Page 28 of Belong to Me
Jeff pulls back.
He searches my face. He searches it for a long time, nothing like how Anton searches, not calculating or cataloguing, but with the open, hoping gaze of a man who wants to find something and is already understanding that it isn’t there.
“You have your answer, Daisy.”
His voice is gentle. Not bitter. Not hurt enough to turn angry. Hurt enough to accept, that nods, that understands something the other person hasn’t said and doesn’t need to.
I cry.
I don’t mean to. I don’t want to. But the tears come because Jeff Peterson just kissed me beside a pool in Monaco and my body refused to feel it and the refusal is the answer to a question I’ve been asking myself for weeks: can I want the uncomplicated thing? Can I choose the man with clean hands? Can I build a life on liking when loving has already ruined me?
No. The answer is no. And the no breaks me open because it means Anton Almazov has taken something from me that I can’t get back, not my virginity, though that too, but my ability to want anyone else. He lives in a place inside me that I can’t empty and Jeff can’t fill and no amount of soup or harbour walks or uncomplicated warmth can reach.
Jeff holds me while I cry. He puts his arm around my shoulders and he pulls me against his chest and he lets me sob into his shirt and he doesn’t ask why and he doesn’t push and he’s kind, so kind, and the kindness is what makes it worse because I am crying in the arms of the man I should want over the man I can’t stop wanting.
I don’t see the penthouse window above us.
I don’t see Anton standing behind the glass, two floors up, his hand on the frame, watching a woman cry in another man’s arms and building the wrong story. Again.
I pull back from Jeff’s chest. I wipe my eyes. He hands me a napkin from the poolside table and I take it and press it againstmy face and when I lower it he is still there, still kind, still not angry.
“It’s the guy upstairs, isn’t it,” he says. Not a question.
I nod.
“The one who leaves the tea.”
I nod again. My throat is thick.
Jeff looks at me for a long moment. Then he leans forward and kisses my forehead, and the forehead kiss from Jeff Peterson is nothing like the forehead kiss from Anton Almazov, because this one is a goodbye and not a verdict and the difference is everything, and he stands up and he picks up his coffee cup and he says, “Go tell him, Daisy,” and he walks inside.
The pool is still. The sun is low. The water is turquoise and the air is warm and I am sitting alone on a lounger with mascara on a napkin and a baby in my belly and the taste of the wrong man on my mouth and the right man two floors above me who is probably, right now, reading this scene the way he reads everything: with his eyes and not his heart.
I stand up. I go inside. I press the elevator button.
Going up.
Chapter 12
DAISY
I knock.
The sound of my knuckles on his door is small and definite and carries the weight of every door between us since the first one: the glass doors of Keyes, Inc. on the morning I spilled coffee on my blouse and walked into a world I didn’t understand. The conference room door. The file room door. The restaurant door I walked out of. His penthouse door that I stood outside while I told him the truth and he kissed my forehead. My apartment door that I closed with a click. The bus station door. The hospital door. Every door has been a threshold between one version of us and the next, and this one, his penthouse, his hallway, my fist against his wood, is the last.
He opens it.
He’s been crying. I can see it the same way he could see it on me the night he came to my apartment, the rawness around the eyes, the tension in the throat, the particular stillness of a man who has recently broken down and reassembled himself and the reassembly isn’t complete. He’s in the same clothes from this morning and his hair is pushed back and his face is bare and unperformed and his eyes, when they find mine, hold something I have never seen in them.
Defeat.
He saw me. With Jeff. By the pool. He saw me crying in another man’s arms and he built a story about what it meant, because that’s what Anton Almazov does: he builds stories about people and believes them and the believing has cost him everything and he’s standing in his doorway with defeat in his eyes because he has just constructed the final story:she’s chosen someone else.
He steps aside. He lets me in.
The penthouse is dark. The same darkness from the night I came here with the truth, amber lamps, leather furniture, the wall of glass overlooking the harbour, but tonight the curtains are half-drawn and the city comes through in strips of gold and the bar cart has a bottle and a glass, recently used, and he’s a man who’s been sitting in the dark building the wrong story and drinking to make it bearable.
He doesn’t touch me.
