Page 63 of Bitter Burn
“That doesn’t make it a good idea,” says Mark, still not looking at me.
“Someone told me once that I was a terrible idea. That didn’t stop him then, so why should it now?”
He shakes his head, and the light catches in the immaculately styled gold strands of his hair. “Would you call this last week stopping? When I’m washing your hair and wrapping myself around you like a constrictor under the blankets?”
“I can tell that it’s all you’ll let yourself have. And it’s been exactly what I’ve needed, and I love it, and I feel just as—” My hand lifts to my throat in substitute of the word I’m searching for. “I feel just as much when you’re cuddling me as when you’re cuffing me. But I’m feeling better than I have been since the garden…and I…I want you to know that I still know my safeword. That’s all.”
He meets my stare in the reflection once more. “You may not be feeling better once we go to the hall tonight, and let me say it again: we don’t have to go. Hugo, Kayden, and Isabella will entertain themselves thoroughly whether or not we join them, and Tristan is still going through his father’s things at the farmhouse, as you know.”
I turn and extend my hand. As I guessed, he’s not able to resist this small invitation, and when our hands meet, his lashes dip and his throat moves.
It’s all that he’ll let himself have…the god of the underworld satisfying himself with touching his lips to the rim of his bride’s goblet and nothing more.
“We’ve relied on the conclave occupying my uncle for too long,” I say. “We need to start up the show once more.”
“How far are you willing to go for it? I won’t stand for finding you half-frozen again. I won’t watch you unlock the door for death and then wait for him to come calling. And I don’t know if I can survive knowing that you want to hurt yourself in a way that has nothing to do with God or with kink and that you haven’t told me.” He uses the hold on my hand to pull us closer together, his head bent toward mine. His scarred, rugged face, his eyes in impossible shades of blue. “You can be a shattered reliquary or an empty tabernacle, and you will be no less mine, but you must tell me. I can’t—I have used you enough, and I will use you still even more. I can’t leave you hollowed out after.”
“I can go very far if I’m not alone,” I say, and the fresh admission of my biggest weakness is painful. Stinging my lips as I speak. For as long as I can remember, I have hidden my vulnerabilities and lied about my defects. I’ve kept all my suffering as a secret, unseen crown of thorns, because who could I tell? My father, who only wanted me for his bank? My uncle, who would tell me all my suffering was meant to be laid at God’s feet anyway? Bryn, who didn’t know that I was a thief, an arsonist, and a murderer? Or Tristan, who hates the part of himself that can kill so easily, who always puts himself last, who is chivalrous and kind and good?
But Mark…Mark knows. He knows what I’ve done and how I’ve done it. He’s seen me selfish and broken and foolish. He’s seen my sins and, more embarrassingly, my mistakes. He’s seen me sharp and dull, in the shadows and in the light.
He’s looked down at his own hands and seen stains that will never wash clean.
“If I feel like I’m not alone,” I repeat, “when it’s just the two of us, then I can withstand a lot. I’ll be honest with you, use my safeword, tell you how I’m feeling, any of it, so long as you’ll stay.”
He lifts my hand to his mouth and kisses the spot over my wedding ring. “Then let’s go down to the hall.”
I don’t see Tristan as much as I’d feared or hoped when Mark told me he’d invited the Armorica contingent to stay here; in fact, I see him hardly at all. He’s either at the town house or the farmhouse, helping Blanche go through clothes and documents and also sorting through the lingering artifacts of his mother’s to either donate or put in storage. The farmhouse will be sold, which seems to me a sad thing, but it’s the most practical, and despite Tristan’s romantic soul, he also has a soldier’s capacity for efficiency. For deciding what resources are essential and what ones only serve to make your pack heavier at the end of the day.
I do see the visitors from Armorica quite a bit. Since Mark has temporarily relinquished Tristan’s apartment back to Tristan and is staying in ours, he entertains them with lunch or coffee at our kitchen table. Kayden comes into my office to play with Petitcrieu while I reacquaint myself with my fake job and email dishonest apologies to my coworkers, and he tells me charming stories about his time in the Army and all the different dogs he’s met and befriended. Hugo and Isabella are very popular in the hall, playing onstage or inviting people back to playrooms.
Mark keeps his distance whenever we’re outside our apartment. I kneel at his feet or sit next to him, ignored while Hugo knots Isabella into a bound work of art or paddles her until she sobs. By the evening before New Year’s Eve, however, Mark’s progressed to occasionally stroking my hair or idly tugging on the collar I’ve started wearing again.
In our apartment, Mark still won’t do anything more than feed me and wash me, take Petitcrieu outside with me, and hold me at night while the puppy flops from one spot to the other on the bed.
“She’ll be too big for your bed one day,” said Mark with some amusement when I coaxed her closer so I could stroke her as we fell asleep.
“Then we’ll get a bigger bed,” I replied, failing to see the problem.
He gave an amused exhale but didn’t argue.
For the most part, I like Hugo, Kayden, and Isabella. Hugo is all elegance, and Kayden is flirtatious and friendly. And Isabella is sweet, truly sweet. I try to remind myself that it’s ridiculous to let sweetness of all things get under my skin, that she’s also intelligent and resilient and kind and that she’s been through too much to deserve my aversion. She’s easygoing and convivial with me, even if I do sometimes see her watching me when she thinks I’m not aware. And even though it would be convenient to use her to advertise our still-recovering marriage to the guests, Mark doesn’t play with her, pet her, or otherwise touch her…though I know he was eight inches deep inside her not even a year ago.
It’s only that she is sweet and I’m not. She’s luscious and tractable, and I’m as tense as piano wire. It’s only that she’s everything Mark could want in a submissive and everything that I’d imagine for Tristan in any other life.
Cheerful and accommodating and not a murderer.
The night before New Year’s Eve, Tristan does manage to make it to the hall, just for the last hour. We’re not in Mark’s usual nook but down on the floor crowded around a temporary wrestling ring, watching a match between Christopher, the erstwhile princeps of Saturnalia, and a dominatrix. Christopher is happily losing.
Tristan comes up next to us, and even though I don’t look directly at him, I feel him there next to me, my skin tingling, my molecules changing polarity, my sin-smudged soul stirring to be so close to his good one.
“Did I miss anything, sir?” he asks Mark.
But it’s Kayden who answers first. “Not much, man. Just Mark allowing Isolde to do the trial by iron.”
Twenty-Five
Isolde
