’t do anything more than sit together. There’s no frantic, heedless fucking of the forbidden lovers about to part. Because even holding Isolde is painful right now, even feeling her listening to my heart. Screwing her while Mark’s within earshot—while he gives us permission to screw, like someone allowing a habitual drinker to drain the last of his liquor before calling it quits—that’s never been what this love is.
This love is aching for him on a yacht in the middle of the ocean. This love is the moonlight catching on Isolde’s tears.
This love is nightmares and the way she talks about lumpy old bowls and the way she looks standing over me, grinding her foot into my cock while her graceful, effortless balance betrays years of creeping across rooftops under the stars.
We weren’t real in the dark, but now we’re more than real in the light. We’re doomed in it.
I toy with Isolde’s braid, finding a strand that’s worked its way loose and rubbing it between my fingertips, reveling in its softness and its shine. There’s an old story from a collection of fairy tales I found at Morois about a king who’d vowed not to marry. He went outside his castle walls and saw a perched bird with three strands of lustrous hair caught in its beak, and the hair was so unusual, so beautiful, that the king amended his vow. He’d consent to marry so long as he married whomever the hair belonged to.
I can’t remember how the story ends now, but it doesn’t matter. I know how the king must have felt as I look at Isolde’s hair. The color and gleam of nacre, the feeling of silk. I also would have broken a vow for it.
I suppose I broke someone else’s instead.
The candle is burning low when Isolde finally says in a whisper, “I’ll miss you, Tristan.”
“I’ll miss you too.”
“I’ll miss the way your heart beats so steadily. Like it was made for the rest of us to keep time to.”
I kiss the top of her head. “Mark’s beats just as steadily.” And I flinch a little, having unintentionally wounded myself with my comfort, because now I am remembering, viscerally, how it felt to use his chest as a pillow. How it felt to be gathered up in his arms after whatever display of absolute depravity and hear the beautiful lub-dub, lub-dub of his heartbeat.
“It won’t be forever,” she says quietly, almost to herself. “Just until Ys is gone.”
“And your uncle?” I ask in a gentle murmur. “Will you let Mark kill him?”
She looks down at where her free hand rests in her lap. Her honeysuckle engagement ring is a shimmer of ruby and gold from the deep navy of her skirt. “I don’t know,” she says bleakly.
But I think she does. I hope she does. I might be angry that Mark has used us, and I might be hurt that his single-minded need for revenge will always come first, but I’ll never be upset about a world where Mortimer Cashel can’t reach Isolde any longer.
The candle flame flickers once but rears up again, not quite done. Hot wax slides down the sconce of the candelabra, and I look away before my thoughts are no longer under my control.
“Promise me that you will stay here,” I ask. “Promise me that you won’t take missions for your uncle, that you won’t take risks you don’t need to take. I know you’re not sure what you believe right now, and I know Mark has deceived you before, but I—I don’t think he’s lying about this.”
She lets out a breath, one I can’t hear, can only feel.
“I used to want nothing more than to be kept in a cloister, to have my days and nights hemmed in by prayer and routine. How peculiar that I’m to be cloistered now, yet it’s the last thing I could ever want.”
“None of us are doing what we want right now, Isolde. Not even Mark.”
The flame is playing hide-and-seek now, dipping low and surging high and then almost disappearing again.
“Then you make a promise to me,” she says. “If I’m to obey and become a meek little nun of Lyonesse, then I want something in return.”
